Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  “Demanding” is the first word that comes to mind when Robitaille reflects on the Burns tenure. “Yet he was also a great communicator. He was so emotional and you never forgot that he was the coach. But there were still times where he would hang out with us and have fun, and that made it special. If we won a game, he’d come into the back of the bus, sit down and joke with us for, like, three hours. That wouldn’t happen if we lost, but we knew he’d be our buddy again when he won. Every guy who played for Pat loved Pat. If you were honest with Pat, he became your friend off the ice. But he had a way of translating that onto the ice, a coach you could both like and respect. He was one of the few coaches I’ve seen who was able to do that.”

  The impish part of Burns delighted in “screwing around” with his players, says Robitaille, getting inside their heads, but usually with a tactical purpose. There was a kid on the team, local boy, whom Burns adored because he played with ferocious emotion. “One time Pat came on the bus when we were travelling to another city. He was talking real loud. Then he winked at me and said that the centre on the team we were going to face was a real tough guy and that we might be making a trade to get him. It wasn’t true, but Pat was trying to get that Hull kid all revved up. And of course, when the game started, he went right after that hotshot as soon as the puck dropped. Pat did whatever he had to do to get the best out of you and help us win.”

  The Burns Rules were simple. “You have to perform, bottom line,” continues Robitaille. “If he said we had a curfew, everybody respected it. But he was a disciplinarian in the way that made sense. He wanted you to be a better hockey player. He wanted you to be respectful of the organization and the city that we played in, but he let you be a human being. He knew it was a game and had to be fun.” Then, adding with a chuckle: “Of course, it was more fun for him when we won. But he helped me become a better player in the sense of understanding the sacrifices you have to make in order to win. And that’s everything, as far as a player is concerned.”

  Although Burns, in his second season with Hull, told reporters he was giving himself two years to make the NHL—and met that self-imposed deadline—he never gave his junior players the impression of just passing through, eyeing a finer prize up ahead. “We didn’t think that way, not even him,” says Robitaille, who would make the leap directly out of junior and play nineteen seasons in the NHL, sixteen of them during three separate stints as a Los Angeles King, where he’s now president of business operations. “He and I kind of started together, but whatever we were doing at the time, we thought that was the greatest. He loved being a coach in junior. Then he went to the AHL and he loved that. I don’t think when Pat went to the AHL he thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be two years in the minors and then I’m going to the National Hockey League.’ He went to the AHL and just thought, ‘I want to win here.’ He looked at the team and thought, ‘I’m going to do the best that I can here.’ When he turned to the NHL, he didn’t think, ‘I’m going to coach in this league for ten years.’ I know he thought, ‘What can I do for this team to be the best team it can be today?’ And he grinded that into us in juniors, too.

  “That’s probably why he was only in one city three or four years at a time, because he did so much about that day—what was important that day.” Which, frankly, is a euphemistic way of saying Burns could also exhaust his players by being so remorselessly demanding, paying the penalty when players—or a cabal of them—ultimately revolted years later, in the NHL. “He never protected his own angle,” notes Robitaille. “It was never, ‘Okay, if I make this decision I’ll be here longer.’ ”

  Few players had a more complicated relationship with Burns than Stéphane Richer, the quixotic French-Canadian luminary, heir apparent in Montreal to the reverence bestowed on The Flower, Guy Lafleur. He possessed a similar flair and flourish, if not the emotional equilibrium necessary to withstand the pressure unique to being a Canadien. Richer’s tendency towards depression, mental brittleness, is a subject he’s opened up about only in recent years; at the time, he was pigeonholed as a flake, even a diva, and he certainly tested Burns’s patience.

  Richer was only a child when their paths first crossed, fatefully so. “He’s the one who saved my life. I always say, if not for him, I’m sure I would never have become a professional hockey player. He picked me out from this little town in Quebec, brought me to play for his midget team in Hull. Pat knew I was a lonely kid from up north who was supposed to be good, I guess. He was still a cop at the time, but he knew people around who were watching young players. Pat called my dad and asked if I was willing to leave my hometown to go to Hull. That was a big step for me. My dad said, ‘Well, it’s up to you, kid. Do you want to go there? Then you call Pat. We’re not doing it for you. You be a man.’

