Who would have bet on the Leafs at that point? They’d stolen one in Detroit, but to do it again, in a game seven? Dream on.
“We were still learning how to win in the playoffs as a team,” Foligno says. “Detroit had come back with barrels a-blazing in our building. I remember us getting scared but saying, ‘You know what? We’ve still got a chance here.’ Pat warned us we might not have the lead to start in game seven, but ‘Let’s learn from our last game, don’t quit no matter what the score is.’ And we did learn. We let them get the lead [in the second period] and we battled back and we were able to take the game into overtime again, and the rest is history.”
Burns had pulled out all the clichés: backs against the wall, do-or-die, no tomorrow, when the going gets tough … Yet it was the Wings who looked more tightly wound, nursing a one-goal lead through half the game. Before the third frame, Burns addressed his troops, keeping the pep talk short and focused. “It’s there for you, guys.” In the third, Detroit was up 3–2 after an exchange of goals. With just two minutes and forty-three seconds left in regulation time, Clark pounced on a loose puck in the corner and passed to Gilmour in the slot, who beat Cheveldae to even the score, sending the game into overtime. “All of a sudden, boom-boom-boom, we were back in it,” says Gilmour. “When I tied it, I felt in that moment, the pressure hit Detroit.”
During the OT intermission, in the corridor outside the dressing room, Burns smacked his palms together. “I love this. This is the kind of hockey I get off on. This is great!” What he told the players was, “Just throw everything at the net.” In fact, Toronto mustered only two shots in OT, but Borschevsky—“Nik the Stick” to his teammates—made one of them count. Gilmour, who’d been centring Andreychuk and Glenn Anderson, had just got back to the bench with his wingers. Burns turned him right around, sending him out again with Clark and Borschevsky. At 2:35, the little Russian with the broken orbital bone who’d not been expected to heal quickly enough to rejoin the series, wearing a plastic shield, redirected Bob Rouse’s goalmouth pass, stabbing home the winner. Yowza.
As the Leafs swarmed over Borschevsky, jumping and dancing in an orgy of celebration, Burns and assistant Mike Murphy shared a bear hug. Up in the press box, Cliff Fletcher buried his face in his hands. Then Burns turned and pointed to Fletcher with an outstretched arm. “Except for that first game back in Montreal, that was the most emotional I’ve ever seen Burnsie,” says Gilmour.
In the dressing room afterwards, Borschevsky was besieged by reporters. “The doctors told me ten days. But I say I play today.” Then he raised his arms in surrender. “I’m sorry. I no speak good English. Maybe tomorrow I talk better.” In another corner, Todd Gill wept tears of joy. Burns, making his way to the interview podium, got in one zing: “So much for the experts.” He said the win was “almost like an apology to our fans” for game six. “For the past few days, I’ve been telling everyone who would listen that this series would go seven games and that we’d win it in overtime. Of course, I also said that Glenn Anderson would score the goal.”
Changed into street clothes, the Leafs straggled towards the bus that would take them to Windsor, across the Detroit River, and the flight home. Wendel Clark carried a case of beer under each arm.
Bring on the St. Louis Blues … and all that jazz.
With Detroit relegated to postseason footnote, the Norris Division final loomed as the Tale of the Cat and the Dog: Félix and Cujo. For his part, Burns was annoyed to be denied the underdog role, even as he pointed to such big-game St. Louis horses as Brett Hull and Brendan Shanahan. Toronto held a 4–0–3 edge in regular-season play, but Curtis Joseph, from Keswick, Ontario, held the hotter hand, standing on his head when the Blues swept Chicago. Solving the Cujo riddle was now Toronto’s challenge. Burns allowed the Leafs one optional practice before the series opened at Maple Leaf Gardens, but otherwise granted them no rest to savour the Detroit triumph. “He didn’t give us a chance to breathe and enjoy the win because he said we hadn’t achieved anything yet,” says Gill. “To be fair to Pat, he was hard on everybody. Usually, your best players get away with a little bit. One thing I loved about Pat is that he was as hard on Dougie as he was on the rest of us.” (At the time of this conversation, nineteen years later, Gill was coaching the Kingston Frontenacs, the junior team managed by Gilmour.)
