Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  Fletcher threw matters of cost to the wind. The Leafs, he figured, deserved all the coddling his franchise could afford as the gruelling postseason ground on. Players were liveried from the L.A. airport to their posh oceanfront hotel in Santa Monica. While agreeing that sequestering the team outside Los Angeles was a good idea, Burns was testy about the location: too much sand and surf, entirely too laid-back and la-la. There may be fewer temptations farther from the bright lights of Tinseltown, but the hotel was also a considerable distance from both the practice rink and the Great Western Forum in Inglewood. Burns spent plenty of hours sitting in the marble lobby, Buddha-like, casting an arched eyebrow around the joint, making note of players’ comings and goings. Few were tempted to loll poolside with frothy drinks, though brisk constitutionals along the boardwalk or out to the Santa Monica Pier were advocated as therapeutic. Burns did fret about sunburn, reminding players about the time Jacques Lemaire got so scalded on his balding pate that he was unable to pull helmet over head come game time. “Remember sunscreen!” he bellowed.

  After sixteen games in thirty-two nights, transcontinental travel was the last thing the Leafs needed. But in Wayne Gretzky’s fifth year as a King, Los Angeles had knocked off Calgary and Vancouver. The speedladen Kings were all glitz; the Leafs a lunch-bucket crew, with a blue-collar integrity they carried with pride, and very much an extension of the man behind the bench. The character of the squad was but one reason—apart from winning—that hockey had returned to its rightful place in Toronto’s bosom. “Not just Toronto, the whole country,” says Dave Ellett, who’d emerged from a prickly first few months of the season under Burns’s custodianship of the team to become one of the coach’s most trusted rearguards. “We had a bit of a rocky start, kind of butted heads. Pat was a defence-first type of coach, and I liked to jump in on the play. He hated when defencemen passed the puck up the middle of the ice. I always felt I had the ability to do that and I was going to continue to do that. But if it didn’t work out well or the puck got turned over, I’d get ‘the look.’ ”

  Ellett and Burns both hailed from the Ottawa area. Early in the season, the Leafs were playing Ottawa on the road and Ellett was on the ice for the pre-game skate. “Burnsie came right out on the ice, made a beeline for me. I could see him coming and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, what did I do? What’s he mad about now?’ ” Instead, Burns inquired if Ellett was the grandson of Abe Cavan. Ellett confirmed he was. Cavan had been the police chief in Ottawa. Burns beamed: “He gave me my first job on the police force! Yup, I’ll never forget him for that.”

  Now, decades later, Burns was coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs and they were one series away from the Stanley Cup final. What a strange and winding road. Yet there was an intriguing patchwork of relationships among Burns, the Leafs and the Kings. It was Gretzky who’d hired Burns to coach his junior Olympiques in Hull all those years ago. Los Angeles was a club that had been interested in Burns’s service the previous summer, when he signed with Toronto. Burns got plenty of mileage recounting that story during the series, inflating the narrative—because Burns was never shy about exaggerating—to the point that he had L.A. dangling the GM title too. Majority franchise owner Bruce McNall, future felon, sharply corrected that version of history.

  In any event, the Kings hired Barry Melrose, who was almost as colourful a character as Burns. Melrose, a former Leaf, was second cousin to Wendel Clark. They were also teammates on the local fastball nine in hometown Kelvington, Saskatchewan, during the summers of the early and mid-1980s, Melrose catching and Clark at shortstop. Burns’s assistant, Mike Murphy, had been head coach in L.A. for one season after serving as captain of the club for six. Several players had been Kings teammates on other teams. Although operating a continent apart, in different divisions, the teams had commonalities that dovetailed.

  There was no dove-cooing in the series. It got off to a rollicking start at Maple Leaf Gardens when Marty McSorley—Gretzky’s personal Praetorian Guard in both Edmonton and now L.A.—flattened Doug Gilmour with a cheap-shot ambush with less than five minutes left in a game Toronto won 4–1. Gilmour completely outshone Gretzky in the affair, The Greater One on this evening, totting a pair of goals and assists, his fingerprints all over every scoring sequence. In the third frame, Toronto outshot the Kings 22–1; that’s how lopsided the match had become. McSorley’s blindside elbow kayoed Gilmour just after Number 93 set up Bill Berg for Toronto’s fourth goal. With Gilmour prone on the ice, Clark—defender of the Leaf realm—hustled over to teach the thuggish defenceman a lesson, laying a whupping on him. McSorley would carry a shiner as memento. “Well, our best player was lying on the ice in a 4–1 hockey game,” said Clark. “That’s something we didn’t want to happen.”

