Coach: The Pat Burns Story (34 page)

As the 1995–96 season got under way, few observers could have predicted that Burns’s shelf life in Toronto was ticking down rapidly, his coaching bona fides headed for the remaindered bin. The playoffs had been a profound disappointment but were generally viewed as an anomaly, an unfortunate twist of fate, the kind of unforeseen consequence that frequently occurs in sports, even to good teams, which is precisely what keeps fans riveted. Only a handful of commentators with a personal axe to grind against Burns, because he’d mistreated them repeatedly, raised any
alarm bells or detected fundamental problems on a squad that had been significantly retooled. Some mild speculation about Burns’s future provoked a self-pitying response. “For two years I was king of the city and now I’m a pauper. But I went through the same thing in Montreal, and you’d expect to feel the heat in any high-profile hockey city.” There was rationalizing for a first-round bounce: injuries, including Gilmour’s two herniated discs, the derangement of a lockout-shortened schedule, not enough time to transition following Fletcher’s flurry of trade-deadline deals. But surely there was no rot at the Leaf core, eroding what GM and coach had built. The house was sound.

Burns, in the final year of his contract, hadn’t asked for extension or raise—wanted the former, didn’t think he deserved the latter. It would get done, no rush, both sides assured, Fletcher now dealing with Robin Burns, the coach’s first cousin, as agent. It did appear suspicious, however, and possibly antagonizing to the franchise, that the coach was making unilateral endorsement deals, taking care of number one through side arrangements that could have been interpreted as slightly insubordinate. When the Leafs signed with one radio station, Burns promptly sold his services to a rival broadcaster. When the Gardens struck an exclusive signage contract with one car maker, Burns walked across the street to a competitor.

A report in
The Globe and Mail
in early August claimed Fletcher had tried unsuccessfully to dump Burns and been rebuffed by owner Steve Stavro, who didn’t relish paying out the $750,000 remaining on his coach’s salary. Fletcher was quick to shoot down the story, saying, “There is not one-millionth of one per cent of authenticity” in the assertions that had been ascribed to two anonymous sources. GM immediately phoned coach to quell any anxieties. Burns had just returned from a fishing trip to New Hampshire and found dozens of messages on his answering machine: queries from journalists about the
Globe
story and further scuttlebutt that had him headed for Pittsburgh or Chicago, a report on French-language radio claiming he’d been terminated in Toronto, condolences from friends. “I hear I’ve been fired,” Burns said to Fletcher. “Don’t be stupid,” Fletcher responded. They both had a laugh about it. It was all the usual off-season
prattle, given a bit more credence because this was the first time Burns had encountered any controversy in Toronto. More chuckles greeted the confirmed news that Burns, along with Jacques Lemaire, had been appointed by Gary Bettman to a committee examining ways to reduce the neutral-zone interference that had slowed down the game by epidemic proportions. Burns and Lemaire were the two coaches guiltiest of employing that hockey style. Burns saw the irony.

Fletcher landed some key summer acquisitions via trades and free-agent signings. Strapping Sergio Momesso arrived from Vancouver. Classy playmaking defenceman Larry Murphy put his John Hancock on a three-year, $7 million contract that made him the highest-paid Leaf—a distinction that would fuel the caterwauling of fans when he failed to perform as advertised, the boos and jeers so relentless that the tortured player would be traded within two years as an act of mercy. By then, of course, the team had imploded and even Fletcher would be torpedoed.

Those convulsions were still far in the future when Toronto opened the ’95–96 campaign in Pittsburgh, routed 8–3 by Mario Lemieux—back from a seventeen-month health hiatus—and the Penguins. Just a freakish thing, Leafs maintained. It happens. The team braced for the return of prodigal son Wendel Clark, who’d been traded a week earlier from Quebec to the New York Islanders. Due to intra-conference play in the lockout season, Clark had not crossed the Gardens’ threshold since leaving Toronto. He had to remind himself to veer towards the unfamiliar visitors’ dressing room. Mats Sundin, ceaselessly self-effacing, tried to downplay the event. Leaf fans gave their ex-captain a standing ovation. But Clark wasn’t a factor in the game and Sundin dazzled with a four-point performance that propelled Toronto to a 7–3 win.

The other memorable episode in October occurred with
KA-POW
shock when Toronto hosted Tie Domi’s one-time team, the Rangers. Seemingly unprovoked, Domi cold-cocked Ulf Samuelsson with a gloved left hook with sixty-four seconds left in a game Toronto would lose 2–0.
POW
in the mug and Samuelsson went down, immobile, lights out. Even according to the code of enforcers, and with scant sympathy
for Samuelsson, among the dirtiest players in the league, this was an extraordinary assault. Burns was not impressed, describing Domi’s loss of temper as “disappointing.”

