Coach: The Pat Burns Story (6 page)

Henry would become yet another in the long line of substitute dads for Burns. “He could have been looking for a father figure.” And the weathered hockey guru was careful not to put the team’s well-being ahead of the “beautiful man” he came to love. While confident this novice would ultimately land in the NHL, he prudently attempted to craft a Plan B, lest that didn’t happen. Known widely in the Ottawa region, where he’d been a fireman, and with a slew of contacts in all manner of business enterprises, Henry one day suggested to Burns that, well, if things didn’t work out hockeywise, he could probably arrange for Burns to be hired as head of security at A.J. Freiman’s, the capital’s largest department store. He was taken aback by Burns’s explosive reaction. “He got insulted! What I’d meant was, he didn’t have to worry about ending up unemployed if he didn’t go back to the police force, that he could go the department store and be the man in charge. Pat was, ‘Jesus Christ, you think all I’m good for is security!’ ”

In any event, when that year’s leave of absence was over—the Olympiques had shot up to second place in their division and fifth overall, losing the championship semifinals in five games—Henry was not about
to let his coaching gem return to pounding a beat, or even solving homicides. “When that year was over, Pat was told he wasn’t getting another leave. So now I went back to the mayor in Hull and got him to come with me to see the police chief, the two of us together, to get Pat Burns another year leave of absence. Lo and behold, we got it again.”

There would be no need for a third sabbatical. As a cop, Pat Burns was done.

He’d never once drawn his gun.

I
T WAS THE DAY
after a stinker of a night before. The Hull Olympiques had lost a big game—lost it bad. Players, geared up, were huddled in the dressing room prior to practice, nervously awaiting the thunderclap of Pat Burns, a coach who could peel the paint off the walls with his blistering tirades even when his team
won
. “The trainer tells us nobody goes on the ice until Pat comes in,” recalls defenceman Cam Russell. “Of course, we’re shaking in our skates, worried about getting skated until we threw up. And Pat finally walks in with the trainer and four cases of beer. So everybody sat around and drank. It was a different time, right?” Burns circulated around the room for two hours, talking to the players. “The running joke became, if we had a bad game, we were always hoping the next day would be a beer practice. That was Pat. He had a lot of tricks up his sleeve and he knew went to pull them out.”

Burns as trickster—and devotee of silly slapstick pranks—would remain a calling card throughout his career. Much of his future style behind the bench was forged during the three eventful years Burns spent as coach of the Hull Olympiques in the fiercely hardscrabble Q—the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Never a keen technician, Burns’s particular
strengths quickly emerged as motivator and ingenious hockey alchemist, a guy who could draw every last ounce of potential out of his players. This skill would be the catalyst for the rapid improvement of all NHL teams he took over, especially in his first year with clubs, and it was what made him so alluring to GMs.

Every player who fell under the Burns spell in junior hockey would subsequently acknowledge how crucial he’d been in their evolution towards the NHL, a roster of comers that included the likes of Russell, Luc Robitaille and Benoît Brunet, all of whom passed through his hands in Hull, a team Burns took to the Memorial Cup in 1986. The past is a different country in the United States of Hockey—in it, Pat Burns was slim and sported a perm for a while—but Burns identified, recruited and enhanced raw talent, foster-coaching teenagers into young men who could step into an NHL lineup.

The Hull Olympiques (renamed Gatineau Olympiques in 2002, following municipal amalgamation) shared a junior hockey market and intense rivalry with the Ottawa 67’s across the river. When Burns arrived as an assistant coach in 1983, club ownership was still held by the City of Hull. The previous season, the team had finished forty points behind their quarter-final opponents, Laval, though they would extend them to a seven-game playoff round. The city then relinquished ownership to a non-profit corporation.

As an assistant in the 1983–84 season, Burns didn’t work from behind the bench because head coach Michel Morin preferred to act alone at ice level. Instead, Burns watched every game from the bleachers, taking notes. What he observed wasn’t pretty; the Olympiques finished second to last in the Lebel Division, the fourth time in eleven years they had been excluded from the postseason, even with a very impressive left winger, Robitaille, drafted onto the squad and immediately saddled with the nickname “The Franchise.”