  During the melee that followed, fans littered the ice with debris, a crutch included among the items hurled. “Somebody’s got a long crawl home,” Melrose chortled. Gilmour picked himself up, skated directly to the L.A. bench, hung on to Darryl Sydor’s stick and flayed the players with verbal abuse. That stand-up gutsiness awed even the Kings. “Just by coming over to our bench, he was trying to say that he wasn’t going to take anything from us,” Sydor marvelled.

  From where he was standing, Burns went ballistic. He raced beyond the end of his bench, stood near the seats that separated the teams, screaming and gesturing at Melrose. Linesman Ray Scapinello had to charge between the men to prevent Burns from crossing over the DMZ. Mullet-haired Melrose—hair would become a trash-talking topic in this series—claimed not to have understood Burns’s screed. “I thought he was ordering a hot dog.” Repelling the tirade with an insolent grin, Melrose then puffed out his cheeks, mimicking Burns’s jowls and nyah-nyahing, “You’re fat!” That further incensed Burns. According to players from both sides, Burns called Melrose “bush” and spewed profane insults regarding the L.A. coach’s dated Rod Stewart shag. “Why don’t you go get a fucking haircut!”

  Not exactly Oscar Wilde wit. This was infantile sassing, but it could have been worse, Melrose told reporters later. “I could have said, ‘Have another doughnut.’ ” (It was not an original line. In the 1988 playoffs, angry New Jersey coach Jim Schoenfeld confronted Don Koharski in the corridor and the referee was either bumped or stumbled, whereupon he threatened that Schoenfeld would never coach another game. Schoenfeld: “You fell, you fat pig! Have another doughnut.”)

  Gilmour has more than once watched that first Leafs-Kings game, and the others from the ’93 playoff run, on video. “To this day, I want to go over there and grab a piece of Barry. If they’d really got into it, my money would be on Pat for sure. That showed how much passion he had for his hockey club, so it was great to see. The same thing for when he jumped on referees. If he had no emotion, how would the players have emotion?”

  After the game, Burns was still fit to be tied about the bushwhacking of Gilmour, asserting he’d never send one of his enforcers on the ice to assault a star opponent. “All I know is that if Ken Baumgartner did that to Wayne Gretzky, we’d be hung from the top of Parliament Hill. I lost a lot of respect for the Los Angeles Kings because of that. I know that wouldn’t happen on our team. I certainly would not allow that to happen.” In the Kings dressing room, McSorley tossed off a glib explanation. “Just call me a cheap-shot artist.” Burns also took a not-so-subtle swipe at Gretzky, comparing the icon unfavourably to Gilmour. “Wayne Gretzky plays less than two hundred feet of the ice. Dougie goes back, picks up his checks and finishes them at the other end.”

  So there was that. The war of words, to the delight of reporters, would continue throughout the series.

  The next day, with his right eye blackened and nearly swollen from Clark’s pummelling, McSorley sarcastically invited photographers to take all the close-up pix they wanted. “Everybody get a good picture. A couple of stitches—big deal.” Otherwise, he was the picture of innocence. Unable to resist, McNall got in on the lip-flapping, saying he had no clue what words had been exchanged between coaches. “What was he yapp
ing about at Melrose? I thought maybe he was mad Melrose got the job Burns was begging for all [last] year.” When two large bouquets of balloons were delivered to the visitors’ dressing room, Luc Robitaille piped up: “One’s from Doug and one’s from Wendel.”

  Burns arrived at practice with an hours-old haircut—clearly, he was the one who’d visited the barber—patiently giving journalists a chance to comb through the feud fallout, then stated he wanted to put the kerfuffle behind him. “Irish tempers flew. I’m in a good mood and I want to stay that way. Barry can talk about it all he wants. I love the Kings today.” Barry did continue to yammer, now indignant over the remark Burns made about Gretzky. “Anyone in hockey that criticizes Wayne Gretzky is not very smart. Pat Burns is making a lot of money in hockey now because Wayne Gretzky hired him to coach his junior team.” He suggested Burns had had a “brain aneurysm.” He revisited the November incident where Gilmour broke Tomas Sandstrom’s arm, with Burns accusing the Kings of “always crying about something” when they groused about the non-game suspension. “Who’s whining now?” Melrose taunted, noting the hypocrisy over McSorley’s mauling of Gilmour.

