Burns was aware of ownership disenchantment. He mentioned to friend Kevin Dixon, “[Ronald] Corey won’t talk to me anymore, doesn’t even say hello.” If his pungent language behind the bench was mentioned, he disregarded the complaint. “Burns was always a guy who went his own way; he didn’t care about management,” says the team equipment majordomo, Pierre Gervais. “But I’ve never seen a better bench coach. He kept everybody on edge.”
For all of his career, Burns would chafe under the sobriquet of being a three-year coach with a four-year contract. Incoming, he could grab a team by the throat and turn things around immediately—three coach-of-the-year laurels in his first season on three different teams. Outgoing, there was paranoia, disillusionment, regressing and a coach who, in the parlance, had lost his players.
“It’s hard to be as strict as he was and maintain that success for a long time,” observes Patrick Roy. “You can do it for one, two years, and then you have to find a way to adjust, to adapt to the group. Burnsie had only one way, and that was his way. He would not move one step from that.”
Says Keane: “I think with the way Pat approached the game, that kind of coach has a shelf life of three or four years. With his demanding ways, players either tune out or it just doesn’t work anymore. They start saying, ‘Okay, enough’s enough. We can’t have the perfect game every night.’ That push-push-push works for a while, and then players just shut down.”
Stéphan Lebeau, who had more than his share of difficulties with Burns yet never lost respect for the man, remembers the gloominess in the dressing room during the Boston series. “Many players were unhappy, for sure. When you’re losing and you come to the rink, you always have that heavy mood. Pat knew what he wanted, but perhaps, when things go your way all the time, you start believing that every decision you make is the right one. In reality, that’s not the case. Hockey is a sport, and it should be fun. When it starts not being so much fun coming to the rink, then this is where, perhaps, some players in the dressing room threw in the towel, or threw it at the coach. That did happen, yes.”
Shayne Corson forcefully disagrees. “Pat had not lost that room—never, never. He certainly didn’t lose me. I never felt that, I never saw that.” Within months, after another altercation at a Montreal bar—Corson just beginning to suffer the panic attacks that would curse him for years—Serge Savard would trade his problem child to Edmonton for Vincent Damphousse. “I wish Pat would have stayed. I think that was one of the reasons I got moved. He left, and I was gone that summer. I don’t blame Serge, because he was a big part of my hockey career and my life. But he just threw up his arms and said, ‘What can I do?’ ”
Russ Courtnall is reluctant to state that players no longer respected Burns. “Maybe he just didn’t have the same influence on the players that they had brought in for him to coach that he once had. Being in Montreal was hard on Pat too, tougher on francophones than anglophones. He used to always say to us: ‘You guys all get to go home after the season. We have to stay here for the whole summer and hear what we did wrong and why we didn’t win.’ ”
Sylvain Lefebvre cuts to the chase. “We lost to Boston in the second round three years in a row. If you keep losing to Boston—not good.”
Serge Savard took the pulse of his club during that series. He’d grown increasingly dismayed. “At the end of those playoffs, when we lost in straight games to Boston, I could see that Pat had lost his grip on his team. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a good coach. This happens to a lot of good coaches. When things start to go down and the coach cannot be himself and the players feel that … the message was not getting through anymore.”
Burns would always insist he was not fired in Montreal. Technically, that’s true. “I did not fire Pat,” says Savard. But neither did Burns quit, exactly. It was a mutual parting of the ways, but the coach really had no choice. Savard invited Burns, just back from a week’s vacation in Jamaica, to his office to discuss the situation. “We started there, and then went to a bar and then a restaurant and had dinner—talk-talk-talk. After a few drinks, we could speak more honestly with each other. I knew he had a five-hundred-pound weight on his shoulders. I knew I was not going to start the next season with Pat. And he knew he could not coach here anymore; he knew it. He knew and I knew that he could not continue.”
Savard also knew something else: Rogie Vachon, the GM in Los Angeles, had serious interest in hiring Burns. So did Cliff Fletcher in Toronto. “These were the two options Pat had in front of him. And it was crystal clear to me that he was going to Toronto.”
