According to the criminal complaint, the players had fought with two police officers, Chelios struggling with the cops when they tried to arrest him for urinating in public. Chelios was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, a misdemeanour. It was not his first brush with law enforcement in the state where he lived during the off-season. In 1984, Chelios was convicted of escaping from police who were taking him to a Madison hospital for an alcohol test after he’d been arrested for driving under the influence. He pleaded no contest to the escape and paid a fine, but was never charged with drunk driving. The policemen involved in the new incident sued both players, claiming to having been “assaulted, battered, abused and ridiculed.” At his arraignment, Chelios entered a not guilty plea.
In any event, Serge Savard had reached the end of his rope with Chelios. And the player professed to be pleased with the trade. “I’m really happy that I’m coming home. It was so unexpected.” All these years on, Chelios admits the abrupt exit from Montreal shook him severely. “It hit me out of nowhere when I was traded, to be honest.” But his biggest regret was not having been a better captain for Burns. “You’re supposed to be the go-between guy with the coach and the players. I had a really tough time and struggled with that. I still think to this day that I failed as a captain in Montreal. I wasn’t ready for the role. And I think Pat, being a young coach in the NHL at that time, didn’t know how to handle that, either—what my role was, what my relationship with him should be. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t understand. I’d had guys like Bob Gainey who showed me, taught me, what it took to be a team guy. You needed a captain like Gainey, who was level-headed, didn’t get too up or too down. And that wasn’t me at that point in my career, at my age. I didn’t help the situation one bit when I was in Montreal. When I got traded, I thought I was just starting to figure it out and was ready to accept the responsibility. But at that point, we’d lost, and someone had to pay and I was the guy that year.” After the trade, Burns invited Chelios to his cottage in the Eastern Townships. “We spent a couple of days there and talked about everything, what I would have done differently. But it was too late …”
A month later, it was Claude Lemieux, the thorn in Burns’s side, out the door, dispatched to New Jersey for Sylvain Turgeon after failing to join the team when it jetted off to training camp in distant Moscow, an ill-advised NHL goodwill experiment. Serge Savard had brought player and coach together for one final stab at resolving their conflict, but no joy. Recalls Lemieux: “I told Pat, ‘I like you.’ And he said, ‘I like you too.’ I said, ‘But you don’t play me.’ He said, ‘I play you as much as I think you should play.’ I told Serge, ‘You’re going to have to trade me.’ I know he didn’t want to, but Serge promised me after that meeting he’d trade me by training camp. Serge was an honourable man. He was trying to do what was right for the team.”
Burns maintained their spats had been exaggerated by the media and he was not the impetus behind the trade. “Claude didn’t want to leave because of me. I talked to him and wished him luck.”
He was being disingenuous, as Savard confirms. “He had a real tough time with Claude Lemieux. I had to get rid of Claude because those two could not reconcile. That’s something Pat should have been able to do. But he was very stubborn. He would not change his mind. It was like he couldn’t recover. As a manager, you have the choice to get rid of a player or the coach. Obviously, in this case it was the player who went. It turned out to be a terrible mistake for us, a very bad trade for us. Turgeon turned out to be a bad player.
“Claude was pretty tough with Pat, too. It came to a point where, you don’t connect, you don’t listen. Pat wanted no part of him. That’s one side of Pat that could have improved, and did improve later. But Pat was a guy who was always right and you couldn’t change his mind.”
Chapter Eight
Rioting Russians, Milbury Mind Games
“If we get beat in Boston in April, I’m not going to blame Russia.”
A RINGING PHONE in his hotel room woke Pat Burns in the middle of the night. Three of his players were in jail. Did he wish to bail them out?
The Canadiens had arrived in chilly Winnipeg two days early for a December game in 1990. Apart from practice, they had a lot of idle time on their hands. Most of the players went out on the first evening to a bar called the Marble Club. By closing time, only three remained: Shayne Corson, Mike Keane and Brian Skrudland. They were just leaving, had stepped through the door, when Corson noticed that a young woman was being smacked around by her male companion. With two sisters of his own, Corson was outraged by the spectacle of a female being abused. He told the man to knock it off. Harsh words were exchanged. Suddenly, someone else struck Corson over the head from behind with a cane. Keane made to grab this second man and was himself whipped across the forehead with the same cane. Skrudland, just emerging into the night air, saw both teammates covered in blood and thought for a moment they’d been shot. Coming to their defence, he too joined the fray, which had now turned into a full rumble. Police were called, and all the participants were handcuffed and thrown in the slammer.