“Samuelsson called me a dummy,” says Domi, revisiting the incident. “ ‘Come on, Tie Dummy. Come on, Tie Dummy.’ ” Domi took that as both a personal slag and a slur against his late father, mocking the family’s surname. “So I fucking dropped him.” When Burns demanded an explanation afterwards, Domi recounted Samuelsson’s baiting. “Pat goes, ‘Oh, okay then. He deserved it, good job.’ ” The mugging earned Domi an eight-game suspension. He did not, however, fall out of favour with his coach.

While Burns remained devoted to Gilmour, Domi was his pet poodle, the one player he took for walkies outside the rink, adopting him as quasi-date for promotional appearances or just tootling around town. “He took me to luncheons, things like that, and I was happy to do it. Pat would say, ‘Come on, you’re coming with me.’ I got to know him as a person, away from the rink.” Burns was also intent on cultivating Domi as a player with more dimensions than just toughie and guardian of Leaf talent. “He was the first to tell me I could be a playoff-type player. He made me established and accountable. He
liked
me. And when Pat liked you, you were like his son.”

Burns was also a lonely man in those days. He revealed little of what was going on in his private life, but he and Tina were clearly headed for a breakup. Quite a few years younger than Burns, Tina had adjusted well to her new life in Toronto. At first, she did marketing for a cookie company, then landed an upwardly mobile position in the promotional field with Nesbitt Burns, the investment firm. Burns was pleased that his girlfriend’s career was blossoming. He didn’t want her to be merely an appendage to his existence, yet a chasm had opened between them. Tina hadn’t gone to the Eastern Townships at all that summer. She’d developed friendships in the world outside hockey. There was no longer any talk of marriage. Burns told a friend that Tina wanted children, and he could understand that, but he wasn’t about to reverse his vasectomy and had zero appetite
for child-rearing again. When Burns came back to Toronto for training camp, he noticed that several photographs of him and Tina as a couple had disappeared from their waterfront condo, tucked away into drawers. What he inferred was that, in his absence, Tina had taken steps to erase him from their shared dwelling. Burns assumed Tina had been seeing someone else—as indeed he had been over the summer. By Christmas, they agreed to go their separate ways. It was a gentle parting, and they remained friends. Burns even let Tina stay in the condo for however long she liked, while he moved into the Sutton Place Hotel.

But Burns was distracted and occasionally mopey over another failed relationship. One night, he was drinking alone at a waterside bar, the Purple Pepper, on Queen’s Quay. A group of young people were also on hand, paying absolutely no attention to the Leaf coach sitting by himself in the corner. “All of a sudden, the bartender brings us a tray of shots,” recalls Mandy McCormick, who was in the youthful tippling party. “He says, ‘These are from Pat Burns and he would really like you all to leave him alone.’ ” The group was puzzled. “First of all, none of us even knew who he was or had even noticed him. We took the shots, though, and ‘left him alone.’ I thought he was being a tad egotistical, but free booze is free booze.”

Around the team, which was having a so-so season, the jelling that Burns anxiously sought was apparently coming to pass. Silly dressing-room pranks were once again common, coach included in the shenanigans. There was the afternoon when somebody poured oil on the rocks in the Gardens sauna as Burns was stripping down to use it. He stepped in and the sauna filled with smoke. “He’s running through the dressing room naked, screaming: ‘There’s a fire in the sauna!’ ” howls Domi, doubling over in hysterics at the memory.

Hijinks among players should have augured well. There were no divisions within the dressing room evident to outsiders. When his charges deserved it, Burns still unloaded with a tirade, but these were fewer and farther between. One evening that he did go ballistic was in New Jersey
between periods, after Todd Warriner—who absorbed more than his share of scolding from Burns—had made a touch pass to a teammate. If there was one thing guaranteed to send Burns ballistic, it was a Leaf gambling on the touch pass—a quick pass from one player to another, in one movement after receiving it, that is vulnerable to turnovers. In the room, he hit heights of fury not witnessed in a long time. “There’s a guy in this room, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t wear 66 or 99, but he makes a one-touch pass! There’s only two guys in the world who can make a one-touch pass, Lemieux and Gretzky, and I don’t see either of them in here!” He glared around, looking for the culprit. Wisely, Warriner had taken refuge in a bathroom stall. “Over here, Coach,” came a small voice. Just as wisely, Burns didn’t invade the player’s privacy. From then on, Warriner was known to his teammates as “One-Touch.”

