When his turn came a month into the summer, Burns stood Stanley in the back of his pickup and drove it to a yacht club in Magog, where a shindig for family and friends was held. A frail Louise Burns, matriarch of the clan, attended. “My ninety-year-old mother was sitting there, touching the Cup with her hands shaking. It choked me up.” Son claimed to have seen the trophy reflected in his mère’s eyes.
That’s when the joy finally overwhelmed.
Chapter Nineteen
Chance and Fate
“I’ve never backed down from any fight.”
IT WAS POURING RAIN, miserable, when Pat Burns went on his last motorcycle run with the Red Dogs. He and his buddies were huddled under a bridge on the New England seaboard, shivering, waiting for the downpour to ease up a little, enough to at least see the pavement ahead. But Burns, brooding, was gazing into an even more bleak immediate future, just down the road. He turned to his friends. “This is my last trip, guys.”
Late spring of 2010, it was, and what a tortuous road it had been: six years of sickness, hospitals, debilitating medical treatment, chemotherapy and radiation and surgery, tentative hopes for recovery, then the demolishing verdict that he hadn’t outrun cancer, that he wouldn’t beat it. Once, twice, Burns had fought back valiantly, summoning all his physical and mental resources for the battle of his life—the battle for his life. And each time, after a period of apparent remission, the invasive cancer cells had returned, from colon to liver to lungs.
Burns was terminally ill. He was dying.
“Even then, he didn’t show his hurt,” says Martin Brodeur. “You had to really know him to figure out what he was feeling inside. He gave it everything he could, but it came back again and again. That last time, I think in his own mind, he probably thought: ‘Just take me.’ ”
How abruptly priorities change when confronted with one’s own mortality, the finiteness of it.
The Stanley Cup glow lingered over the club at training camp in September 2003. They were guests at a reception in the Rose Garden at the White House, and President George W. Bush had even given them a peek at the Oval Office. Less happily, Burns’s name had popped up in the Montreal murder trial of two Hells Angels when police testified that the coach’s unlisted private phone numbers had been discovered during a search of the suspects’ homes. He brushed off the controversy, claiming to have no idea how the defendants had obtained the numbers. In fact, Burns had once left a couple of tickets at the Gardens’ will-call office in Toronto for a Hells chieftain. But the story, when it trickled out, caused no significant damage to his reputation.
By midseason, Burns was far more concerned with his club’s mediocre play, yet confident they would rediscover their pith in the playoffs. As early as January, however, he’d been feeling unwell, unusually tired, dozing off immediately on team flights, which was not at all his normal tendency, so enervated that Lou Lamoriello noticed and asked if everything was okay. Fine, said Burns. For a few months, there had been alarming symptoms of something seriously amiss, but Burns ignored the early warning signs, as many people do—avoidance, not wanting to know, to have their worst fears confirmed. That stalling infuriated Robin Burns when he learned of it later, and makes him mad still. “Pat, you’re an asshole,” he spits out at the cousin who’s no longer around to hear. “Never said a word to anyone.”
After a trying, lacklustre season—for Burns, however, on March 30, 2004, his 500th NHL win—New Jersey was preparing to meet Philadelphia in the first round of the playoffs. Players were baffled when Burns missed a practice, a morning skate, a team meeting. “Personal reasons,” they were told. “We asked, ‘What’s going on?’ and they told us, ‘Oh, he’s seeing a doctor about a problem,’ ” says Brodeur. “Nobody thought it was anything serious.”
It was very serious. Only at the urging of his wife, Line, did Burns finally share his concerns with Lamoriello, who promptly arranged for team doctors to conduct tests, which led to more tests, which resulted in the heart-seizing diagnosis: Burns had colon cancer and needed to begin chemotherapy treatments right away. Even then, he bargained for time. “I said to him, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” remembers Lamoriello. “ ‘Because I’m going to do what you want, we’ll find a way.’ ” Burns wanted desperately to remain behind the bench for the first round. “Done,” responded Lamoriello. “One round. Unless you find you can’t do it.” Then Burns would step away, whether or not the team advanced.