Joseph was allegedly vulnerable high to the glove side, but he held the Leafs off the scoreboard in game one until there was under a minute left in the first period, John Cullen tucking in his own rebound. Philippe Bozon got that one back midway through the third. And there the score remained for what seemed an eternity. Back and forth the teams swung in what the advance billing had conjectured would be a dull, defensive goaltending duel. There was nothing boring about the battle between net men. Not until 3:16 of the second overtime, as the clock approached midnight, threatening to turn the TV broadcast into Hockey Morning in Canada, after Joseph had faced sixty-two shots and been clunked on the head by Foligno’s skate, did Gilmour, the former Blue—hero one more time, with gusts to legend-in-the-making—prick the cocoon of apparent invulnerability. Every other Leaf was tied up by frantic checkers when Gilmour darted out from behind the net with a swirling, spinning, dizzying wraparound goal that confounded Joseph. “It was the longest game I’ve ever played,” says Gilmour, who’d skated miles, logging Herculean ice time.
With the pounds still falling off, he looked emaciated, sometimes seeming no more than a black-and-blue smudge inside a jersey. “I should take that little runt home and force-feed him,” joked Burns.
The perspiration had barely dried off when the puck dropped on game two, the Gardens a sweat-soaked sauna. With no air conditioning, muggy air clashed with cold ice surface, creating a misty fug at ice level. Potvin knew he had to match Joseph save for save; there was clearly no margin for error in this showdown. “It was tough because I knew I couldn’t let anything get by me. But at the same time it was fun. Because Curtis was so good at the other end, I knew I had to be equally good. And honestly, I grew up a lot from the first series against Detroit. Now it was about taking care of business.”
Hull scored on the Blues’ third shot of the game, stunning the crowd. But Gilmour, quickly ascending to the ranks of the immortals, made it 1–1, scooting in from the corner to stuff the puck behind Joseph. Garth Butcher, St. Louis defenceman, immediately and sharply—almost quicker than the eye could see—scooped the disc out of the net. The episode went to video review, scrutinized from several angles, before referee Paul Stewart, after an interminable wait, signalled it was a good goal. In the next frame, Gilmour was clipped in the face with a high stick. He fell to the ice, writhing, and the partisan crowd held its breath. Finally, he stood up again, gave Stewart an earful for not calling a penalty, and the game proceeded.
Again there was no further scoring in regulation. Again, it went to overtime. Again, it went to a second overtime. Again, Joseph withstood a Leaf barrage. Again it would be a 2–1 verdict, but this time for the Blues. At 3:03 of the fifth period, St. Louis defenceman Jeff Brown pounced on a rebound and hit the open side of the net, Potvin down. Through six playoff games, including the opening round against the Blackhawks, Joseph had now stopped 252 of 261 shots. His jackknife splits and Venus-flytrap glove snaps were jaw-dropping. “He’s playing right now as if he was four hundred pounds and four feet wide,” said Burns. As the series switched to St. Louis, the coach had little advice to impart. “Put the puck in the net more, that’s all I can say.” Despite hammering Joseph with 121 shots, the Leafs left Toronto with no better than a split in the series.
Looking to change the dynamics, Burns decided to dress the sparsely used Mike Krushelnyski for only his third outing of the postseason. The veteran had enjoyed a splendid first half of the season, but then went frigidly cold. Still, he was the only Leaf to play in all eighty-four regular-season games that year, albeit with reduced ice time. “Fifty-two players had come and gone through the door that season,” Krushelnyski recalls
. “That’s tremendously hard on a coach, juggling players and trying to fit in all the pieces.” What sticks out in his memory is one especially punishing practice. “We’d lost the night before, and Pat bag-skated us for forty minutes. If he’d have gone even one more minute, there would probably have been a huge revolt. But Pat wasn’t there to be our best friend. At times you loved him, and at times you hated him.”
Wendel Clark scoffs at the notion of either/or. “The whole thing with a coach isn’t whether you love him or hate him. It’s whether you respect him. Pat had a lot of respect.”
Game three was mercifully shorter, but no sweeter for Toronto, a 2–0 lead vanishing into a 4–3 loss. Gilmour had a new track of stitches across the bridge of his nose, but a St. Louis columnist had more fun mocking Burns’s signature pompadour. “What’s the deal with coach Pat Burns? Why has this beefy, tough-guy former cop made himself over to look like oily lounge singer Wayne Newton?”
