Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  Adds Savard: “When Pat arrived, it was like a breath of fresh air for a lot of players. As a group, players like discipline, even if they might complain.”

  Perhaps. But this was also a group that liked to party hard, frequently spotted in the watering holes on Crescent Street and, because of who they were, easily identifiable, occasionally attracting trouble. As boulevardiers about town, a few of the bachelors had become notorious. Not that rich young hockey players should be expected to drink their milk, eat their cookies and be in bed by eleven o’clock. This was cosmopolitan Montreal, after all, bright lights and big city. Predecessor bon vivant Habs such as Guy Lafleur, a self-admitted rogue, were hardly known as recluses, either. But there had been eyebrow-raising incidents, some initially concealed by the club and only belatedly erupting in the media. “Yeah, we had a few guys who made a lot of mistakes off the ice,” acknowledges Stéphane Richer, who wasn’t one of them—all his stumbles occurred under the hot lights.

  During the playoff series with Boston earlier that year, three players—Chris Chelios, Shayne Corson and Petr Svoboda—had gone bar-hopping on the eve of game two. The carousing climaxed with a car crash (none of them were driving), their vehicle smashing into a lamppost and flipping over. Subsequent reports claimed Corson suffered damaged tendons, Chelios and Svoboda injured ankles. Corson denies any of them were hurt in the accident, though he did play in that series with cracked ribs. The three told no one about their misadventure. Savard only learned of it when two provincial officers presented themselves as game five was about to start. After winning the series opener, Montreal dropped four in a row. Ignominiously bounced from the 1988 postseason on home ice, the door to the dressing room was slammed shut behind Savard and Corey. All hell broke loose inside, with the three hangdog players blamed for Montreal’s elimination. Warnings were issued that each would be on probation the next season.

  This was the environment of immature truancy that Burns encountered, tasked with cleaning up.

  “It was no secret that guys liked to go out,” says Chelios. “It was just the fact that we had so much more media attention in Montreal. They made it more personal, more of an issue, when players got in trouble. Obviously, being in Montreal, there was nowhere to hide. Hockey players can’t blend in when they go out. We were also falsely accused a lot of the time. But that team, I’d say, was no different from my Chicago team. It was a lot different when I got to Detroit because we had an older, veteran club. The young guys were more scared of the veterans. And things had changed by then. Times had changed.”

  It was, indeed, another era, far removed from the tamer atmosphere of the NHL circa 2012. “We’re talking thirty years ago; the whole general culture was different at that time, and hockey players reflected it,” says Gainey. “They were young and popular and temptation was only a glance left or right. I don’t think that group of players was any more out of bounds than others before it and some after it. At some point in the last three decades, there has been a shift, and many things that were acceptable in the 1980s and ’90s are no longer part of the culture of NHL players.”

  Burns, realistic about temptations and well versed in boys behaving badly, was no puritanical Victorian. He was not going to tolerate wretchedly excessive debauchery, however. He became Big Brother, in the Orwellian sense, eyes and ears everywhere, amassing a snitch network that included police contacts, bouncers and even exotic dancers from Montreal’s famous peeler bar, Chez Paree. He would become the coach who went undercover. And sometimes, not so undercover. There was the time he received a late-night tip from an informer that some Canadiens were at Chez Paree, well oiled. Burns got dressed, went to the club and took a stool, didn’t even glance towards his players. But they saw him and skedaddled.

  Savard acknowledges the bird-dogging that Burns embraced but notes that unofficial guardians of Canadiens morality were already in place, even if he didn’t assemble them. “We had a lot of information before Pat Burns got there, from friends, from police, about what was going on, things that we never made public.” The eyes-on became more intense with Burns’s arrival, though.

  “Whenever we went out, Pat would get calls, Serge would get calls,” chuckles Chelios. “Every morning, it seemed like the papers would have a story about us out in the bars, whether it was true or not. So that’s what Pat was dealing with. With his police background, he would literally go to guys’ houses at night and stake them out, waiting for them to come home. We had rules and curfews, and Pat loved to enforce them. What he really loved was to catch guys lying. And he was really good at it.”