  Mischievous Melrose knew how to stick in the needle, though professing to have sworn off physical confrontations since the time when, as a first-year coach with Medicine Hat, he’d gone after a fan who slugged him during a game, which led to sixteen-year-old players swinging their sticks like hatchets. “I vowed not to lose control again. I was embarrassed.” So he swallowed his temper, even staying cool during a 10–2 demolition by Philadelphia earlier in the year. “I had a leather strap between my teeth.”

  As for his much-mocked mullet, which Burns had targeted for ridicule, Melrose explained: “The only thing my dad and I ever fought about was my hair. He always made me keep it short. When I left home at fifteen, I said I would never have it short again. Everybody likes it. Well, you know who doesn’t? Bald people.” Ba-da-bing. Burns rolled with the jokes about his thinning pompadour—“I don’t have much hair on top anymore”—but he was genuinely aggrieved by the punch at his paunch. “Maybe when Barry hits forty-one or forty-two, he’ll find the stomach will grow out a bit, too.”

  Reporters quickly noticed Gilmour wasn’t on the ice for practice. Cracked Burns: “Doug has gone back to his planet for a rest.” It was the only rest the double-shifted Gilmour would get.

  In game two, it was the Leafs who utterly lost their composure. The raggedy match could have gone either way; neither team distinguished itself. Near the end of the first period, after McSorley swatted him again, Gilmour skated up to his tormentor with fire in his eyes and head-butted McSorley bang on the schnozz. The Kings were outraged that Gilmour was not assessed a major penalty or game misconduct, both players receiving minors for roughing.

  Toronto wasted a 2–1 lead and lost 3–2 on Sandstrom’s tie-breaker in the third, set up by Gretzky, who disputed accusations the Kings were a one-dimensional run-and-gun team. Indeed, L.A. had matched Toronto’s grit and slow-down style in the snooze cruise, while Gilmour, as one columnist put it, “went from super-duper to super-stupor” in the space of two days. At the time, Gilmour denied head-butting McSorley, saying: “We were just head-to-head.” Today, he says: “Oh, I head-butted him.”

  Off the ice, Melrose was wrangling with Don Cherry, who was hardly a neutral observer of the series—he planted a smooch on Gilmour’s kisser on national TV after game one. “I just don’t feel that Hockey Night in Canada should be cheering for one team over another,” said Melrose, miffed. “We have as many Canadians on the Los Angeles Kings as the Leafs do.” In retaliation, Melrose forbade his players from appearing on HNIC. Cherry fulminated on the air that Melrose “was a candy-ass as a player and he’s a candy-ass as a coach.” Prudently, Melrose passed on the opportunity to tell the bombastic commentator to kiss a relevant part of his anatomy.

  Cherry further slammed Melrose for looking like “Billy Ray Cyprus” on account of the hair—which actually cut closer to the bone for Burns, who’d proclaimed Billy Ray Cyrus his favourite country crooner. Meanwhile, Melrose’s wife, Cindy—notable for stripper-style fashion, all lace and bustiers—grabbed a piece of the inter-coach baiting by going on KISS radio and calling the Toronto bench boss “Fat Burns.”

  Toronto had not won a game two throughout the playoffs. Burns was ticked that his team had failed to show much, squandering the opportunity to take a two-game series lead. “We all seemed to sit back and wait for the Doug Gilmour Show to start. Maybe some of our guys still don’t realize what this is about.” Now they were winging to the coast, distaff partners in tow—but not for the players. Burns had no inkling what was about to hit him.