Morin lasted only a year and returned to academia as the reins were handed to Burns, still shuttling between his policeman job and the rink. In ’84–85, the Olympiques ranked second in their division, Robitaille acquitting himself as advertised, scoring 55 goals and 148 points. The team
lost in five games against Verdun in the semifinals. Meanwhile, Gretzky formally assumed ownership, his press conference at the Hull convention centre attended by nearly 150 journalists from across North America. With Gretzky’s éclat, the Olympiques would no longer fly below the radar. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was in the stands at their season opener.

In Burns’s second season in charge, the team was assembled to win, with Robitaille its flashiest star. “When I went to Hull the first year, Pat was an assistant coach-slash-cop,” says Robitaille. “He would do most of the games at home and, when he could, he would travel with us. The next year, he took over as coach. The year before, we’d made the playoffs and got out in the first round, but we had a very good team coming up. That’s why Pat kept his job when Wayne came in: because they knew he was doing something pretty special already.”

“Demanding” is the first word that comes to mind when Robitaille reflects on the Burns tenure. “Yet he was also a great communicator. He was so emotional and you never forgot that he was the coach. But there were still times where he would hang out with us and have fun, and that made it special. If we won a game, he’d come into the back of the bus, sit down and joke with us for, like, three hours. That wouldn’t happen if we lost, but we knew he’d be our buddy again when he won. Every guy who played for Pat loved Pat. If you were honest with Pat, he became your friend off the ice. But he had a way of translating that onto the ice, a coach you could both like and respect. He was one of the few coaches I’ve seen who was able to do that.”

The impish part of Burns delighted in “screwing around” with his players, says Robitaille, getting inside their heads, but usually with a tactical purpose. There was a kid on the team, local boy, whom Burns adored because he played with ferocious emotion. “One time Pat came on the bus when we were travelling to another city. He was talking real loud. Then he winked at me and said that the centre on the team we were going to face was a real tough guy and that we might be making a trade to get him. It wasn’t true, but Pat was trying to get that Hull kid all revved up. And of course, when the game started, he went right after that hotshot as soon as
the puck dropped. Pat did whatever he had to do to get the best out of you and help us win.”

The Burns Rules were simple. “You have to perform, bottom line,” continues Robitaille. “If he said we had a curfew, everybody respected it. But he was a disciplinarian in the way that made sense. He wanted you to be a better hockey player. He wanted you to be respectful of the organization and the city that we played in, but he let you be a human being. He knew it was a game and had to be fun.” Then, adding with a chuckle: “Of course, it was more fun for him when we won. But he helped me become a better player in the sense of understanding the sacrifices you have to make in order to win. And that’s everything, as far as a player is concerned.”

Although Burns, in his second season with Hull, told reporters he was giving himself two years to make the NHL—and met that self-imposed deadline—he never gave his junior players the impression of just passing through, eyeing a finer prize up ahead. “We didn’t think that way, not even him,” says Robitaille, who would make the leap directly out of junior and play nineteen seasons in the NHL, sixteen of them during three separate stints as a Los Angeles King, where he’s now president of business operations. “He and I kind of started together, but whatever we were doing at the time, we thought that was the greatest. He loved being a coach in junior. Then he went to the AHL and he loved that. I don’t think when Pat went to the AHL he thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be two years in the minors and then I’m going to the National Hockey League.’ He went to the AHL and just thought, ‘I want to win here.’ He looked at the team and thought, ‘I’m going to do the best that I can here.’ When he turned to the NHL, he didn’t think, ‘I’m going to coach in this league for ten years.’ I know he thought, ‘What can I do for this team to be the best team it can be today?’ And he grinded that into us in juniors, too.

“That’s probably why he was only in one city three or four years at a time, because he did so much about
that
day—what was important
that
day.” Which, frankly, is a euphemistic way of saying Burns could also exhaust his players by being so remorselessly demanding, paying the penalty when players—or a cabal of them—ultimately revolted years later,
in the NHL. “He never protected his own angle,” notes Robitaille. “It was never, ‘Okay, if I make this decision I’ll be here longer.’ ”

Few players had a more complicated relationship with Burns than Stéphane Richer, the quixotic French-Canadian luminary, heir apparent in Montreal to the reverence bestowed on The Flower, Guy Lafleur. He possessed a similar flair and flourish, if not the emotional equilibrium necessary to withstand the pressure unique to being a Canadien. Richer’s tendency towards depression, mental brittleness, is a subject he’s opened up about only in recent years; at the time, he was pigeonholed as a flake, even a diva, and he certainly tested Burns’s patience.