“We spent the night together, in the same cell, wearing prison jumpsuits they gave us,” Corson remembers. “Keaner and I were pretty young at the time. It was scary. And there were other guys in the cell too, pretty tough guys. We sat on a bench together, the three of us, side by side, and didn’t speak. Skrudland kept saying, ‘Don’t speak, don’t say a word, just sit and shut up.’ We didn’t want anybody to know who we were, but they recognized us and then they started talking to us, even asking for autographs. So that made us feel a little more comfortable, but we were still scared.”
Someone—Corson thinks it was Skrudland—rang up Burns when police permitted the obligatory one phone call. “But he didn’t come right away. He left us there till morning.” News of the arrest had already broken, and Burns tried to sneak his wayward threesome out the back exit. “He wasn’t happy,” says Corson. “He gave us shit. Pat said, ‘We’ll talk about this later.’ ” That afternoon, after practice, Burns sat the three quasi-felons down for a stern chat. “Pat wanted to know what happened. We realized the best thing was to be honest, tell the truth. I explained about the girl getting beat up and that we hadn’t started the fight. Pat said, ‘Okay, did you learn something from this?’ We said yeah, definitely. And that was it.”
For Corson, this was neither the first nor the last time he’d have brushes with the law. More often, his shenanigans were harmless—on that same trip, Corson and Keane picked up a Christmas tree in the hotel lobby and dumped it in Chris Chelios’s room. But on other occasions, fuelled by alcohol, things turned ugly. Eventually, when Burns was no longer there to watch his back, the bar brawls would get him tossed out of Montreal.
Life for a Montreal coach is always eventful and never predictable, no matter how precisely charted in a schedule that’s released well in advance of every new season. In the late summer of 1990, that schedule sent the bleu, blanc et rouge across the Atlantic. The “Friendship Tour,” a promotional brainwave of the NHL, had the Canadiens, their wives and their children boinging from Sweden to Latvia to the Soviet Union over a fortnight of exhibition games. Pat Burns loathed the whole undertaking. “I don’t think it’s going to be the kind of training camp that a coach would like to conduct,” he grumped prophetically as the travelling circus aboard Air Habs landed in Stockholm.
Perhaps, given his history at the junior worlds in Czechoslovakia, the league should have had a rethink. The NHL was, after all, at that very moment trying to soothe feathers ruffled by Sergei Fedorov’s walking away from the Soviet national team to sign with Detroit. Burns didn’t do unruffling very well.
The excursion had started mildly enough. It would conclude with an ugly brawl and empty vodka bottles hurled at the “dirty” Canadiens. Following an unremarkable match in Leningrad, the team had flown on to Moscow, worn out, sleep-deprived and grouchy. The culture shock had already knocked them
for a loop, and now they were simply eager to go home. In the capital, Stéphan Lebeau had his clothes stolen, players complained about the food—until Patrick Roy discovered a just-opened Pizza Hut, placing a massive to-go order—and everyone was pretty much confined to their hotel, partly because of the language barrier and partly because there was nowhere to go, few Habs particularly interested in camera-clicking tourist jaunts to the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral or Lenin’s Tomb. Burns claimed several wives had been accosted by Russian men who thought they were hookers, and so the women were afraid to venture outside the hotel.
