Coach: The Pat Burns Story (32 page)

The inevitable happened, albeit in dramatic fashion. Gill, who’d injured his ankle, took a freezing injection, just like Gilmour, and begged to play, but Burns wouldn’t permit it. “It was the right call; I realized that after,” says Gill. “But at the time, I wanted to play so bad and Pat was worried I’d
hurt myself worse. I said, ‘But I got the damn thing shot up, let me play!’ The thing is, Pat really did care about his players. I respect him for that, but at the time I was ready to kill him.”

At the start of game five, before the opening faceoff, Burns moved slowly along the bench, patting every Leaf on the back, leaning over to speak words into their ears. Enlivened, Toronto built up a three-goal lead in the first period and then watched it evaporate. Locked 3–3, they played on into double overtime, Greg Adams scoring fourteen seconds into the fifth period, giving Vancouver the 4–3 win and the series. The Leafs, again, were done, Vancouver moving on to face the New York Rangers in the final, losing in seven. “That week in Vancouver, never winning a game, was the longest week I’d ever spent,” says Fletcher.

Burns offered decidedly cool congratulations in his requiem. “The Vancouver Canucks will represent Canada very well in the Stanley Cup finals. But I won’t admit they were the better club. I won’t admit that.”

“I
F THEY WANT TO STAY
with the team they’ve got, then maybe it’s time for me to move on.”

There was no subtlety to Pat Burns. He wasn’t going anywhere, although the Nordiques were making overtures, clandestine lest they be accused of tampering. GM Cliff Fletcher would soon put a stop to that, with a two-year contract extension and honking-huge raise. Burns’s tacit ultimatum, delivered through the media, was the coach wailing for a roster shakeup, fidgety because the squad as constituted had regressed, was living on borrowed time. So, in the weeks after Toronto was eliminated from the playoffs—final four once more, but no further—Burns lobbed his mini-grenade.

It was widely agreed that personnel adjustments were required. Nobody, however, sensed the shock wave coming. On June 28, 1994, the first day of the NHL entry draft in Hartford, Fletcher made the knock-me-over-with-a-feather announcement that Toronto had traded Wendel Clark to Quebec for Mats Sundin. Oh my. Among Leaf fans, the disbelief was staggering, the outrage instantaneous. Trade Wendel? How could they? Reached at home by the
Toronto Star
, Don Cherry sputtered: “This isn’t
April 1, is it? This must be a joke. I hope somebody’s kidding me that you would trade Clark for Mats Sundin.”

It was no joke. The audacious Silver Fox had done the inconceivable, the unimaginable. The blockbuster trade involved six players, but Clark was the price for obtaining twenty-three-year-old Sundin, the number-one draft pick overall in 1991, who’d been in the 100-point district two out of three seasons. Despairing Leaf Nation went into paroxysms of grief, feeling genuinely betrayed. Fletcher knew he’d be vilified. He’d tossed and turned the night before, vacillating over the deal. Nordiques GM Pierre Lacroix had approached him with the idea. At that point, moving Clark hadn’t been on Fletcher’s radar. It was later suggested Burns had been a fifth columnist, scheming to put a whole lot of gone between himself and Clark. Theirs had been a distant and sometimes strained relationship, lacking the symbiotic intensity that existed between Burns and Doug Gilmour. “They hated each other,” says one Leaf who was there at the time. “It made Pat crazy that Wendel wouldn’t play hurt and basically did nothing in practice.” Certainly, the coach had, on several occasions, publicly challenged his captain. “We got along well enough,” counters Clark. “He was a good coach, not like some who wish they were players instead.” And Burns acknowledged that, in the clutch, Clark had usually answered the bell. Now, the captain was about to get his bell rung emotionally. “It broke my heart,” Clark says.

Burns did not promote the trade, says Fletcher. “I cannot recollect Pat ever coming to me saying, ‘We have to trade Wendel.’ What happened was Quebec had lost to Montreal in the playoffs. In their minds, they had been physically intimidated in that series. Lacroix started talking to me about Wendel. I said, ‘Well, we’ve never even thought about trading Wendel. But I might look at it if Mats Sundin would be coming our way.’ When they agreed to that, it was something we had to do. Mats was young, he was big, he was a horse. You had to do it.”

Jettisoning the captain was agonizing, though. “Wendel Clark had been the hope of the Maple Leaf franchise for years, the only thing they had,” says Fletcher. “Wendel represented eternal hope in Toronto, and I
appreciated that.” A Leaf icon, undoubtedly, but Fletcher was being paid to make the burdensome decisions to better the team, and this was a club verging on old and spent.