  “Here I was, a fourteen-year-old kid thinking of leaving home. But Pat said, ‘I believe you can do something right in your life.’ ”

  The adjustment was difficult. “Scared? Oh man. When you play minor hockey with all your buddies and suddenly you’re playing in a big city like Hull—full equipment, new pants. I was like, ‘Wow, what just happened here?’ ” He was also the smallest player, only five foot three and 135 pounds. Burns put him on the fourth line. Then he shot up to five foot ten by the end of the season.

  Hull Kiwanis, Burns’s midget team, was a culture shock for the yokel Richer. “For Midget AA, they were pretty good. All the guys were older than me. We were supposed to win everything, and we almost did. It was funny, though. Pat used to put his policeman’s stuff on the table, put on the hockey gear for a couple of hours, then change back into his policeman clothes, get in his car and go back to work.”

  After enticing the young Richer to Hull, Burns showed him no favour, cut him no slack for his rawness, his disorientation. “It was always, ‘Do you realize how lucky you are?’ A lot of times, I was the one who had to pay the price for everyone else. Trust me, he was tough. We were all scared of him. Pat was a good hockey man, but he forgot that we were only fourteen and fifteen years old.”

  Richer would be drafted onto a Midget AAA team but would be reunited with Burns, with considerable misery for both, several years later in Montreal, after playing his junior hockey in Granby and Chicoutimi. “In juniors, I wasn’t dreaming about the NHL. I was just trying to survive, pretty much; never thought about the next level, whatever it might be. But I knew if I wanted to do something great in my life—like Pat had told me—I had to take care of myself, accept the discipline. When you’re away from your family, it’s easy to go astray. Pat understood that and kept a very close eye on me.”

  The life skills Burns imparted, in tough-love mode, came with the job as a junior coach, even though in his personal life he was, in those days, a distant and only sporadically involved dad. Burns was ushering his protégés towards maturity while teaching them how to tap into depths of potential most didn’t quite realize they possessed.

  Yet there were surprisingly few technical tutorials at a level of organized hockey—both midget and juniors—where instruction is a primary component. “He was never a technical coach,” says Richer. “Pat didn’t know anything about technique, to be honest. I don’t think he even knew that word at the time.”

  Cam Russell, who landed with the Hull Olympiques as a sixteen-year-old, shares that assessment. “He was a motivator all the way. There wasn’t a lot of technical coaching in him: one defenceman in the corner, one defenceman in front of the net, forecheck hard, backcheck hard and make sure you give 100 per cent every shift—and if you didn’t, you’d hear it from him. The biggest thing with Pat was accountability, and it didn’t matter who you were. Our best players were our hardest-working players, and that’s a great credit to your coach when you can get your skill guys to be your hardest-working guys.”

  When Russell arrived, Gretzky was the team’s owner, the clincher in his opting for the QMJHL. As a teen from the Maritimes, Russell—from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia—could have chosen from any of the three junior lea
gues in Canada: Quebec, Ontario or the Western League. “Wayne would sometimes come on the ice and practise with us—and this was Wayne Gretzky in his heyday. It’s pretty amazing when the greatest player in the world is even mentioning your name, much less skating with you.”

  Where Gretzky inspired awe, there was, typically for his new young charges, outright terror where Burns was concerned. “Oh, he was an intimidating person, and not just for the players. He was also feared by opposing coaches,” says Russell. “You never knew if he was going to come over the glass after you if you were the other team’s coach. And that rubbed off on us. We felt like we had an extra man on the ice because we had Pat behind us. He was the big brother.” In one particularly violent game, Burns actually did come over the glass, squaring off at centre ice with his opposite, Ron Lapointe, a fight neither would admit to losing, even years later. That notorious incident would carry into NHL bitterness when Burns was coaching Montreal and Lapointe took over behind the Quebec Nordiques bench. They hated each other and it was real, not staged, animus. Burns simply looked more the part, with his chronic scowl, glowering. His rare smiles, in-game, were sneers.