The Devils, defending Stanley Cup champions, were eliminated by Philadelphia in five games. The following day, April 18, reporters were summoned to a press conference at Continental Airlines Arena, to be enlightened about “a non-hockey-related issue involving the coach.” Burns took a seat on the dais, pulled out a handwritten prepared statement, smoothed out the pages, and read the ghastly news aloud to a stunned audience. He had colon cancer that required immediate aggressive treatment.
“The last month or so, I have not been feeling well. There were signs that something was not right, but I was reluctant to do anything because the playoffs were coming up.” He apologized to the players for his distraction during the series. “I wasn’t the coach I should have been the last couple of weeks, but I had a lot of things on my mind.” Only when he spoke of his pride in the team did his voice begin to waver and he fought back tears. “My wish and hope was to see this team continue into the next round and win another Stanley Cup. Even if I was physically not there, I certainly would have loved to see this group of gentlemen do it again.” He swallowed hard. “As I learned in the past, chance and fate are a big part of winning. Neither, unfortunately, as I’ve learned in the past weeks, can be controlled. For those who know me well, I’ve never backed down from any fight. And I’m not going to back down from this one.” He took no questions, and left, disappearing down the corridor with his arm around Line’s shoulders.
Lamoriello made it clear Burns was still Jersey’s coach and would return in that capacity the following season, health permitting. In any event, it was a moot point—there would be no 2004–05 season. The entire year was wiped out by an NHL lockout. “All my time and energy will be focused on this,” Burns had said. He returned the day following his cancer announcement to participate in the formal team photo session then vanished. He immersed himself in a gruelling regimen of daily chemotherapy and radiation sessions, then intestinal surgery in July, then more chemo. Thousands of emails and letters poured in, from hockey people throughout the league, from fans and from complete strangers.
The hospital where he received initial treatment, St. Barnabas, was in Livingston, New Jersey. Brodeur invited Burns to stay at his nearby home, and the coach gratefully accepted. “I told him, ‘Come to my house, relax, you’ll be better off.’ We became close. I have two bulldogs, and Pat loved playing with them.” Brodeur’s dogs are named Stanley and Vez—as in Vezina Trophy, the first of which he’d won in 2003, playing for Burns.
Doctors were optimistic. The malignant tumour they removed hadn’t penetrated the intestinal wall and seeped into Burns’s lymph nodes. His cancer was deemed Stage II, which has a 75 per cent “cure” rate without recurrence following surgery. Burns and his wife relocated to their off-season home on a golf course in Punta Gora, near Port Charlotte, Florida.
He continued to receive chemo twice a month for the remainder of the year, many days returning to writhe in his bed, beset by violent nausea. One of the many therapeutic drugs Burns was prescribed had the side-effect of making him keenly sensitive to low temperatures, which would have kept him out of the rinks had there been a season. He later described the horrors of treatment to Rich Chere, hockey writer at the Newark Star-Ledger. “The operation was tough, but the second round of chemotherapy during August, September and October was the toughest part. That really made me sick. You couldn’t touch anything cold. You couldn’t drink a cold glass of water. If you stood in front of the refrigerator and it was open, you had to back off. It was the weirdest thing. I still have numbness in the ends of my finge
rs and feet. That’s going away slowly.”
It was a dreadful year, as Line underwent abdominal surgery as well. Then, while Burns was up north, Hurricane Charley struck the Florida coast in August, causing sixty thousand dollars’ worth of damage to their house. But by the following spring, Burns had regained much of the weight lost during chemo, was working out almost daily and generally feeling upbeat, buoyant. Doctors were encouraging. Burns—kept on the payroll—was scouting for the Devils, attending NHL and International Hockey League games in Florida. He rode his Harley, played many rounds of golf with Line and returned to Montreal as marshal for the St. Patrick’s Day parade, where his father was honoured. Burns had every reason to believe he would be cleared to resume coaching duties at the start of the 2005–06 season, was even fooling around with potential line combinations. And then his world caved in again.
