Coach: The Pat Burns Story (20 page)

From where Burns was standing, the writers went much too far. As the team stumbled, relations with the entourage that cover the Canadiens turned toxic. Not only were the Habs flattening out, they were playing boring hockey. And boring hockey, especially in Montreal, is only tolerated when it’s also winning hockey. “Flying Frenchmen,” went the joke, “only when they board a plane.” Banging off the boards and chasing was not aesthetically satisfying for fans. “It wasn’t dull for me,” notes Sylvain Lefebvre, who did a lot of that banging. “At the same time, Pat wasn’t telling our offensive-minded players they couldn’t make plays. But there was a way that he wanted us to play in the neutral zone, between both blue lines. That’s where he was very strict. He’d didn’t want the team to create turnovers. He wanted us to win a certain way and not to lose a certain way.”

Burns bristled when his defensive system was maligned. “Everybody talks about our defensive system,” he said. “I laugh at that one, I really do laugh. There is no defensive system. This great system, you know what it is? If you lose the puck, you have to get it back. That’s our system. Awesome, isn’t it?”

Rekindled were the allusions to an anti-francophone bias. But now some reporters were openly mocking Burns’s own French usage. “His French was very colourful,” says Tremblay. “His accent was good. It was
a French that you learn at home and in the streets.” Other commentators were less kind. Burns recoiled from the sting, which he equated to class snobbery. In Quebec, vigilance about the French language and French culture is a social, political and journalistic pillar. Mike Keane, the western boy who was made Montreal captain in 1995, felt the wrath. “If it was a Tuesday when I got named, I was taking my French-language class on the Wednesday, respecting the fact this is part of the game and you have to do this when you’re captain in Montreal. One of the reporters asked me, ‘What do you guys speak in the dressing room?’ I said most guys speak English. The next day in the papers, it was: ‘Keane refuses to speak our language.’ Things went sour from there. That’s the reason I got traded out of Montreal.” Keane’s captaincy lasted four months. He was dealt to Colorado with Patrick Roy in the mega-swap triggered by Roy’s rage over rookie coach Mario Tremblay hanging him out to dry in a mortifying loss to Detroit.

Keane is still trying to set the record straight. “I wouldn’t know if Pat mangled his French. But we spoke mostly English in the dressing room. The French guys spoke French to each other. If someone didn’t feel comfortable speaking in English, they wouldn’t. I just find it all really strange. It’s something that’s never an issue in the dressing room—only outside.”

Burns could empathize. When the Habs won, it was the work of Pat Burns, the French-Canadian. When they lost, it was because of “that damned Irishman.”

One issue outside the dressing room in the winter of ’92 actually took place
inside
a St. Laurent Boulevard saloon around 3 a.m. That’s when police were called to the Zoo Bar to break up a brawl in which Shayne Corson had been a central punch-swinger. The bar manager said Corson, who had been downing shooters and tossing empty shot glasses around the premises, became incensed when a man approach his female companion. Corson was arrested, briefly suspended by the franchise, and afterwards, apologized profusely. On this occasion, there was no rescue-me call placed to the coach. “I wouldn’t have gone this time,” Burns said. He was furious, calling Corson “the Charles Barkley of hockey”—it wasn’t a
compliment—and, during an interview with a French TV station, using a deeply insulting slur:
“Qu’il mange de la merde,”
which translates roughly as “Corson can eat shit” but is much more venomous in French semantics. “It’s probably the most vulgar thing you can say,” explains Réjean Tremblay. “Really disgusting. And he said it about one of his favourite English players.”

On another occasion, it was allegedly Burns blowing over the limit. Tremblay received a bizarre formal letter from a lawyer, ordering him to refrain from writing anything about Burns failing to pass a sobriety test when pulled over following a game in Montreal. This was strange because Tremblay had heard nothing about the incident and still remains doubtful any such thing happened. “There was not a cop in Montreal that would write up a report on Burns. I could find no record of it. So I wrote a column about the letter.” He laughs. “It was the only time I received a warning from a lawyer to stop me from writing about something that I didn’t know about.” When the story was published, Burns growled, “You shit-disturber.”