It quickly became apparent that the Soviets were taking these games all too seriously. “To us, this is preseason hockey, it doesn’t have too much importance,” Burns objected. “But the Soviets have put a lot of emphasis on these games, too much emphasis sometimes.” Yet it was Montreal that was criticized for playing too aggressively in the first Moscow encounter, a 4–1 loss to Dynamo. That was merely the aperitif. The next night, facing a keyed-up Central Red Army squad, was déjà vu for Burns, fingered as the culprit in yet another diplomatic fiasco. Fights had already twice stopped the game. In the third period, a couple of bottles smashed on the ice after being thrown towards the Canadiens’ bench, and the glass had to be swept up before play could resume. Several Montreal players were hit with coins. A number of scuffles broke out simultaneously, Shayne Corson and Stéphane Richer jumping off the bench to join the fray, giving the Canadiens a two-man advantage on the fight card that ensued. Petr Svoboda was ejected for a deliberate attempt to injure. Peace was just being restored when fans began pelting the visitors with debris, so Burns ordered his team off the ice. “When that vodka bottle broke in front of the bench, Coach Burns said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ ” said defenceman Mathieu Schneider. Burns insisted that Soviet hockey federation president Leonid Kravchenko get on the public address system and calm the unruly crowd. Having done so, Kravchenko pleaded with the Canadiens to finish the match, adding, as a bizarre pleasantry, his hopes that the visitors would leave the Soviet Union with good memories.
“It hasn’t been much fun,” Burns fumed later, after Red Army edged his team 3–2 in overtime. He justified his ten-minute timeout as a necessary precaution. He’d been worried about his players’ safety. “When the president of the [federation] comes over and says how sorry he was and says his fans were hooligans to throw bottles and this and that, and then he comes back and says he wants our wives … to leave with good memories of Russia, you sort of look at him and say, ‘What?’ We’ve been stalled and we’ve been lied to and we’ve been almost shafted in every corner in nearly every place we’ve been.”
Red Army coach Viktor Tikhonov blamed the Canadiens for the melee. “They started this fight and they had no right to leave the ice.”
As the Canadiens bid their fare-thee-well to Mother Russia, legendary ex-goalie Vladislav Tretiak and others delivered parting shots at their guests, castigating Montreal for the third-period donnybrook. “Can you believe it, they felt insulted,” he told the Tass news service. “They provoked a clash and were forced to leave the rink. Canadian players have always been clean sportsmen. But in this match they used the dirtiest moves—hitting players already down on the ice and jumping out from the bench to help their teammates in hand-to-hand fights.” Soviet customs officers got the last laugh, confiscating dozens of jars of caviar at the airport, the Canadiens’ flight delayed for three hours as a thorough search of the players’ luggage was conducted. Montreal had arrived with $3,000 worth of medical supplies and equipment to donate to Soviet hockey. They left with a bill for fourteen rubles, accused of stealing two tiny, rough-textured towels from the Moscow visitors’ dressing room.
When training camp reconvened as normal in Montreal, Burns tried to put the whole sorry affair behind him. “If we get beat in Boston in April, I’m not going to blame it on Russia. If I have a heart attack next year, I’m not going to blame it on Russia. But it will affect us at the start of the season. When we got back, we had to start training camp all over again.”
Turns out, Burns was prescient about Boston.
The regular season came and went, bringing with it Burns’s 100th NHL win and nasty jeering for Stéphane Richer—who scored 51 goals the previous year—on Fan Appreciation Day at the Forum, with his coach observing, “Here, you can go quickly from hero to zero.” But the frustration of late-season slumps had been trained on the delicate flower that was Richer, the hockey public continuing its love-hate relationship with its star. Richer had done himself no favours by revealing he’d consulted with an astrologist about his scoring travails. “As a Gemini, it’s all or nothing with me,” Richer told snickering reporters. “I’m loved or I’m despised.”
If the love was no longer quite as fervent for Burns either, he remained very much Montreal’s celebrity coach, more ink-worthy than a tepid pool of player personalities, even Denis Savard—proving less than the spin-o-rama saviour advertised. The diet Burns put himself on in preparation for the postseason was closely documented: twenty pounds lost, smoking habit snapped. Canadiens finished second in the Adams Division, eleven points behind the Bruins, and thus drew Buffalo for a second straight playoff-opening opponent. What was expected to be a low-scoring wrangle between defensive-oriented squads was anything but: forty goals scored through the first four kooky games; each club taking two apiece on home ice; pucks going in off skates, shins and shoulders; Patrick Roy yanked during game four and then returned to the net for the next period. Montreal eked out a 4–3 overtime victory in game five and then ripped the Sabres 5–1 at the Memorial Auditorium to close it out with a bang.