Before that meeting, there had been plenty of finessing behind the scenes, most of it orchestrated by powerful player agent Don Meehan. Burns and Meehan had spoken casually over a coffee earlier in the year. Recalls Meehan: “He told me things weren’t going well. I said, ‘If you ever have any issues or problems, give me a call and I’ll try to help.’ ”
Burns had no agent to that point; he’d negotiated his contracts with Montreal on his own. Now he needed top-drawer representation. When he sensed the axe hovering, he contacted Meehan. The agent learned from Savard that the Canadiens were going to make a change. He informed Burns, who said, “I think it’s coming,” and Meehan confirmed it, yup. Burns admitted he didn’t know how to handle the situation. Burns had three years remaining on his contract, and Meehan emphasized, “You have to be very careful in terms of how you’re going to react.” The agent formally took him on as a client and tried to calm Burns down. “This is where you’re going to get my worth, because I’m going to negotiate a settlement. I know there’s pressure to get you out of here. Let me use this as leverage with Savard, because I can do well for you, knowing what the circumstances are from the ownership point of view.”
Then Meehan revealed to Burns that “I have something else in mind, too.” Burns asked what that might be. What Meehan had in mind was the coaching job in Toronto. He knew, from discussions with Fletcher, that the Leafs wanted to replace the ineffective Tom Watt. “I told Pat, ‘Toronto’s going to be available.’ He said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
So Meehan got to work on Fletcher. When he placed the initial call to the Leaf GM, Fletcher was on another line and asked if he could call back later. “I said, ‘No, you better talk to me now. I think I have something for you here which isn’t official, but I think it would meet your best interests. Montreal is going to terminate Pat Burns and I think he’d be terrific in Toronto. It would really make sense for you. You could make a real statement, getting a guy with real presence in the league. It’s just what your team needs.’ ”
Fletcher was keen but needed to run the idea by his board of directors. Meehan urged him to do it quickly, because there was a press conference to make the announcement of Burns’s termination scheduled for Montreal the next day. Coincidentally, Meehan had just been contacted by Jacques Demers, who wanted to get back into coaching, though he was making a mint as a TV commentator. So now Meehan had two new coach clients. He was frantically juggling balls in the air.
Meehan spoke again to Savard, who was seeing Burns that night. Then he got back to Fletcher. “Are you on?” Fletcher said yes, and they talked money. It was a done deal except for the signature on the contract. Burns was over the moon, if gobsmacked. On the blower with Meehan, he kept repeating, “Are you serious?” Meehan was clear: If you want this to happen, it will happen. “Coach the Toronto Maple Leafs? Oh yeah.”
In Montreal the next day, the announcement of Burns’s departure was made to a mostly shocked media horde. Burns, emotional, claimed reluctance to leave, insisted he wasn’t running away—anybody in the room care to dispute that?—but admitted feeling overwhelming pressure to resign. “When you’re criticized openly, in the way I have been, I don’t care who’s in the seat, it’s really hard to take.” The flower of Montreal journalism, caught napping, was thunderstruck. And they were still clueless as to what was about to unfold five hundred kilometres down Highway 401. Meehan had booked plane tickets for himself a
nd Burns. They went directly from the Montreal presser to the airport. During the flight, Burns was bewildered. “I can’t believe all this happening.” Recalls Meehan: “He was in seventh heaven.”
Landing in Toronto, Meehan and Burns went straight to Maple Leaf Gardens for a first face-to-face meeting with Fletcher and their second press conference of the day. Welcome the new Toronto coach: Pat Burns.
It was a win-win dénouement, or actually win-win-win, because Meehan placed Demers with the Canadiens. The agent was justifiably pleased with himself. “Montreal was happy to move Burns out, both sides got their settlement, Pat could say he hadn’t been fired, and the Canadiens got a new coach who ended up taking them to the Stanley Cup. There was no bitterness. Everybody was happy.”
Chapter Eleven
The Passion Returns
“We love you, Pat Burns!”
RULE NUMBER 1: The Toronto Maple Leaf crest was never to touch the ground.
