Coach: The Pat Burns Story (7 page)

Where Gretzky inspired awe, there was, typically for his new young charges, outright terror where Burns was concerned. “Oh, he was an intimidating person, and not just for the players. He was also feared by opposing coaches,” says Russell. “You never knew if he was going to come over the glass after you if you were the other team’s coach. And that rubbed off on us. We felt like we had an extra man on the ice because we had Pat behind us. He was the big brother.” In one particularly violent game, Burns actually did come over the glass, squaring off at centre ice with his opposite, Ron Lapointe, a fight neither would admit to losing, even years later. That notorious incident would carry into NHL bitterness when Burns was coaching Montreal and Lapointe took over behind the Quebec Nordiques bench. They
hated
each other and it was real, not staged, animus. Burns simply looked more the part, with his chronic scowl, glowering. His rare smiles, in-game, were sneers.

“At my first training camp in Hull, I was standing outside the rink one day and this guy rides by on a motorcycle, all decked out in leather, with a beard,” remembers Russell. “One of our players waved to him. I said, ‘Who’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s Pat.’ And this was a month after I’d started practising with the team. I didn’t even recognize him. He was a big,
imposing figure, intimidating, intense. But he was an intelligent guy, a great motivator and the kind of coach who always found a way to get the best out of you.”

The youthful Russell, wet behind the ears though pegged early as a skill player, was agog, eyes like saucers, upon arrival in Hull. “This was my first time being coached by a professional. I didn’t really have anyone to compare him to. It wasn’t until later, when I’d played for some other guys, that I realized what a great coach he was.”

Russell’s first night at training camp, all the players were anxious, many pining for home. Burns joined the teens, sat down with them and cracked jokes, told stories for the next two hours. “He made us laugh, and that kind of broke the ice. Of course, the next day when the puck dropped, it was all business and Pat cracked the whip. But you respected that and you followed along because you knew that there was a fair side to him as well. Pat was the kind of guy, even though he had a tough exterior and looked like a big tough biker, he knew the right time to sit you down for a one-on-one talk. At that time, Hull was bringing in a lot of Maritimers and Americans, guys a long way from home. Pat had the gruff exterior but knew when you needed to have a good heart-to-heart. I had a tough time my first two years after leaving home, and he really helped me get through that.”

Through three years up and down in the minors, and then a decade-long NHL career spent almost entirely with Chicago, Russell played for some of the hardest-nosed coaches in hockey, including Mike Keenan and Darryl Sutter. Burns had provided a primer for dealing with that type of individual. But it wasn’t until much later on that Russell, eventually coach and now GM of the Halifax Mooseheads, would stop to consider where Burns had learned the tactics and psychology he applied. Unlike Russell, Burns had no significant mentors in the game, hadn’t been exposed to elite coaching, and learned only by one-step-removed osmosis. Yet he thirsted for hockey knowledge and was alert to shifts in the style of the game as it was being played in the NHL. From close access to Gretzky, he adopted drills then almost exclusive to Edmonton Oilers practices,
incorporating the long breakout in Hull, for all that he remained obsessed with defence-first hockey.

He was essentially self-taught about hockey, about handling athletes. Like others who came into his orbit, Russell suggests Burns’s people instincts grew out of his policing years. “Being an officer, handling things like domestic disputes, he became someone who could read people, knowing what to say at the right time. That must have carried through into hockey. Hockey players, their psyches are delicate. Yet he just always seemed to say the right thing. It’s like people who are successful in businesses without having a great education—he learned things quickly. He’d look at Cam Russell and think, ‘What does Cam Russell need to make it to the next level?’ He just knew. And those were the things that he worked on, the areas he made you better in. Growing up, I would usually win the most-sportsmanlike player awards. Pat taught me another level of intensity. He taught me how to show up every night and how to be consistent. Those are the things he really harped on me about.”

Burns could browbeat, but he could also inspire. “Even as a young man, he commanded respect,” says Pat Brisson, who played two seasons for Burns in Hull and would eventually become one of hockey’s most powerful player agents. “You knew he wasn’t there just for fun. He was there to get us to the next level, no messing around. It was written on his forehead.”