For the club, there was no soul-destroying collapse akin to the Leafs circa 2012, but things were clearly not right. As was commonly the case, a vexed Burns was an ornery Burns. He did not handle the team’s fluctuations well; he worsened the anxious mood. Incessant screeching and hollering was bringing diminishing returns. Though the Canadiens did challenge for first overall through February and March, they stumbled to an 0–5–3 finish in the last two weeks of the campaign, and couldn’t win a thing after the ten-day players’ strike that interrupted the late season. “The second half of the season, we’ve been horrible,” said Burns. “It’s mind-boggling.” Still, Montreal wound up first in the Adams Division, fifth overall, with 93 points. Once again, they’d open the playoffs against Hartford.

It was an arduous seven-game series that Montreal won by the skin of its teeth. In game five at Hartford, Burns had even been accused of using a stick to butt-end a fan heckling as the players departed the ice via the visiting team’s exit, which had no protective canopy. Actually, Burns had
slammed the stick against the wall. Police investigated the fan’s complaint and closed the file. “A guy just spit on me, that’s all,” said Burns.

But the Canadiens were spent. Boston swept them out of the playoffs in the next round, Montreal cracking under the pressure of their inability to score—a feeble offence that produced just eight goals against Mike Milbury’s Bruins. Not since 1952 had Montreal been swept in a seven-game series. And to Boston! The horror, the horror. In three consecutive years, they’d been dispatched by the Bruins. It was unendurable.

Rumbles trickled out from the dressing room. “During the playoffs, the climate was far from healthy,” said Denis Savard. “I didn’t see any arguments between players, but certain guys were visibly unhappy.” If the players weren’t arguing among themselves, who did that leave? Burns, obviously.

The writing was on the wall. But who was responsible for the graffiti? Was the impetus rebellious players or did the shove come from far above? Réjean Tremblay remembers running into a steady stream of players at the food court across from the team’s hotel prior to the last game in Boston. “I spent the whole afternoon there, had coffee with maybe eight, ten players. It was not at all clear that they’d had enough of Burns. Instead, what they talked about was that big management was fed up with his swearing, his bad mouth behind the bench. At the time, Mr. Ronald Corey always had guests in the first row behind the bench at the Forum, very close. Many players told me, ‘Pat will be in trouble, Pat will be in trouble, Pat will be in trouble.’ I don’t know, maybe it was all a pretext. But at least half of the players on this afternoon told me how management had had enough of the ways of Burns, his talking and reacting behind the bench. At the time, myself, I expected he would last at least one more year. He still seemed in control of the team.”

Burns was aware of ownership disenchantment. He mentioned to friend Kevin Dixon, “[Ronald] Corey won’t talk to me anymore, doesn’t even say hello.” If his pungent language behind the bench was mentioned, he disregarded the complaint. “Burns was always a guy who went his own way; he didn’t care about management,” says the team equipment
majordomo, Pierre Gervais. “But I’ve never seen a better bench coach. He kept everybody on edge.”

For all of his career, Burns would chafe under the sobriquet of being a three-year coach with a four-year contract. Incoming, he could grab a team by the throat and turn things around immediately—three coach-of-the-year laurels in his first season on three different teams. Outgoing, there was paranoia, disillusionment, regressing and a coach who, in the parlance, had lost his players.

“It’s hard to be as strict as he was and maintain that success for a long time,” observes Patrick Roy. “You can do it for one, two years, and then you have to find a way to adjust, to adapt to the group. Burnsie had only one way, and that was his way. He would not move one step from that.”

Says Keane: “I think with the way Pat approached the game, that kind of coach has a shelf life of three or four years. With his demanding ways, players either tune out or it just doesn’t work anymore. They start saying, ‘Okay, enough’s enough. We can’t have the perfect game every night.’ That push-push-push works for a while, and then players just shut down.”

Stéphan Lebeau, who had more than his share of difficulties with Burns yet never lost respect for the man, remembers the gloominess in the dressing room during the Boston series. “Many players were unhappy, for sure. When you’re losing and you come to the rink, you always have that heavy mood. Pat knew what he wanted, but perhaps, when things go your way all the time, you start believing that every decision you make is the right one. In reality, that’s not the case. Hockey is a sport, and it should be fun. When it starts not being so much fun coming to the rink, then this is where, perhaps, some players in the dressing room threw in the towel, or threw it at the coach. That did happen, yes.”