Symbols meant a lot to Pat Burns. His primary job in a city where the hapless hockey team was being mocked as the Maple Laughs was to regenerate respect—for the franchise, among the players, and definitely for the new coach. For starters, that meant no more tossing of the jersey on the grimy floor of the dressing room, like a used Kleenex. Veneration of club logos has since become a widespread practice across the NHL, where reporters can even be fined for stepping on the crest woven into carpeting. But in the fall of 1992, in a grungy Maple Leaf Gardens dressing room that had no broadloom underfoot, Burns was the first to initiate a statute against sacrilegious abuse of the trademark insignia.
“After a game, we used to just throw our sweaters into a laundry cart—it was really just a grocery cart—in the middle of the room,” recalls Mike Foligno, one of the returning Leafs who’d been part of the team that had finished out of the playoffs in the spring. “Pat wanted to make sure that we held ourselves accountable for the fact we were playing in a hockey-hungry city like Toronto. I remember him specifically saying he was so proud to be able to coach one of the Original Six teams, and he wanted to impress upon us what that really meant. There was a hanger behind your stall. When you took off the sweater, you had to hang it up on the hanger and the trainer would pick it up later to do the laundry. You might not think those kinds of little things would make a difference, but they do when you’re talking about the attention to detail that makes the difference from one organization to another. Even something as small as that, never letting the jersey drop on the floor, never letting the logo touch the ground, was about bringing back pride in the club.”
Cliff Fletcher, president and general manager, had begun the process of rehabilitating the Leafs when he swung a blockbuster deal towards the end of the 1991–92 campaign, picking the pocket of his counterpart and former protégé in Calgary, Doug Risebrough. That ten-player swap remains the biggest trade ever in the NHL. Toronto gave up a fifty-goal scorer in Gary Leeman, with enforcer Craig Berube and other movable parts thrown into the package. But in return, the Leafs got Doug Gilmour—the club’s mainstay for several years to come—along with Jamie Macoun, Ric Nattress, Kent Manderville and backup goalie Rick Wamsley. Then, for the first and only time in his long career, Fletcher hired a coach over the phone.
Toronto had been without a coach since May 4, when Tom Watt moved into the front office as director of player development. Fletcher was looking for a bench boss who would command instant esteem, who would grow with the team. “I did not want to sit at home and twiddle my thumbs,” said Burns at his May 29 introductory press conference, explaining why he’d wasted not a minute jumping from Montreal to the Leafs. And Fletcher had made Burns an offer he couldn’t refuse: two years that matched the $750,000 remaining on his contract with Montreal, and two more years with a salary hike after that—$1.7 million overall. That made Burns, the twenty-second man entrusted with the whistle in Toronto’s history, one of the highest-paid coaches in the league. He became only the second man in the annals of the NHL to coach both storied franchises, Dick Irvin being the other. But Burns had switched from a perennial contender, with whom he’d posted a .609 winning percentage in four seasons—the best mark in the NHL during that span—to a franchise that hadn’t finished over .500 since 1978–79. He had his hands full.
Asked what needed doing to transform a team that had missed the playoffs in three of the past four years, Burns said, “The players will have to learn what it takes to win, and I’ll be there every night to remind them.” Finally, after an absence of fifteen years and with the death of barmy owner Harold Ballard, there was a palpable sense of change in the air, something to fuel optimism. When a French-language reporter at the packed press conference asked Burns, “Quelques mots en français?” he retorted in faux exasperation: “I thought that was finished.” The forty-year-old coach pulled on a Leaf jacket for photographs. “It’s a funny feeling, but I like the feeling.”
The local media horde was excited, and so was Burns. “Coming to another hockey Mecca like Toronto makes you a better coach. I want to have fun again. I want to make it fun for everybody, and it’s fun when you win.” The fun, he said, had gone out of his job in Montreal. “When you won, they didn’t like the style you played. When you won, it was because the other team was no good. If you lost, it was because you had no system. If a player didn’t score on certain nights, it was because you were holding him back. If he did score, you didn’t play him enough. It was a no-win situation.”