  Brent Gilchrist, who came up to Montreal with Burns from Sherbrooke, recalls one eye-opening incident. “There were certain places in the city where we thought we were incognito because people didn’t ask us for autographs or pay any attention to us. So, one night, some of the guys had been out to one of these places where we thought we were ‘safe.’ The next day, I walk into the Forum and Pat says, ‘Did you have a good time last night?’ And he named the place where we’d been. He said, ‘Hey, I know everything. I don’t even have to make phone calls. They call me.’

  “Pat knew we were young and wanted to have some fun. He wasn’t trying to take that away from twenty-one-year-old kids who have lots of time on their hands. But every once in a while, he’d mention something when he thought it was getting a little bit excessive, or if he didn’t like the way we were practising, like maybe we were having a bit too much fun off the ice. He made just enough comment to keep you on the straight and narrow.”

  Twenty-year-old rookie Mike Keane drew Corson as a road roomie and was more than once enticed into bar frolics. “I’m not going to lie; we had fun,” he says. “A couple of times, curfews were broken. Pat was open with us about it. He said, ‘I know guys go out. Just don’t let it affect your game.’ He took that extra time to find out, ‘What are you doing tonight? Where are you going?’ He’d say, ‘Kid, don’t think I don’t know what’s going on. Just make sure you’re back at a decent hour.’ I don’t think coaches do that with their young players these days. They assume players will be taken care of because they have their agents, they have so many people around them, but it doesn’t always work out that way. I was lucky enough to have Pat looking over my shoulder.”

  Rookie camp opened on September 2, the scrubeenies reporting a week earlier than the rest of the squad. The most prominent rookie on the ice was Pat Burns. Actually, on the first day, Burns watched from the stands while assistants Jacques Laperrière and François Allaire conducted the workout. But this was the media’s first opportunity to observe the thirty-five-year-old coach in quasi-action. They descended en masse, and Burns got a preview of what, by necessity, would become a daily routine: fielding questions in French and English from the inquisitors. “Some of the youngsters here today played for me at Sherbrooke last year, so things were very much at ease when I spoke to the players in the dressing room before we started,” he noted.

  This was bland material, though Burns swiftly livened up. “I know that being the coach of the Montreal Canadiens is one of the highest pressure jobs in North America. No doubt, I’m going to have to adapt to that. But when you accept a job in the NHL, you have to expect that.”

  Little did he know. Feeding the beast, Burns quickly realized, was part of the job, and he discovered a natural flair for it. Press scrums, as much as Burns would profess to loathe the ritual throughout his career, were usually animated affairs, if mostly depending on his mood. And Lordy, Burns could be moody. But he had a knack for the adroit quote. Grateful reporters would fill their notebooks.

  His teams had always been noted for their robust style of play. Yet Burns told his rapt audience that he was more interested in good defence than brawling. His Habs would not be the second coming of the Broad Street Bullies. This was mildly disappointing in some quarters. Burns was rather more intent on asserting his authority straight out of the chute, over both youngsters and veterans. Captain Bob Gainey—who’d flirted wit
h retirement over the summer, meeting with the Minnesota North Stars about that team’s vacant GM position before deciding to continue his playing career with a sixteenth season in Montreal—was only two years younger; legendary Larry Robinson was a year older. Between them, they had enough Stanley Cup rings to decorate every finger on both hands. And they cast long shadows, which would prove awkward soon enough. But mostly it was a group of curious and eager-to-impress players that convened.