  “At my first training camp in Hull, I was standing outside the rink one day and this guy rides by on a motorcycle, all decked out in leather, with a beard,” remembers Russell. “One of our players waved to him. I said, ‘Who’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s Pat.’ And this was a month after I’d started practising with the team. I didn’t even recognize him. He was a big, imposing figure, intimidating, intense. But he was an intelligent guy, a great motivator and the kind of coach who always found a way to get the best out of you.”

  The youthful Russell, wet behind the ears though pegged early as a skill player, was agog, eyes like saucers, upon arrival in Hull. “This was my first time being coached by a professional. I didn’t really have anyone to compare him to. It wasn’t until later, when I’d played for some other guys, that I realized what a great coach he was.”

  Russell’s first night at training camp, all the players were anxious, many pining for home. Burns joined the teens, sat down with them and cracked jokes, told stories for the next two hours. “He made us laugh, and that kind of broke the ice. Of course, the next day when the puck dropped, it was all business and Pat cracked the whip. But you respected that and you followed along because you knew that there was a fair side to him as well. Pat was the kind of guy, even though he had a tough exterior and looked like a big tough biker, he knew the right time to sit you down for a one-on-one talk. At that time, Hull was bringing in a lot of Maritimers and Americans, guys a long way from home. Pat had the gruff exterior but knew when you needed to have a good heart-to-heart. I had a tough time my first two years after leaving home, and he really helped me get through that.”

  Through three years up and down in the minors, and then a decade-long NHL career spent almost entirely with Chicago, Russell played for some of the hardest-nosed coaches in hockey, including Mike Keenan and Darryl Sutter. Burns had provided a primer for dealing with that type of individual. But it wasn’t until much later on that Russell, eventually coach and now GM of the Halifax Mooseheads, would stop to consider where Burns had learned the tactics and psychology he applied. Unlike Russell, Burns had no significant mentors in the game, hadn’t been exposed to elite coaching, and learned only by one-step-removed osmosis. Yet he thirsted for hockey knowledge and was alert to shifts in the style of the game as it was being played in the NHL. From close access to Gretzky, he adopted drills then almost exclusive to Edmonton Oilers practices, incorporating the long breakout in Hull, for all that he remained obsessed with defence-first hockey.

  He was essentially self-taught about hockey, about handling athletes. Like others who came into his orbit, Russell suggests Burns’s people instincts grew out of his policing years. “Being an officer, handling things like domestic disputes, he became someone who could read people, knowing what to say at the right time. That must have carried through into hockey. Hockey players, their psyches are delicate. Yet he just always seemed to say the right thing. It’s like people who are successful in businesses without having a great education—he learned things quickly. He’d look at Cam Russell and think, ‘What does Cam Russell need to make it to the next level?’ He just knew. And those were the things that he worked on, the areas he made you better in. Growing up, I would usually win the most-sportsmanlike player awards. Pat taught me another level of intensity. He taught me how to show up every night and how to be consistent. Those are the things he really harped on me about.”

  Burns could browbeat, but he could also inspire. “Even as a young man, he commanded respect,” says Pat Brisson, who played two seasons for Burns in Hull and would eventually become one of hockey’s most powerful player agents. “You knew he wasn’t there just for fun. He was there to get us to the next level, no messing around. It was written on his forehead.”

  Brisson had all but given up on a hockey career in the mid-’80s. At age twenty, having played junior all over the place, he enrolled at Ottawa University. One night, he ran into Burns. Almost offhandedly, Brisson wondered if Burns had any interest in securing his playing rights, which were held by Drummondville. To Brisson’s surprise, Burns was receptive. “It took about three weeks, but Pat managed to get my rights traded to Hull.” Looking back, Brisson remembers his remarkably cocky former self sashaying into Burns’s office to push for more money before he’d even played one game as an Olympique. “I go in saying I want this and I want that. Pat said, ‘Christ, I’ve been working on your frigging release and you’re going to ask for another $100?’ I thought I was gonna die or he was gonna kill me, cut me right there.” Instead, Brisson’s audacity was rewarded. “He ended up listening to me when I said, ‘Man, I’m giving up university for this.’ He gave me what I was looking for. Pat was intimidating, but if you had something to say that made sense, he’d listen. That was my first lesson in the art of negotiation. Pat was a tremendous influence on my life. There were no grey areas with Pat. It was his way or the highway, but he was no fake. Get on or get off.”