Alarm began to creep up the Leafs’ spines. “Fear is knocking on our door, and the way we have to answer it is with faith,” said Foligno. “We’ve got to believe in each other. I know we do.” Then he lightened up the mood. “As a team, our goal, our whole reason for being here, our very existence, is to try to put a smile on the face of Pat Burns. And we’ve actually done that a few times this season. But we want to do it some more.” Burns, grimacing, was simply sick of listening to encomiums for Curtis Joseph. “It’s been Joseph, Joseph and more Joseph. We finally got three goals against him, but the trouble was we gave up four.”
In the game four matinee, Toronto exposed Joseph as merely human. Leafs crashed his crease, threw him off balance, Foligno and Krushelnyski creating most of the traffic. “They’ve given us good hockey all year,” said Burns of his two inelegant but useful marauders. “They played the style we wanted: move your legs, take a punch in the face.” Joseph yowled to the referee about the liberties Toronto was taking with his turf. The ref had a word with Burns. “We’re just bringing the puck to the net,” he responded, angelically. “That’s our job.” Roused by a Burns pre-game speech, the players threw their bodies around with purpose in the 4–1 victory. A sizzling Potvin, who’d sweated off nine pounds of water in the game, outplayed his St. Louis counterpart.
As the series reverted to Toronto, the two teams had developed a serious hate-on for each other. Except for tree-hugging Glenn Anderson. “Hatred isn’t in my vocabulary,” he sniffed.
In the fifth game, Toronto continued its domination, outchecking, outscoring and outsmarting the Blues, clobbering them 5–1. A win in the sixth game, at decrepit St. Louis Arena, would give the Leafs their first Norris Division title since moving from the Adams in 1981 and send them to the Campbell Conference final. Back in the Gateway City, the temperature was scorching. Foligno, warning that the Blues would not roll over, inverted a cliché with a spoonerism. “We’ve got to make sure we hold our heads, uh, our feet, on the ground.” Burns found time to tweak his opposite number, St. Louis coach Bob Berry, who’d been going through agonizing withdrawal as he tried to kick the smoking habit. The Toronto coach sent over the obligatory lineup sheet to the Blues dressing room with a cigarette taped to it.
Inside the muggy barn, Burns’s pompadour was wilting as he pounded his beat behind the bench. With Toronto leading 1–0, watching his players dilly-dally as if victory were assured, his hair practically stood on end. “I could feel it when we left Toronto. There was all this talk about Stanley Cup, Joe-Sieve [the moniker hung on Joseph by Leaf fans], stuff like that. You can’t talk like that in the playoffs.”
The Blues prevailed 2–1, and now the situation was reminiscent of Toronto’s previous series against Detroit, when the Leafs had failed to put the Wings away in six, inviting the excruciating tension of a deciding game seven. Afforded the chance between the smooth and bumpy road, the Leafs again opted for the latter. “We played with fire and we got burned,” the coach sighed. “We’ve really put gas on the fire now.”
Foligno admits the Leafs felt a sense of foreboding going into St. Louis. “They had so much pride, the Blues. They didn’t want to lose in front of their home fans. So that’s what we told ourselves after. But when we got back home, there was absolutely no way they were going to beat us in our own building. We were convinced we would raise our level in the next game to the point that all our passes were going to be on the tape, everything would be executed properly, and that’s exactly how it turned out. It was unbelievable; we played the game that mentally we’d seen ourselves playing.”
Still, staring down another game seven, Burns was fretful. “There’s no doubt about it, the visiting team has the advantage. The pressure’s on us. I’ve told them to go find themselves a way to put on the jersey at 7:20 and say, ‘This might be the last time I put it on.’ Seventh games don’t come down to tactics. They come down to what you have within you. They’ve got to reach deep into their hearts and understand what this means.” Gilmour deadpanned: “Pressure? What pressure?”