Beneath the surface, there were a few clues that Burns’s psychological methods might be losing their effectiveness. After Toronto was subjected to a 6–1 drubbing by the Florida Panthers, the coach again pushed the self-respect button. At practice at Forest Hill Memorial Arena the next day, he spotted a youngster playing on an adjoining rink. He summoned his players—who’d been booed off the ice the night before—and directed their attention to the lad. “That’s the pride. That’s what it’s all about. There’s a kid going around in a Maple Leafs sweater, adoring you guys.” Some of the players smirked and rolled their eyes. That would never have happened a year, two years, earlier. Burns took note of the disrespect and put the players through a punishing ninety-minute workout. If sentimental words didn’t get their attention, maybe hard-ass labour would.

The team couldn’t put together a string of wins, gather any momentum. They were playing .500 hockey, no better, and there wasn’t any excuse for it. A western road swing, three games in four nights in three different time zones, sapped everybody’s energy, with modest results 1–0–2. Through early November, the Leafs did rouse themselves somewhat, losing just one out of six with a couple of ties. The fact was, Toronto had not managed three consecutive victories in almost twenty months. They professed no undue worry. Theirs was a veteran team, inured to mental fragility and
withering of confidence, the typical precursors to stagnation and a standings crash. They’d come around.

From November 1 through 21, Toronto went 7–1–2, then 6–1–1 through the first half of December. The tidy record saw them jump seven games above .500 for the first time since their ten-game winning streak at the start of the ’93–94 season. Just before Christmas, Gilmour hit the 1,000-point plateau, the third player in franchise annals to do so in a Toronto uniform, collecting 350 of them in 285 matches as a Leaf. On the same night, Burns marked his 300th game as an NHL coach, 126 of them behind the Leaf bench. “It’s a great feeling, and I hope I’m around for 300 more, although that might be asking too much. Some coaches don’t even last 300 games.” A reporter wondered about the Grinch (of Dr. Seuss fame) tie that Burns was wearing. “I always thought the Grinch was misunderstood,” he smiled. “He’s really a lonely guy. I’ve always been a Grinch fan.”

Burns was about to hear a “Who” in the new year: Who will take the blame for this suddenly, catastrophically, freefalling Leafs team?

On January 5, 1996, the Leafs were in Buffalo, clearly tired as they played their sixth game in nine nights. The 3–1 loss upset Burns disproportionately. At his press scrum, he went abruptly haywire, delivering a jeremiad that went far beyond message via media. For inexplicable reasons, he cryptically suggested there was a disconnect in the dressing room, a serious no-no for any coach to reveal. “Some players feel a coach’s message isn’t important anymore. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got a good bunch of guys on this club. I’m not saying everybody, but I think there’s a couple of individuals that are trying to hold other individuals back.”

What in the world was Burns babbling about? “I don’t know what goes on in the dressing room,” he said, “but maybe some guys say, ‘This is the way we should play, not the coach’s way.’ ” Naturally, reporters trotted off to the players for their reaction. They were taken aback, and at least some were angry. “If Burns has got a problem with some players, then that’s something that he should say to them,” snipped Macoun. “If he’s got a problem, I don’t know who it’s with. He didn’t say it to me.” Todd Gill,
very much a liege to Burns, was baffled. “You’ll have to ask Pat who he’s talking about. Every game I’ve ever played for Pat Burns, we’ve had a game plan and we’ve tried to follow it.”

The coach had opened a can of worms, though a lax Toronto media contingent didn’t stick their fingers in deep to poke around. Burns generally avoided singling out players for criticism, preferring the generic reprimand. On the bench, if annoyed by a Leaf’s misplay, he’d bend over and speak directly in the player’s ear. “Why’d you let your guy go? Just sit there for a while and think about it.” Out of character, though, after an earlier loss in Montreal, he’d chastised the “leadership” of the club, which upset several players, notably Gilmour. Veterans should have been less sensitive about light slaps on the ego. Yet they were genuinely miffed that Burns had taken the matter—what matter?—outside the dressing room. Alerted to a possible power struggle on the team, some reporters started to pay closer attention. In fact, there was an ember of dissension within the inner sanctum that would in quick time flame up. “It was a team dominated by older guys,” says Domi, choosing his words carefully. “Some guys are fragile and can’t take constructive criticism. We were in the middle of a changeover between guys who had a long history with Pat, who’d been there for those final-four playoffs, and younger players. Pat was trying to make that transition with us, but there weren’t enough young guys around to do it. Maybe some players didn’t like that changeover; I’m not sure. I wasn’t part of that older group. I was Burnsie’s guy and everybody knew it.”