That set the table for another mano-a-mano with bitter rival Boston. Francis Rosa wrote in the Boston Globe: “April has become official. Daylight Savings Time has come, as it does every year. The Red Sox have opened the season, as they do every April. The Marathon is upon us, as it is annually. And the Bruins and Montreal are matched again in the playoffs. All is well in our corner of the wonderful world of sports. The Bruins and the Canadiens for the 10th time in the last 15 years. Now, that makes spring official.”
Boston had a firm regular-season edge over Montreal, with a 5–2–1 head-to-head record. Yet there was anxiety over the “Montreal Jinx,” even though Boston had won two of their last three series and even after the Bruins tasted first blood, grinding out a 2–1 decision in the plodding, eye-glazing opener on Causeway Street. Burns had warned this would be a tight and emotional playoff set. “There was the jinx for years and years, how Boston couldn’t beat Montreal. That’s over now. They don’t believe in the ghosts anymore. Anyone who’s not motivated to play Boston shouldn’t even put on skates. You see it when you go into the old Garden and they’ve won five Stanley Cups, and it’s the same for them when they come into the Forum and see our twenty-three banners. This rivalry is good for everyone.”
Mike Milbury scoffed at the Montreal jinx. “If you look back at the Montreal teams that beat Boston, they were probably mostly better teams. Now the talent has evened out a little bit. We don’t have the sword of Damocles hanging over our head. It puts us more on an even footing psychologically.”
Game one was an unusually polite, fight-free affair that had fans wondering what had become of the Flying Frenchmen and the Big, Bad Bruins. One wag suggested game two would be played with both sides wearing tuxedos. Asked why there wasn’t more emotion, Burns was miffed: “I can’t understand that question. Why do you ask it? Because we’re not throwing the gloves and not fighting? Everyone’s waiting for a brawl because it’s Boston and Montreal. Well, it’s not going to happen. We don’t have the ammunition for that and I don’t think Mike Milbury has either. It may not seem so upstairs, but it’s rough hockey down on the ice level. It’s tough but it’s clean.”
The ice-level excitement was considerably cranked in game two, Montreal staging a dramatic come-from-behind effort, Richer tying the score 3–3, beating Andy Moog with 8:30 remaining in the third period. “I was
really surprised to be by myself in front of the net. In the Garden, it’s so small that every time you get one shot off, you get pushed out of the way.”
Burns rested Richer and his first-line mates for the rest of regulation time. He had a feeling, a hunch. When the horn sounded and the teams retired to their dressing rooms, Burns pulled his goal-scorer aside. “I told Richer, ‘You’re going to win the game for us in overtime.’ ” Twenty-seven seconds was all it took. Richer struck for his second goal of the night. “Am I a coach or a prophet?” Burns crowed.
Moog missed the Bruins team bus to the Forum for game three because he was watching golf on TV in his hotel room. He hitched a ride with some Boston media and slipped into the dressing room without Milbury noticing the tardy arrival. The goalie made the difference in the net with forty saves, holding off the Canadiens after Ken Hodge scored the 3–2 marker with just under a minute and a half remaining in regulation time. “We deserved to win, but Andy made saves like I’ve never seen,” said Burns, tipping his hat. “I don’t think he can have another game like this.”
In game four he most assuredly didn’t, Montreal storming back 6–2, Shayne Corson leading the way with two goals and two assists. Burns had called his tough winger out for particular criticism, his idea of motivation, and it was front-page fodder for the press. But the tactic worked. “That’s one thing Burns was awesome at,” says Corson, “knowing which players he could push hard and call out, and which he had to be a bit more delicate with. He knew he could kick me in the butt and get the best out of me.” Corson came out of the chute in the fourth game like a man on fire. He completed his lively evening by picking up a five-minute major and game misconduct for high-sticking Dave Christian. “It was probably one of the best games I’ve seen him play since he first put on the uniform of the Montreal Canadiens,” said Burns. Just a couple of months earlier, Montreal had almost traded Corson to Toronto for Wendel Clark, but backed off the deal, leery of the Leaf captain’s injury stats: 159 games missed over the three previous seasons.
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