Coach: The Pat Burns Story

I
T’S WELL PAST MIDNIGHT
, sleeting, and Pat Burns is halfway home.

There’s a six-pack on the seat next to him, a duffel bag containing a few articles of clothing, and a cell phone stamped with the Toronto Maple Leafs logo. Just outside Kingston, the vacancy sign of a Super 8 motel beckons. Burns is tired right down to his bones—so weary, eyes puffy from sleeplessness, spots blurring his vision—so he prudently pulls his pickup off Highway 401 and into the motel’s parking lot. At the front desk, the bored clerk doesn’t recognize the dishevelled guest who checks in for just the one night, and Burns is grateful for that. Anonymity is what he craves at this moment, not an autograph-seeker and definitely not an armchair expert with advice for a hockey team that has been imploding spectacularly. All the world’s a coach when it comes to hockey in Canada.

But the Leafs aren’t Burns’s problem anymore. He’s not their coach anymore. It’s March 4, 1996.

Only a handful of people are aware of this development, however. It’s a secret, a hush-hush contrivance that was the final gesture of mercy offered to Burns by the franchise where he’d been as much a Leaf luminary as Doug Gilmour, his beloved Dougie. In the fight-or-flight response common to all creatures faced with stress and fright, Burns has chosen to flee. He is running, in the middle of the night. A man who has always prided himself on never dodging any challenge or ordeal has lammed it while the city sleeps.

So many times, Burns had made this trip between Toronto and the Eastern Townships of Quebec, by truck and by Harley. Three and a half years earlier, he’d set out in the opposite direction on a hot summer’s day, music blasting on the CD player, the future unfolding as brightly, as welcoming, as the open road, signposts whizzing past. Now he’d shifted gears into reverse, the Big Smoke disappearing in his rear-view mirror, all that anxiety and amassed failure left behind, along with twenty-five suits, hundreds of ties and two Harleys stored at a Richmond Hill dealership.

In the spartan motel room that’s illuminated by the flash of headlights from the highway, Burns shucks out of his parka, kicks off his hand-tooled cowboy boots, sinks onto the bed, fires up an extra-mild cigarette and flips the cap on his first beer. The brew is unpleasantly warm. Burns isn’t much of a beer drinker anyway—he prefers scotch or wine, the expensive stuff. Once, when taken to dinner by a reporter who was working on a Burns profile, he’d blithely ordered a $400 bottle of California Opus One as the journalist gagged over an expense that would never be approved by the office. Burns could be mischievous that way, or thoughtless.

In his solitude now, the coach who’s no longer a coach sips intermittently and ponders events from a whirlwind forty-eight hours, the last gasps of a job that had seemed so secure at midseason, when he’d been offered, and accepted, a provisional contract extension by Leafs general manager Cliff Fletcher. The kicker is that Burns was still being paid a deferred salary from his earlier tenure as coach of the Montreal Canadiens, a dream gig that had ended just as precipitously, though less ignominiously, at the end of his fourth season behind the bench. A four-year coach with a three-year act—the rap that would be pinned on him again, Burns frets. He picks up the phone and dials a friend. “I’m gone,” he says, ever so softly.

At 10 p.m., unseen even by security guards, Burns had slipped into his office in the bowels of Maple Leaf Gardens and cleared out his desk, tossing a few personal items into the duffel bag. In the eerie quiet of the dressing room—the dank venue where, on one memorable occasion during his first season in Toronto, he’d conducted a blistering postgame media scrum deliberately staged so that his players would get an earful of the diatribe aimed specifically at them—Burns scribbled a departing message on the blackboard, GOOD LUCK BOYS, and signed it “BURNSIE.” He left a well-wishing note also for the interim coach, Nick Beverley, who would replace him. Then he jumped in his truck and pointed it towards his rustic off-season cottage on the shore of Lake Memphremagog, ten miles north of the Vermont–Quebec border.

That he’d got his ticket punched in Toronto was inevitable, if agonizing in the long goodbye—six weeks of lurching through mounting losses, first one tailspin and then, after a brief respite, another. Fletcher had been adamant that he wouldn’t fire his coach—indeed, had never in his lengthy and distinguished career as a hockey executive canned a coach in midseason. On February 6, Fletcher assured reporters that the coach’s job was not in jeopardy. “Pat Burns is our coach for next year, too, if he should decide to return. His future is no different now than it was when he got us to the final four two years in a row. It’s not an issue.” Burns, flailing, appreciated that Fletcher had his back, though suspicious that some players were stabbing knives in it, even as he publicly denied rumours of team dissent. “I don’t feel the players have quit on me and I’m not going to quit on them.” On February 25, with the club plummeting in the conference standings, Fletcher issued another vote of confidence to quell the media masses: “It’s Pat’s job—period. That isn’t even an issue.” Seven days later, he gassed him.

Everybody watching had sensed the omega moment of the alpha-dog coach approaching. A roster tailored to suit Burns’s personnel desires had gone off the rails and Gilmour’s aching back couldn’t bear the burden anymore. Players generously rewarded for past performances seemed to have lost interest; certainly, they’d lost the motivating fear of Burns that the coach had instilled in them. The team was a shambles as February gave way to March, caught in a downward spiral that put them in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time in four years. For public consumption, Burns remained stalwart, if sounding increasingly defensive and peevish. “More than ever, everything that has been written and said has made me want to come back next season even more. If Cliff will have me back, I’ll be back and I’ll win again. I didn’t get dumb in three months.”

Shock therapy was looming, though.

The Leafs were on the road that final week. On the Saturday, in Burns’s 600th game as an NHL coach, they were beaten in Dallas. On the Sunday, they lost 4–0 to the Colorado Avalanche, their eighth consecutive defeat—they had won only three of their past twenty-two matches. Since mid-January, the NBA-expansion Toronto Raptors had won more games than the Leafs.

They tried group meetings, individual meetings, psychologist sessions, scoldings, avuncular chats, trades, yet nothing reversed the descending trajectory. In desperation, Fletcher tapped alumnus Darryl Sittler, the one-time captain and franchise hero of the ’70s, latterly a “consultant” for the club, to facilitate communication between the dressing room and the coaching staff. Burns had deeply resented that; he believed Sittler was functioning as de facto spy for management. One of Sittler’s first moves as part of his increased role with the Leafs was to corral Gilmour for a heart-to-heart, and that also irritated Burns, who was proprietary about his captain. But he was a profoundly paranoid coach by that point.

On the road, Burns has been reading
The Art of War
by Sun Tzu.

He spoke frequently with his closest buddy back in Magog, Quebec, Kevin Dixon. “He’d say, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming. Fuck, it’s going to be coming any day, any day.’ He thought Mike Gartner was against him, Jamie Macoun was against him, guys he believed were telling Cliff that he had to go. Think about it, what it was like for him: the team was digging itself a bigger hole every night. He’d get behind that bench and after every first period, he’d look up at the scoreboard and the Leafs were trailing. They’re down, he’s down. Honest, he should have been on antidepressants, that’s how bad it got. Then he called from Phoenix and it was just, ‘I’m done.’ ”