  It didn’t take long for Burns to demonstrate what he was about. One week into camp, he laid a tongue-lashing on defenceman Svoboda for showing up fifteen minutes late for practice. Then he broke his stick over the net in anger about what he considered lackadaisical practice habits. On another occasion, Burns stormed into the dressing room, in high dudgeon about the practice session. “He knocked over the Gatorade container, there were tables flying left and right,” recalls Pierre Gervais, who’d been in Sherbrooke with Burns and remains to this day head equipment manager for the Habs. “So I go into his office after and he’s sitting and he’s laughing. He just wanted to show them right away what he was about. Pat could be rough at times, but not mean, just very moody. He never picked on players personally. If you pick on players in front of everyone else, they won’t forget that.” Burns and Gervais became good friends that first season “because he was new in Montreal and didn’t know many people.” Never a victim of Burns’s wrath, Gervais certainly witnessed it over and over. “He’d get mad, throw garbage all over the place. And then I’d find him smiling. Once, during the intermission, he put on such a show that he split the seam in his pants. Three, four minutes before the second period, I was chasing after him, trying to sew up this crack in his pants, and he couldn’t stop laughing.”

  The sight of Burns screaming his guts out at the players was wildly entertaining for those with the pencils and cameras documenting such scenes. His charges had to be brought to heel straight off, Burns knew; no more of this feckless nonsense and half-assed reaction to commands, or not being on the ice at the designated time. Hop to it, the coach bellowed. One incident at practice made it difficult for Burns to keep a frown on his face, though. He’d ordered the power play unit to jump over the boards. “Everybody stood up to get on the ice. I said, ‘Where the hell are you guys going?’ ” Either they weren’t listening or they’d all fancied themselves PP specialists. “Guys were used to doing whatever they wanted to do. I’m just trying to put the discipline back in,” Burns said. “It’s hard at the start, but it will pay off in the long run. I’m just talking about normal discipline—like when a coach talks, shut up and listen.”

  Whether by design or intuitively, this newbie coach was already buffing up the cult of Burns. He hollered, he cussed, he turned the air blue. And then, so different from the man he replaced, he’d hang out in the dressing room, joking with players. From those perceived as disciplinary problems, there was not a peep of protest. “He was really good at recognizing the difference among players, their character, and how to deal with them individually,” says Chelios. “What he maybe lacked was structure. But that was just inexperience.”

  Some, particularly the younger crew, responded well to the drillsergeant tactics. Burns was adept at moulding men out of boys because they scared most easily. He was also prepared to give youth opportunity on a club where nudging out veterans was not the done thing. Mike Keane, who fully expected to be returned to Sherbrooke or worse at the end of training camp, instead found himself breaking through to the NHL roster, and many observers were critical of that decision.

  “I fought everyone and hit everyone and just did whatever I could at camp to try and make an impression,” the future Canadiens captain would recall many years later. “At the end of camp, he called me into his office and I thought, ‘Here it comes, I’m going back to Sherbrooke.’ But Pat looked at me and said, ‘Can you do what you did in camp for eighty games for me?’ I told him yes, and he told me to find a place to live in Montreal.”

  Keane had arrived at camp as an undrafted player. Suddenly he was in The Show, to borrow a baseball term. “He gave me a chance. I was an English player, too, and they don’t get many chances in Montreal. There were other players who were more talented than I was. Things were written—‘What’s this guy doing here? He’s too small, he doesn’t have enough skill.’ But Pat believed in me and I never forgot that. I knew every day at practice, not only would I be under the microscope if not playing well, so would he.”

  A third-line guy to start, and barely that, Keane benefited from Burns’s fondness for grinder types. “He was blue collar. He liked to work, he liked passion. He absolutely despised people who were talented but didn’t work. Pat appreciated people who put the time in, who’d do the shitty job to have success for the team.”