Richer was only a child when their paths first crossed, fatefully so. “He’s the one who saved my life. I always say, if not for him, I’m sure I would never have become a professional hockey player. He picked me out from this little town in Quebec, brought me to play for his midget team in Hull. Pat knew I was a lonely kid from up north who was supposed to be good, I guess. He was still a cop at the time, but he knew people around who were watching young players. Pat called my dad and asked if I was willing to leave my hometown to go to Hull. That was a big step for me. My dad said, ‘Well, it’s up to you, kid. Do you want to go there? Then you call Pat. We’re not doing it for you. You be a man.’

“Here I was, a fourteen-year-old kid thinking of leaving home. But Pat said, ‘I believe you can do something right in your life.’ ”

The adjustment was difficult. “Scared? Oh man. When you play minor hockey with all your buddies and suddenly you’re playing in a big city like Hull—full equipment, new pants. I was like, ‘Wow, what just happened here?’ ” He was also the smallest player, only five foot three and 135 pounds. Burns put him on the fourth line. Then he shot up to five foot ten by the end of the season.

Hull Kiwanis, Burns’s midget team, was a culture shock for the yokel Richer. “For Midget AA, they were pretty good. All the guys were older than me. We were supposed to win everything, and we almost did. It was
funny, though. Pat used to put his policeman’s stuff on the table, put on the hockey gear for a couple of hours, then change back into his policeman clothes, get in his car and go back to work.”

After enticing the young Richer to Hull, Burns showed him no favour, cut him no slack for his rawness, his disorientation. “It was always, ‘Do you realize how lucky you are?’ A lot of times, I was the one who had to pay the price for everyone else. Trust me, he was tough. We were all scared of him. Pat was a good hockey man, but he forgot that we were only fourteen and fifteen years old.”

Richer would be drafted onto a Midget AAA team but would be reunited with Burns, with considerable misery for both, several years later in Montreal, after playing his junior hockey in Granby and Chicoutimi. “In juniors, I wasn’t dreaming about the NHL. I was just trying to survive, pretty much; never thought about the next level, whatever it might be. But I knew if I wanted to do something great in my life—like Pat had told me—I had to take care of myself, accept the discipline. When you’re away from your family, it’s easy to go astray. Pat understood that and kept a very close eye on me.”

The life skills Burns imparted, in tough-love mode, came with the job as a junior coach, even though in his personal life he was, in those days, a distant and only sporadically involved dad. Burns was ushering his protégés towards maturity while teaching them how to tap into depths of potential most didn’t quite realize they possessed.

Yet there were surprisingly few technical tutorials at a level of organized hockey—both midget and juniors—where instruction is a primary component. “He was never a technical coach,” says Richer. “Pat didn’t know anything about technique, to be honest. I don’t think he even knew that word at the time.”

Cam Russell, who landed with the Hull Olympiques as a sixteen-year-old, shares that assessment. “He was a motivator all the way. There wasn’t a lot of technical coaching in him: one defenceman in the corner, one
defenceman in front of the net, forecheck hard, backcheck hard and make sure you give 100 per cent every shift—and if you didn’t, you’d hear it from him. The biggest thing with Pat was accountability, and it didn’t matter who you were. Our best players were our hardest-working players, and that’s a great credit to your coach when you can get your skill guys to be your hardest-working guys.”

When Russell arrived, Gretzky was the team’s owner, the clincher in his opting for the QMJHL. As a teen from the Maritimes, Russell—from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia—could have chosen from any of the three junior leagues in Canada: Quebec, Ontario or the Western League. “Wayne would sometimes come on the ice and practise with us—and this was Wayne Gretzky in his heyday. It’s pretty amazing when the greatest player in the world is even mentioning your name, much less skating with you.”