Clark had spent that day filming a breakfast cereal commercial in Toronto. Bowled over by the news when Fletcher called, he went home, where reporters quickly gathered on his doorstep. A white stretch limo idled in the driveway. In the back seat was close friend Tie Domi, then a Winnipeg Jet, sipping a beer. Sundin, meanwhile, was at Borje Salming’s hockey school in Sweden when informed he was now a Leaf. The legendary defenceman assured Sundin all would be well, that he’d love playing hockey in Toronto. Sundin never spoke with Burns until the big Swede arrived in town for training camp. Said Fletcher, “I don’t think we’ll be as good a team October 1, but I’m hoping by March we’ll be a better team.”

When the draft was over, Burns was booked on a puddle-jumper back to Montreal. At the Hartford airport, he ran into Pat Hickey, longtime hockey reporter for the Montreal
Gazette
. Their flight was delayed and the two Pats repaired to the bar, where they were joined by Jacques Lemaire, who was coaching the Devils at the time. Burns and Lemaire spent the next three hours sipping martinis and talking hockey—“What a horseshit job it was to coach the Canadiens,” Hickey recalls. The flight was eventually cancelled, but the trio—two of them well refreshed by now—were put on a plane to Boston, with a connection to Montreal, arriving shortly before midnight.

Hickey didn’t have a car, so Burns offered him a ride. “Burns found some coffee at the airport, we found his truck and we sat there for about thirty minutes while he made some phone calls. While we were waiting, an RCMP cruiser came past, and it stopped when the driver recognized Pat. Jacques Demers was in the cruiser because he was looking for his truck, which had been stolen. Demers yelled out at me, ‘I see you’re getting a ride with the ex-coach!’ At which point, Pat replied: ‘I still have a job, you fat fuck!’

“I live about ninety kilometres from the city, and Pat was another thirty kilometres further,” Hickey says. “He was driving about 140 kilometres an
hour in the rain, and at one point, I reminded him that there was a speed trap near the Bromont exit. He said he wasn’t worried about a ticket because he was part of the brotherhood. As we approached my exit, Pat wanted assurances that I didn’t live too far off the autoroute because he was getting tired. I told him it was only a kilometre and offered him our guest room, but he said he wanted to get home. About thirty minutes after he dropped me off, I called his cell to make sure he got home okay. There was no answer. I called again five minutes later, and Pat answered. He said he was in his driveway and he thanks me for calling because he had stopped the car but had fallen asleep with the engine running.”

Gilmour, as expected, inherited the
C
. Fletcher and Burns had sat down, looked at each other, and immediately agreed. “There wasn’t even a discussion,” the GM told a media gathering. “We both knew it was Gilmour. I expect Doug to play with the Leafs until he retires. And he’ll be captain as long as he plays.” Really, general managers should watch those declaratory statements.

Burns flew to Toronto for the formal announcement of Gilmour’s captaincy at the Hockey Hall of Fame, then went directly back to the Eastern Townships—didn’t even stay overnight. On Lake Memphremagog, he had a new neighbour in Félix Potvin that summer. “If you want to get away from it all, I’ll tell you a place,” the coach had advised. Potvin purchased the property where he still resides. “My mom and dad came to visit and we decided to take a boat ride,” Potvin remembers. “Mom asked me to show her where Pat lived. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to go there on the boat. What if he’s outside and sees us spying on him?’ But I steered the boat by Pat’s place and, sure enough, I see him coming down the dock. He recognizes me, waves us over. We talk for a while, have some beers. He was great with my mom. Away from the rink, Pat was a really fun guy, a different person. But he never mixed his job and his fun time.”

Burns’s “local” was a little pub called The Owl’s Nest. Another habitué was revered author Mordecai Richler. “He smokes like a chimney but
never buys cigarettes,” Burns snorted. One night, the two sitting together, Richler complained that he couldn’t find anyone to do maintenance work around his house. “You do know,” said Burns, “that you have to pay them?” Richler cast a beady eye around the regular cast of tipplers and picked one at random. “Hey, do you know how to paint?” The fellow said, sure, he could do that. “Okay, you’re hired. Start tomorrow. Come over when you’ve sobered up.”