Brisson had all but given up on a hockey career in the mid-’80s. At age twenty, having played junior all over the place, he enrolled at Ottawa University. One night, he ran into Burns. Almost offhandedly, Brisson wondered if Burns had any interest in securing his playing rights, which were held by Drummondville. To Brisson’s surprise, Burns was receptive. “It took about three weeks, but Pat managed to get my rights traded to Hull.” Looking back, Brisson remembers his remarkably cocky former self sashaying into Burns’s office to push for more money before he’d even played one game as an Olympique. “I go in saying I want this and I want that. Pat said, ‘Christ, I’ve been working on your frigging release and you’re going to ask for another $100?’ I thought I was gonna die or he was gonna kill me, cut me right there.” Instead, Brisson’s audacity was
rewarded. “He ended up listening to me when I said, ‘Man, I’m giving up university for this.’ He gave me what I was looking for. Pat was intimidating, but if you had something to say that made sense, he’d listen. That was my first lesson in the art of negotiation. Pat was a tremendous influence on my life. There were no grey areas with Pat. It was his way or the highway, but he was no fake. Get on or get off.”

Nor could Burns be conned by the creative excuses his players often invented when rationalizing a poor performance or simply being caught breaking curfew. “Hey, it’s the same if you’re an NHLer or a kid in juniors with $20 in your pocket,” says Brisson. “You want to go out and have some fun. But Pat had a spiderweb of sources. This was Hull, and he was linked up everywhere, knew everything. If he confronted you, he knew the truth, he knew the story. If you tried lying to him, you were in trouble. The only thing he might forgive is if you were covering up for a roommate. He embraced that whole togetherness thing. But if you otherwise lied to him, he’d trade you or scratch you. Pat couldn’t live with being lied to. It just bugged him too much.” To that end, Burns vested responsibility in his older guys for seeing that players kept their noses clean. “He made sure the veterans were guiding us in the right direction. He loved those guys. Maybe the younger guys didn’t quite feel the love as much as the older ones.”

Many a time, none would feel the love; quite the contrary, Burns was already infamous for his spectacular eruptions of temper. One such incendiary episode remains burned into Brisson’s memory. The team had just had a poor period when Burns strode into the dressing room. Inside the room was a bin used for collecting and recycling pop cans. “He starts kicking that bin, and his foot gets stuck in there. He tried kicking it across the room but he tripped and fell. You could tell he was embarrassed. It was funny, but none of us dared laugh. You could hear a pin drop.”

Laughing at Burns could be fatal. “One player we had, an enforcement type, made some comment at practice when Pat was playing with us, just a joke. Pat couldn’t take that. When you hit Pat’s pride, you went to the wrong place. So Pat chased him right into the locker room. He didn’t physically strike him, but he sure scared the hell out of him. Another time,
we were losing something like 5–0 and he brought a guy right into the middle of the locker room to scream at him. With Pat, there was a time to have fun, but also a time to pay the price.”

This was the squad, with eighteen players from the previous season, that Burns would take—or they would take him—to the Memorial Cup in 1986. The following year, Brisson had a tryout, unsuccessfully, with the Montreal Canadiens. He concluded there was no NHL in his future and was anxious to move on with his life, in a different direction. First, though, he had to explain his choice to Burns. “It was October 10—I remember the date exactly. I went to Pat’s office and told him, ‘I think I’ve made a decision to leave hockey. I just don’t have it, I’m not going to make it to the NHL.’ ” Brisson had formulated a plan to move to Los Angeles, live with Luc Robitaille, start teaching hockey in California and see what opportunities arose. “Pat was, ‘Are you sure? Because I can be more patient if you need more time.’ Then he wished me good luck. But even that conversation, I was nervous having with him.”

Junior hockey, with its long bus rides and pro aspirations, tends to cut the wheat from the chaff. Not all have realistic ambitions of making it to the NHL; some intuitively grasp this is as good as it gets, and rare are the examples of late-draft picks who will persevere and earn jobs in the big league. Benoît Brunet went unclaimed for Midget AAA, but was drafted by Hull in the sixth round from Midget AA and, to his surprise, stuck. He is among those who credit Burns for eventual matriculation to the NHL. Brunet has an alternate view of Burns’s technical proficiency, or lack thereof. “He was the guy who made the difference to me in my career. A lot of people thought he was just a motivator, somebody who tried to intimidate his players. But I thought he was a good technical guy. It was just overshadowed by his personality, his character. I’d had good coaches in minor league, but he taught me how to play. We had a great team [in 1985–86], but we had a tough start and he took the time to go over the technical part of what we were doing wrong on the ice.”