In July, a Montreal radio station reported that Burns had been diagnosed with cancer for a second time, news shortly thereafter confirmed by the Devils. “He will not coach next year,” a solemn Lamoriello announced. Larry Robinson would return to the job he’d left after leading Jersey to a Stanley Cup championship in 2000. Burns was shattered. “I was feeling great. I was in top shape with great expectations. Then it showed up again in a CAT scan. That was devastating.”
This time, the cancer was in Burns’s liver. “I’d been feeling so much better, was going to the gym, looking forward to coaching again and then—BAM,” he told a friend. “That was the worst part, the worst day, when they gave me that news. I asked the doctor, ‘So, what do we do now?’ He said, ‘An operation and another six months of chemo.’ I thought, ‘Jesus.’ ”
He underwent surgery in August, doctors removing a third of the organ. But the liver can regenerate itself, so Burns and his family clung to the best-case scenario. “Fortunately, we got everything. It wasn’t a massive attack on the liver,” he said. His pal Chris Wood—a pilot who at that time had his own plane—collected Burns in New Jersey, and flew him home to New Hampshire. Lamoriello had picked up Burns at the hospital and brought him to the Teterboro Airport. The patient boarded the aircraft unassisted.
Burns began another agonizing cycle of chemo and radiation. And he adamantly refused to rule out a reboot of his coaching career, at some future date, preferably with the Devils. “It’s motivation,” he said. “To overcome this sickness, you have to believe. It’s hard at times, but I’m going to try to beat this thing.” He even managed to find some humour in his situation. “He joked about his colostomy bag,” recalls sister Diane. “He said, ‘When I fart, I make bubbles.’ He was able to laugh about something like that.”
Weakened from his treatments, there were some good days, many more bad days back in Punta Gora. A doctor friend who was a hockey fan occasionally drove Burns into Tampa to watch Lightning games. In November, he was in attendance when the Devils pounded the Bolts 8–2 and he visited with the players afterwards. Slowly, his strength—and sprouts of new hair growth on a scalp gone bald from chemo—returned, testament to Burns’s tremendous physical resilience and formidably defiant state of mind. As his health improved, he resumed his scouting trips for the Devils, often in the company of Scotty Bowman, who was doing the same as a senior consultant for Detroit. “He lived pretty close to me, so we went to a lot of games together in Tampa and to the other coast,” recalls Bowman. This was the coach Burns had most idolized, and now here they were, a couple of semi-retired snowbirds, enjoying their excellent road tour adventures.
Bowman’s son, Stan, had been through two bouts of Hodgkin’s disease, so Scotty had seen up close the physical trials of treatment. They rarely discussed Burns’s illness, though. “I’d ask and he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m doing fine.’ Then I’d hear he was really having trouble, but he never let on. We’d watch these games together and commiserate when we saw things we didn’t like, whether it was the referee’s calls or because we couldn’t believe what some of the players were doing.” They established a close friendship. “He was sort of like me, I guess, because we’d both moved around among teams. And we had the same ideas about player accountability.”
The two men gabbed about how damn hard it was to win a Cup—though Bowman had done it a record nine times, which seems inconceivable today. “It’s so elusive, winning a Cup,” says Bowman. “When you push players—and I did a lot of that, as did Pat—sometimes they end up, not tuning you out, but your voice doesn’t sound the same to them after a while. It’s probably easier to be a coach and last longer if you’re not so demanding. Pat was demanding. His overall record was outstanding, but eventually you’re judged on the performance of your team. It’s tragic he couldn’t enjoy his success longer when it finally came.”
Before completing a final cycle of chemotherapy late that year, Burns saddled up his Harley for another trip, dreading the treatment to come. “The stuff’s poison, right?” he told a Toronto friend about the chemo. “After the past year, my body’s full of poison. It knocks the shit out of me.” But it hadn’t knocked the fight out of him. “I’m going to beat this thing. We thought we had it beaten once …” He was without a shred of self-pity, didn’t rail at fate or God about his misfortunes. “I never blamed God, never said, ‘Why me?’ But this is such an up-and-down disease, mentally. There are days when you’re sure you’ll beat it, when you feel strong in your head and in your body. Then there are other days when you’re nauseous and throwing up, when your stomach hurts so bad, when you’re dizzy, when you’re so weak you can hardly walk.”