Ominous clouds hovered over hockey in the weeks before camps opened. League and players’ association were stalemated in talks over a new collective bargaining agreement. It was rumoured Commissioner Gary Bettman intended to abort any day, with clubs shuttering their rinks before medicals. Tentatively, with nobody taking bets on whether any season would unfold, the camps opened and exhibition games proceeded. Sundin was booed at the Gardens. “I remember coming to Toronto not knowing what to expect. My first meeting with Pat, he called me into his office. Any time a coach brings you into the office, you get worried, and Pat was an especially intimidating guy. He was sitting at his desk, doodling, and he says, ‘What do you think I want to talk about?’ I was nervous, so I laughed a little. ‘Uh, I don’t know, Coach.’ All he said was, ‘You just keep working as hard as you did in Quebec and everything will be fine. Don’t feel like you have to replace Wendel. Be your own guy.’ I tried to be that for him because Pat was the best coach I’ve ever had in my career. He put all his passion into his teams.”

Seven Leafs from the previous season were gone, including stalwart defencemen Bob Rouse and Sylvain Lefebvre. Departed also was a frequent target of the coach’s wrath, Rob Pearson, who practically did somersaults fleeing Toronto as a restricted free agent. Some could cope with Burns’s incessant demands; others, like Pearson, couldn’t, and never escaped the doghouse.

Shaving off his beard was Burns’s signal that he was now in full coaching mode. The potential of this ’94–95 squad tantalized him. “It’s
going to be like a whole new team. We’re going to be younger and I think we’ll be more aggressive. But it’s going to take a while before we get everybody pulling in the same direction. There are definitely question marks. Who am I going to play with Sundin? It’s going to be interesting.” There had been a vast turnover, “but we’ve still got our TCB guys.” TCB stood for “Taking Care of Business,” the Bachman-Turner Overdrive anthem that was played at every Leaf home game, along with Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town,” the team’s other musical standard.

Prospects for an NHL season were bleak, however. Burns could only look on in silent incredulity as his players shook hands in solidarity with opponents after exhibition games. Before a game with Detroit, Gilmour and NHLPA president Mike Gartner went to the visitors’ dressing room for a confab. Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman found the door closed to him when he tried to enter, so he went across the rink for a pre-game commiserating chat with Burns. Coaches, sighed Burns, were “neither fish nor fowl” in this labour impasse. He took the team to their usual Collingwood resort for a three-day bonding interlude. “I’d be devastated if we didn’t keep playing. I hear all kinds of things and I have all kinds of hope. Not that I know anything, because I don’t.” Whistling in the wind, he prepared the club for their season-opener against Washington. It would not come to pass. Owners pulled the plug, and rinks went dark October 1.

Months dragged by. Would both sides be so foolish, so averse to compromise, that they’d sacrifice the entire season? Behind the scenes, Fletcher spearheaded conciliatory discussions. “I got involved because the ownership of Maple Leaf Gardens was not happy with the lockout at all.” As a contingency plan, Fletcher presented Toronto’s board of directors with cost-cutting schemes that included layoffs and pay cuts for himself and the coaching staff, but Steve Stavro rejected it. This was all foreign territory for everybody. Burns was still being paid, but there was nothing for him to do. Fletcher dispatched him to scout junior and minor-league games in Quebec. “It was more or less to give him something to stay busy. But we were all just waiting.”

Restless, Burns retreated to the cabin he’d bought in Austin, also on Lake Memphremagog, that summer. It was decidedly rustic and held no charms for Burns’s girlfriend, Tina Sheldon, who visited only once during the 105-day lockout. Burns rode his bike while the weather held and was endlessly on the phone to Fletcher—“What’s the word? Any news?” He accepted an invitation to open a community rink on Broughton Island in Nunavut, flying up to the Arctic territory on an RCMP plane. Informally, he coached youngsters in the Magog area.

At the Gardens, ice was rented out to punters at $500 for seventy-five minutes, resurfacing included. The Leafs and their union brothers had dispersed to play in leagues overseas or in charity games in the U.S. and Canada. Rules prevented coaches from even speaking to their players. Burns paced and prowled, fretful about the players’ conditioning and having to start from Square One if this labour standoff was ever resolved. Not that he necessarily observed the no-communication order. By mid-December, he was covertly calling players, whispering that an agreement would be reached by the end of the year. Burns imparted workout proposals to the guys he most trusted, to pass along. When Toronto reporters discovered a large group of Leafs conducting lively drills at a suburban rink—wearing their Leaf jerseys inside-out—it was assumed Burns was present in spirit. Dave Ellett, sharply managing the drills and scrimmages as pseudo coach, denies receiving any coded instructions from Burns. “No, no, we weren’t allowed to talk to coaches.” But Burns had admitted as much to a reporter: “I’ve told them what I’d do, and what should be done.”