Who could have foreseen what would befall the Blues that night at Maple Leaf Gardens? Curtis Joseph, like Icarus, must have flown too close to the sun. He melted. Wendel Clark scored two goals and ripped Joseph’s mask off on another bazooka slapshot that struck the goalie flush on the mug. Four goals in the first period took all the starch out of St. Louis in a 6–0 defeat. All Gilmour did was pick up a goal and two assists, to give him 22 points in the postseason, surpassing Darryl Sittler’s club record of 21. Game, set, match. “Pat had us so prepared for that game,” he says. “He didn’t do it with a lot of loud speeches, either. He just spoke to us quietly.”
Outside, the city went crazy, a good crazy. Foligno, who lived downtown near the Sutton Place Hotel, waded through the crowd as he walked home, weaving through the impromptu parade on Yonge Street. “I always tell people that I’ve been to a few victory parades in my life. There was one in Colorado, when we won the Stanley Cup. There was the one when the Blue Jays won the World Series. And there was the one after our series against St. Louis. I had a bunch of family in town and they joined the parade. I remember walking down the alleyways to get to my house because I could not walk down the street without being mobbed. It was amazing.”
A late arrival: baby Patrick with his parents Alfred and Louise and (clockwise from top left) siblings Lillian, Sonny (Alfred Jr.), Violet, Diane and Phyllis. (photo credit 12.1)
The former homicide cop joins the Montreal Canadiens: At the conclusion of the 1987–88 season, the scandalously carousing team was in need of a man like Pat Burns. (photo credit 12.2)
Renewing the Leafs, 1992: He told the players to hang up their jerseys carefully after each match. Mike Foligno recalls: “Even something as small as that, never letting … the logo touch the ground, was about bringing back pride in the club.” (photo credit 12.3)
Playing a part, 1993: While coaching in the NHL was a dream come wildly true, Burns had other fantasies—guitar picker, cowboy, Hells Angel—and often dressed the part. (photo credit 12.4)
Facing an uncertain future: As the 1995–96 season got under way, few observers could have predicted that Burns’s shelf life in Toronto was ticking down rapidly. (photo credit 12.5)
NHL Finals, 2003: At last, with the New Jersey Devils, he’d won the only silver hardware that matters. “My son Jason and my daughter Maureen came in from Montreal.… My wife was there, friends and family from Quebec. I pointed the Cup at them because sometimes you forget the people who are behind you, who were there when things don’t go so good.” (photo credit 12.6)
“I know my life is nearing the end, and I accept that”: At the news conference in March 2010, where it was announced that an arena would be named after him in Stanstead, Quebec. (photo credit 12.7)
Line Burns carries her husband’s ashes: The Stanley Cup urn was requested by Pat, who had also asked for a small funeral, conducted by a parish priest. What he got was a grand affair fit for a statesman. (photo credit 12.8)
Chapter Thirteen
&nb
sp; Gilmour vs. Gretzky; Burns vs. Melrose
“If he thinks calling me a doughnut is going to distract me …”
FROM HIS SEAT towards the back of the plane, Pat Burns was glaring. Of course, this was his face in repose, brow perennially furrowed, grave stare, expressionless yet speaking volumes. And on this morning, Leafs bound for Los Angeles, he was deeply annoyed. Cliff Fletcher was really the target of his ire, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. “The Boss,” as Burns called his GM, had opened up the team’s travelling entourage to spouses. A convivial sort, Fletcher invited wives of the coaching staff and management staff to accompany the club on their sojourn to California. That’s what really got up Burns’s nose. “I’m not for it,” he huffed. “This isn’t a vacation, for Chrissake.”
So opposed was Burns to domestic intimates tagging along for games three and four of the Campbell Conference final that he had deliberately withheld knowledge of the invitation from his own girlfriend, Tina Sheldon. She found out about it only after receiving a call from Fletcher’s wife, Boots. So then he was in double doo-doo. “Don’t you want me there?” Tina had asked, hurt. He was forced to admit, “No, not really.” Being Burns’s significant other could be a trial. While affectionate and usually considerate—a “big teddy-bear,” as Tina described him—the love of his life was really hockey, and everything, everyone, came second, at least during the season, and most definitely during the playoffs. But once Boots Fletcher let the cat out of the bag, Burns was caught lying by omission. He surrendered to the inevitable, not graciously, issuing a disclaimer: “Don’t expect me to go for no hand-holding walks on the beach.” In fact, Burns would take that promenade stroll, though in unexpected fashion.
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