He forced himself to get up and out, walking Roxie, smelling the flowers, feeling the warm sun on his face. “Can’t just stay in the house and give in.” Frequently, he chatted with Lamoriello, loath to speak about his condition but always eager to talk hockey. Burns was profoundly thankful for the organization’s continuing support, financially and otherwise. The Devils had his back on a contract—vaguely described as a consultant gig—that extended insurance to cover steep medical bills: $30,000 per chemo treatment, white cell booster shots at $14,000 a pop. “I owe my life to the New Jersey Devils and Lou Lamoriello,” Burns stressed. “If it wouldn’t have been for my medical insurance, my operations, my chemo, everything, is over $1.5 million.”
On December 18, 2005, citing stress and poor health, Larry Robinson resigned as Devils coach. Lamoriello went behind the bench on an “interim” basis—and stayed there for the rest of the season. Within a few weeks of that development, Burns finished off his chemotherapy. When he and Robinson later attended a Devils game in Tampa together—Burns looking hale, with good colour—rumours flared that he was sufficiently fit to take back his old job, possibly at the beginning of the 2006–07 campaign. He didn’t squelch the reports, but maintained a cautious posture about his physical recovery. “I don’t want to get my hopes up.” To a friend, he revealed a troubling detail: “There’s still some stuff in there. Doctors said to come back every few months to see what’s happening.”
When the season began, the coach behind the Jersey bench was Claude Julien.
The next public spotting of Burns was in Toronto, where Wendel Clark had organized a reunion of the ’92–93 squad, their old coach the guest of honour, seventeen players crowding into Mats Sundin’s private box for a Leaf game, swapping stories. This was the team that Burns remembered most fondly, their framed photograph holding pride of place above the mantel at his New Hampshire home. “I look back on those years in Toronto and, you know, they really were the best. That team, they loved each other, everybody was a family.” Burns told reporters he was feeling dandy. “The best I’ve ever felt. You wouldn’t call it full remission because they’re always watching. There’s never full remission when you have this. It’s something they have to watch and watch and watch.”
Itching for a return to hockey, Burns stuck a toe back into the coaching waters, at least symbolically, tickled when named as one of four ceremonial skippers—along with Bowman, Jacques Demers and Michel Bergeron—for the annual Canadian junior prospect
s’ game on January 17, 2007. His “Team Red” won the match 5–3 in Quebec City. Buzzed by reporters for an update on his health, Burns said: “Nobody can guarantee it. You live every day with that—that it can come back, and then you face it and punch at it again. You keep your left up and swing with your right. That’s all you can do.”
Burns was making more public appearances, as if striving to show the hockey world that he was robust and sturdy, even suitable for employment. Primarily, he was intent on living the life he had, which seemingly had been restored to him, without fear of what might happen tomorrow and tomorrow. “If you start thinking like that, you’re in trouble. If you get up and think you’re going to get sick again, you can’t live your life.” Together with Luc Robitaille, he was inducted into the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League Hall of Fame in April, arriving in Montreal to enjoy the festivities. He led a fundraising march there to raise awareness of prostate cancer. In Toronto, he was a head-table guest at the annual Conn Smythe dinner to benefit Easter Seals, sharing his insights into the nature of serious illness. “We all say to ourselves, ‘It can’t happen to me.’ I said that for a long time, too, until it creeps up and kicks you right in the ass. I didn’t expect it. I felt great. I’d never been sick in my life. I just tell people to make sure they get screened and checked, and don’t lose faith. There are some days when, after a round of radiation and chemo, you definitely feel like, ‘Is this ever going to end?’ or ‘Is this the end?’ But you have to stand up, and the next day, you feel better, and the day after, you feel better, and then you get it again and you get another treatment and it puts you down. But that’s the way it is. It’s very stressful, not only physically, but psychologically.”
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