  If what Burns had set out to accomplish—changing the culture of the club—irked some of those who considered themselves entitled, he refused to be rattled by it. From his cubicle in the dressing room, Keane watched quietly as adjustments were absorbed, not always placidly. “There were a lot of Type A’s in that dressing room. So you needed someone who was very strong in his beliefs, someone who said, ‘I’m coming in here with one goal and one voice, and it’s mine.’ I don’t think anyone else could have taken over that team. You look back at Larry Robinson, Bob Gainey, Bobby Smith, Mats Naslund, Patrick Roy, Guy Carbonneau—these are Hall of Fame players. Some were playing a lot where maybe they shouldn’t have. Pat had to figure out what was best for the team. Make no mistake, it didn’t make everyone happy. Behind closed doors, Pat had some fires he had to put out. Someone who didn’t have as strong a personality as Pat wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

  There was resistance. There were furious arguments, a lot of which went over Keane’s head. “When they got into these heated shouting matches, Pat and some of the guys, believe it or not, it would go from English to French. They’d have a good old-fashioned fuck-you match and it would turn into French. It was funny because even in the minors, with Pat, when he got really irate he’d start talking French. Any time he got into arguments with Steph [Richer] and Peppy [Lemieux]—Claude is very Type A, Steph is Type A—it would be in French.”

  In French or English, Montreal’s eightieth NHL season opened on a sour note, the Canadiens losing 3–2 in Buffalo on October 6, a game that illustrated the team’s offensive impotence, an area Burns was committed to addressing. A club that lately had been living and dying on defence needed to find its scoring mojo again. That was an irony, because defence was Burns’s coaching forte—very much of the check-or-sit mentality—and Montreal was the franchise that had invented firewagon hockey. The power play had become uncharacteristically enfeebled, clicking at a rate of 15.9 per cent the previous season, ranked twentieth in the league, though their penalty-killing success rate was a muscular 83.8 per cent, third-best. Also atypically, the Canadiens had been ninth in goal production, despite a contribution of fifty from Richer, the first Hab since Lafleur to hit those heights.

  Burns explained he was attempting to make the team more spontaneous in its attacking style, but there was precious little evidence of that in their play. When the Maple Leafs dumped Montreal 6–2, right in the Forum, giving the Canadiens a 2–4 record in their first half-dozen games, the hand-wringing began in earnest. As the team sank into last place in their division, with a record of 4–7–1, Savard’s acumen in hiring an NHL-unproven coach was questioned. Tensions were thick in the dressing room as doubts took hold, especially among veterans. Robinson was so displeased with the team’s direction, he threatened to bolt. The team was clearly struggling. Burns had messed with a winning formula by altering the system instilled under Perron. Maybe he was just a dumb cop after all. “I knew what to expect,” said Burns, shrugging off the wailing and gnashing of teeth. After the loss to Toronto, “one paper had me gone by Christmas—a front-page headline.”

  None of the players were bitching to the media, however, perhaps mindful of their orchestration of Perron’s uncer
emonious dismissal six months earlier. “We’re still searching for our team’s character this season,” suggested Bobby Smith. “What I mean is, we still haven’t found out what type of team we will be.” Gainey expressed his frustration in a way that seemed to reflect poorly on Burns. “We don’t have any consistent coordination yet. We haven’t stabilized our lines. Perhaps in trial and error you can find the right chemistry.”

  Burns persisted in preaching on-ice discipline as the necessary foundation for success. “The players have to adjust more to me. I’m a bit closer to them than Jean Perron was. Maybe there’s more communication. When I blow the whistle in practice for them to come to centre ice, I want them all to come there right away. I don’t want a few players not coming there at once. I don’t want guys throwing sticks.” Though he threw a few.

  In an interview during this troubling stretch, Burns said, “When the time comes to talk, we’ll talk.” Pointing out that the club was coming off a season in which it had finished second overall in the league, with 103 points, and thus carrying high expectations, he said: “I’m a guy coming into a difficult situation. I’m a new coach with a new system and different ideas. There is an adjustment period. Many new coaches have problems at the start.”

  It was a two-way adjustment, and an agonizing one for Burns. “I was out—fired, gone, goodbye. That’s the way it is here: win or else. I didn’t want to walk the streets at night. I figured somebody would run me over. One guy was coming to the games dressed as a chicken, with my name on his shirt. The pressure is unreal, and the spotlight is always there. I don’t like it, and I wish I could put it on somebody else, but I can’t. So I just have to deal with it.”