  A Los Angeles radio station, making light of Burns’s girth, urged its listeners to send a doughnut to the coach, identifying the team’s Santa Monica hotel. When the Kings caught wind of the prank, officials called the station, firmly urging it to cease and desist. Not a chance. Eighteen dozen doughnuts arrived. In a quite brilliant counter-thrust, Burns and Tina distributed the pastry to vagrants in Santa Monica and Venice. “I was a king this morning. I may be the most unpopular person in L.A., but the homeless guys who sleep on the beach think I’m the greatest. I thought they were going to carry me around on their shoulders. They told me it was the best breakfast they’d had in years.” Knock it off though, Burns requested. “I advise people not to waste their money, because Tim Hortons doughnuts are the only ones I eat.” Good-natured about the gag, Burns put a different spin on the fans’ gesture, suggesting they weren’t ribbing his portliness. “I think it has to do with my previous years as a police officer. We do hang out in doughnut shops a lot, to have coffee and stay awake so we can protect all those guys who have big mouths.”

  He was growing weary of the shtick and the spotlight. “While all this stuff has been a lot of fun, it’s time to get down to brass tacks again. Barry and I aren’t the point of this thing at all. We’re just a sidelight. We’re here to win some hockey games, not bicker like a couple of schoolchildren.” To that end, Burns put the Leafs through a lung-burning practice, rejecting any suggestion the club was physically worn down. “They shouldn’t be tired. The piece of meat between their ears is tired, maybe.”

  Hundreds of fans came to the Forum armed with doughnuts as projectiles to hurl towards Burns. Gilmour-badgering from spectators began halfway through the Canadian anthem. “They had these signs,” recalls Gilmour. “On one side it said ‘Gilmour Head Butt.’ Turn it around and it said ‘Gilmour Butt Head.’ That was actually pretty funny. I should have kept one.”

  Gilmour was blowtorch-tailoring his sticks (made of wood in those dinosaur days) in the corridor of the Forum before the game. “This guy walks by and says, ‘Hey you, take it easy on us.’ As soon as I heard the voice, even without looking up, I knew who it was—Sylvester Stallone. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ There were all these Hollywood stars coming to the games and we were in awe. Pat said, ‘We don’t give a fuck about who these people are, okay? Who cares if Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn are in the stands? Don’t even look at them. They’re not cheering for you.’ ”

  The Kings tipped Toronto 4–2, twice beating Félix Potvin on shorthanded goals. While Gretzky continued to play pedestrian hockey—for him—Burns was uneasy about an imminent explosion from Number 99. He implored his players to take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves, “How much do we want this?” They must have heeded his directive, because an efficient, forceful effort resulted in game four, which Toronto took 4–2, winning all the one-on-one battles within the encounter. “We are at our best when we think we’re done,” observed their appreciative coach. “We have to play scared.” “It’s going to be a long series,” Gretzky predicted. “We know that now.”

  There was anxious remonstration about 99. His last remaining objective in hockey was to lead the Los Angeles Kings to a Stanley Cup. But where was the tour de force performance that had been anticipated? “Wayne’s Wane” went the refrain. At the start of th
e series, the thirty-two-year-old Gretzky declared that he hadn’t felt this good in ages, but there was little evidence of that on the ice. Alas, as everyone now knows, he was saving it for the final act, the curtain-dropper.

  Rattled, the Kings called in their positive-thinking guru, Anthony Robbins, the celebrated late-night TV pitchman for books and tapes on personal power and author of Awakening the Giant Within. Melrose was a devotee. Burns, back in Toronto, scoffed at the New Age approach to hockey; how very California. Besides, Burns said, the Leafs had their own motivational expert in team psychologist Max Offenberger. “I’ve got Maxie. We smoke a cigar, have a cognac and everything looks better. Anyways, Max has home-couch advantage.” On home turf, Toronto’s fans would show the L.A. mob a thing or two, Burns promised. “The Madhouse on Manchester will become the Crazy House on Carlton.”

  The coaches fired another round of verbal salvoes, each accusing the other of shattering the ceasefire. Burns believed there was an implied slur when Melrose made a comment about the Leafs having an older lineup, which forced them to play a middle ice–clogging style because they couldn’t otherwise keep up stride for stride with the Kings. It was a soft lob, but Burns went nuclear. “Barry Melrose doesn’t show any respect to anybody. He has been the same since the playoffs started. He thought he could distract me with that doughnut thing. I was a cop for sixteen years. I’ve been called a pig, a dog. I’ve had beer bottles broken over my head. I’ve been kicked in the groin. I had a woman I was arresting try to scratch my eyes out. If he thinks calling me a doughnut is going to distract me … I don’t think Barry understands that coaching is a fraternity. We should respect each other. We’re alone out there. Someday he might be alone.”