  Nor could Burns be conned by the creative excuses his players often invented when rationalizing a poor performance or simply being caught breaking curfew. “Hey, it’s the same if you’re an NHLer or a kid in juniors with $20 in your pocket,” says Brisson. “You want to go out and have some fun. But Pat had a spiderweb of sources. This was Hull, and he was linked up everywhere, knew everything. If he confronted you, he knew the truth, he knew the story. If you tried lying to him, you were in trouble. The only thing he might forgive is if you were covering up for a roommate. He embraced that whole togetherness thing. But if you otherwise lied to him, he’d trade you or scratch you. Pat couldn’t live with being lied to. It just bugged him too much.” To that end, Burns vested responsibility in his older guys for seeing that players kept their noses clean. “He made sure the veterans were guiding us in the right direction. He loved those guys. Maybe the younger guys didn’t quite feel the love as much as the older ones.”

  Many a time, none would feel the love; quite the contrary, Burns was already infamous for his spectacular eruptions of temper. One such incendiary episode remains burned into Brisson’s memory. The team had just had a poor period when Burns strode into the dressing room. Inside the room was a bin used for collecting and recycling pop cans. “He starts kicking that bin, and his foot gets stuck in there. He tried kicking it across the room but he tripped and fell. You could tell he was embarrassed. It was funny, but none of us dared laugh. You could hear a pin drop.”

  Laughing at Burns could be fatal. “One player we had, an enforcement type, made some comment at practice when Pat was playing with us, just a joke. Pat couldn’t take that. When you hit Pat’s pride, you went to the wrong place. So Pat chased him right into the locker room. He didn’t physically strike him, but he sure scared the hell out of him. Another time, we were losing something like 5–0 and he brought a guy right into the middle of the locker room to scream at
him. With Pat, there was a time to have fun, but also a time to pay the price.”

  This was the squad, with eighteen players from the previous season, that Burns would take—or they would take him—to the Memorial Cup in 1986. The following year, Brisson had a tryout, unsuccessfully, with the Montreal Canadiens. He concluded there was no NHL in his future and was anxious to move on with his life, in a different direction. First, though, he had to explain his choice to Burns. “It was October 10—I remember the date exactly. I went to Pat’s office and told him, ‘I think I’ve made a decision to leave hockey. I just don’t have it, I’m not going to make it to the NHL.’ ” Brisson had formulated a plan to move to Los Angeles, live with Luc Robitaille, start teaching hockey in California and see what opportunities arose. “Pat was, ‘Are you sure? Because I can be more patient if you need more time.’ Then he wished me good luck. But even that conversation, I was nervous having with him.”

  Junior hockey, with its long bus rides and pro aspirations, tends to cut the wheat from the chaff. Not all have realistic ambitions of making it to the NHL; some intuitively grasp this is as good as it gets, and rare are the examples of late-draft picks who will persevere and earn jobs in the big league. Benoît Brunet went unclaimed for Midget AAA, but was drafted by Hull in the sixth round from Midget AA and, to his surprise, stuck. He is among those who credit Burns for eventual matriculation to the NHL. Brunet has an alternate view of Burns’s technical proficiency, or lack thereof. “He was the guy who made the difference to me in my career. A lot of people thought he was just a motivator, somebody who tried to intimidate his players. But I thought he was a good technical guy. It was just overshadowed by his personality, his character. I’d had good coaches in minor league, but he taught me how to play. We had a great team [in 1985–86], but we had a tough start and he took the time to go over the technical part of what we were doing wrong on the ice.”