Compared to Montreal, Toronto’s fans had modest expectations. Simply returning to postseason play would be grounds for hoopla. Burns tacitly let on that there had been interest in him from other organizations, though he didn’t specifically mention the Los Angeles overture, saying only: “I wasn’t interested in going to practice with sandals on. I want to wear some good boots and go to work. I wish we could start tomorrow.” He also committed a blooper when admitting unfamiliarity with the Toronto players: “I don’t know the players very well. There’s Darryl Gilmour, and I’ve always been a Wendel Clark fan.” Darryl Gilmour had been an obscure goaltender in the minors, and where Burns came up with that name is anybody’s guess. The other Gilmour, Doug, was at a fast-food restaurant with daughter Maddison when he heard that Burns had been hired, and he was dumbstruck. “At first I said, ‘Yeah, right, good one.’ It came as a huge surprise, because nobody expected it.” He cracked up over the new coach getting his first name wrong. “Tell George no problem.” They met face to face shortly afterwards. “He took me to Filmores.” That’s one of Toronto’s oldest strip joints. “We were there for half an hour, and then all of a sudden it went crazy with people congratulating him and asking for autographs, so we went on to a little pub. Right away, he told me, ‘This is what I expect: you’re one of our best players, and every day in practice you better work hard. I’m going to give you time off, but make sure, games and practices, you’re the best player on the ice, and everybody will follow you.’ ” Burns added: “I just got here, you just got here. Let’s do this together.”
Burns talked seriously with Wendel Clark as well, delicately suggesting that improved conditioning might help keep the captain out of the medical room. Clark was unquestionably the most popular athlete in town—he and Todd Gill were the longest-tenured Leafs, survivors of the worst era in Toronto hockey history—but with only 187 games on his resumé over the previous five seasons, constantly felled by injuries, it was unclear where Clark fit into Burns’s plans. The coach settled that matter quickly. “I believe in Wendel Clark. We want Wendel to be a prime-time player.”
The addition of Burns, who kept Mike Murphy and Mike Kitchen as assistants, imbued the Leafs with instant cachet. He was the embodiment of Irish temper and Gallic pride, he was colourful after years of bland coaching in Toronto, and he was a proven winner even without a Stanley Cup ring. Not since Punch Imlach’s first tour of duty in the ’60s had Toronto boasted a coach with such presence. “I have never, ever missed the playoffs,” he stressed. “I don’t intend to start now.” No slou
ches in the kaching-kaching department, the club’s bean-counters immediately jacked up ticket prices to reflect the promise Burns represented. When the organization threw a party to reveal the team’s new jersey for the upcoming season—the current, straight-edged Maple Leaf logo on a retro striped sweater—more than 7,500 fans showed up, delivering an outpouring of affection: “We love you, Pat Burns!” As caught up as anybody in optimism, Burns nevertheless tried to calm anticipations. “They’re not a good team, I don’t hide the fact. And I’m not a saviour. I’m coming in here with a lot of help from guys like Cliff. If we make the playoffs, we’ll be that much better. People talk Stanley Cup and I say, ‘Just relax.’ They haven’t seen it in a long time here. I think they just want a hard-working hockey club, and I can give them that every night.” Fletcher observed: “Pat Burns’s hockey teams are notorious for giving a consistent effort every shift of every game. He won’t tolerate anything less.” He confidently predicted Toronto would make the playoffs. “Pat’s teams have, in my opinion, always overachieved.” When Glenn Anderson, notable space cadet, enthused that the Leafs would undoubtedly make the playoffs, even “definitely contend for the Stanley Cup this year,” Burns called a timeout. “Let’s not block off Yonge Street for the parade just yet.”
Training camp in September opened with the proverbial clean slate, Burns warning his players he intended to run hard workouts, no goofing around. “I’ve been out in the work world myself with my lunch box, and I don’t see anything wrong with asking for an all-out effort. We will try a variety of things to make the workouts interesting but, yes, they will be tough.” He chose not to look at videotape of the team’s games from the year before. “I don’t want to hate some of the things I see before we get started.”
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