Shayne Corson forcefully disagrees. “Pat had not lost that room—never, never. He certainly didn’t lose me. I never felt that, I never saw that.” Within months, after another altercation at a Montreal bar—Corson just beginning to suffer the panic attacks that would curse him for years—Serge Savard would trade his problem child to Edmonton for Vincent Damphousse. “I wish Pat would have stayed. I think that was one of the
reasons I got moved. He left, and I was gone that summer. I don’t blame Serge, because he was a big part of my hockey career and my life. But he just threw up his arms and said, ‘What can I do?’ ”

Russ Courtnall is reluctant to state that players no longer respected Burns. “Maybe he just didn’t have the same influence on the players that they had brought in for him to coach that he once had. Being in Montreal was hard on Pat too, tougher on francophones than anglophones. He used to always say to us: ‘You guys all get to go home after the season. We have to stay here for the whole summer and hear what we did wrong and why we didn’t win.’ ”

Sylvain Lefebvre cuts to the chase. “We lost to Boston in the second round three years in a row. If you keep losing to Boston—not good.”

Serge Savard took the pulse of his club during that series. He’d grown increasingly dismayed. “At the end of those playoffs, when we lost in straight games to Boston, I could see that Pat had lost his grip on his team. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a good coach. This happens to a lot of good coaches. When things start to go down and the coach cannot be himself and the players feel that … the message was not getting through anymore.”

Burns would always insist he was not fired in Montreal. Technically, that’s true. “I did not fire Pat,” says Savard. But neither did Burns quit, exactly. It was a mutual parting of the ways, but the coach really had no choice. Savard invited Burns, just back from a week’s vacation in Jamaica, to his office to discuss the situation. “We started there, and then went to a bar and then a restaurant and had dinner—talk-talk-talk. After a few drinks, we could speak more honestly with each other. I knew he had a five-hundred-pound weight on his shoulders. I knew I was not going to start the next season with Pat. And he knew he could not coach here anymore; he knew it. He knew and I knew that he could not continue.”

Savard also knew something else: Rogie Vachon, the GM in Los Angeles, had serious interest in hiring Burns. So did Cliff Fletcher in Toronto. “These were the two options Pat had in front of him. And it was crystal clear to me that he was going to Toronto.”

Before that meeting, there had been plenty of finessing behind the scenes, most of it orchestrated by powerful player agent Don Meehan. Burns and Meehan had spoken casually over a coffee earlier in the year. Recalls Meehan: “He told me things weren’t going well. I said, ‘If you ever have any issues or problems, give me a call and I’ll try to help.’ ”

Burns had no agent to that point; he’d negotiated his contracts with Montreal on his own. Now he needed top-drawer representation. When he sensed the axe hovering, he contacted Meehan. The agent learned from Savard that the Canadiens were going to make a change. He informed Burns, who said, “I think it’s coming,” and Meehan confirmed it, yup. Burns admitted he didn’t know how to handle the situation. Burns had three years remaining on his contract, and Meehan emphasized, “You have to be very careful in terms of how you’re going to react.” The agent formally took him on as a client and tried to calm Burns down. “This is where you’re going to get my worth, because I’m going to negotiate a settlement. I know there’s pressure to get you out of here. Let me use this as leverage with Savard, because I can do well for you, knowing what the circumstances are from the ownership point of view.”

Then Meehan revealed to Burns that “I have something else in mind, too.” Burns asked what that might be. What Meehan had in mind was the coaching job in Toronto. He knew, from discussions with Fletcher, that the Leafs wanted to replace the ineffective Tom Watt. “I told Pat, ‘Toronto’s going to be available.’ He said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

So Meehan got to work on Fletcher. When he placed the initial call to the Leaf GM, Fletcher was on another line and asked if he could call back later. “I said, ‘No, you better talk to me now. I think I have something for you here which isn’t official, but I think it would meet your best interests. Montreal is going to terminate Pat Burns and I think he’d be terrific in Toronto. It would really make sense for you. You could make a real statement, getting a guy with real presence in the league. It’s just what your team needs.’ ”