Brunet, who would go on to play for Montreal—he’s now an analyst for Canadiens games on RDS—looks back and divides those Hull prospects
into two camps: those who
got
Burns and those who didn’t. “Pat would push and push and push. Some guys didn’t understand that it was about trying to make us better. The guys who didn’t understand what he was trying to teach didn’t make it to the pros. If you understood that he was doing it for the right reasons, good reasons, that it would make you a better player in the long run, then you got Pat Burns.” And Burns was prescient too about talent. “He gave the chance to some guys that people didn’t expect to make the NHL. He saw something in players that others didn’t see, who weren’t key, and he put trust in us, pushed the right buttons. That was his best quality. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have turned pro, I’m pretty sure of it.”

Late in the 1985–86 season, with the Olympiques already runaway leaders in their division, Burns made trades to add more muscle in preparation for the postseason, seeking to ensure the team had enough strength and stamina for a gruelling stab at the national championships. They won the President’s Cup, the QMJHL championship trophy, for the first time in franchise history, with fifteen straight victories in the playoffs. It was on to the Memorial Cup in Portland, Oregon.

Their opponents were the Guelph Platers from the Ontario Hockey League, a team coached by Jacques Martin—in his first season in the OHL—with his signature style of sound discipline, backbone character and a tenacious forecheck. The Platers also had better goaltending and were rested from a four-day layoff. Martin broke down the first period of the deciding game into four five-minute segments, “and our objective was not to get beat in any of those segments.” The Olympiques were weary. Their semifinal, a 9–3 victory on the Friday night over the Kamloops Blazers of the Western Hockey League, had ended at 11 p.m. Because of TV commitments, the final started at eleven o’clock Saturday morning. Guelph right winger Luciano Fagioli scored goals eleven seconds apart in the opening period, and the Platers got another brace within thirteen seconds in the second period, en route to a 6–2 triumph. Hull got goals from Brunet and Robitaille. Robitaille and prolific scorer Guy Rouleau combined for fifteen goals in the tournament, but a Guelph defenceman, the late Steve
Chiasson, was selected as MVP for his solid play and leadership. Robitaille was designated Canadian major junior player of the year. Yet Burns was devastated. “There’s no reason to be tired when you’re winning,” he grumped. “Guelph worked harder than we did.” With Burns, that was the ultimate felony.

Burns’s final season in Hull was a rebuilding year, focusing on youth. Lots of Americans were recruited. The Olympiques would finish fourth in their division and lose in the first round of the playoffs. Far more memorable, and scandalizing, in the annals of Pat Burns was his alleged complicity in the disaster that was the world junior championship that winter—when the lights went out in Piestany on January 4, 1987. Selected as an assistant coach to Bert Templeton for the squad deployed overseas, Burns was fingered by some in the media as an agent provocateur in the stunning bench-clearing brawl during the gold medal game against the Soviets, which resulted in a disgraceful exit by Canada from the tournament in Czechoslovakia and a three-year international ban hanging over the players’ heads, a roster that included such future stars as Brendan Shanahan, Theoren Fleury and Pierre Turgeon.

It hadn’t been Burns throwing haymakers on the ice in Piestany or exhorting his players to bolt the bench in a frenzy. Young Soviet Evgeny Davydov was identified as the first culprit to hop the boards. It hadn’t been Burns who made the loopy decision to turn off the lights in the arena as television coverage faded to black, with disembodied commentary, Canada up 4–2 and assured of at least a bronze medal, though needing to defeat the Soviets by five or more goals to cop gold.

But Burns had admittedly seeded the ill will. Suspicious that Soviet coach Vladimir Vasiliev would try to bait the inexperienced referee, Burns lobbed a provocative shot across the bow, telling reporter Jim Cressman beforehand that he was planning to “stir things up.” He added, “I’m not going to do anything stupid, but just try to keep his concentration off the game as much as I can.” What this meant in practice was never specified,
except that Burns was his usual glowering and yammering self behind the bench, hurling abuse at Vasiliev, who didn’t need a Russian-English dictionary to grasp the menacing Canadian’s words. But the assault was merely verbal.