Coach: The Pat Burns Story (43 page)

The years when his dad was coaching in Toronto had their highlights for Jason. “He’d bring me on road trips with the team. I’d even be on the
bench. That was cool. That’s the love part of my dad. He showed me a bunch of stuff that most Canadian kids can only dream of. But there was also that other part where he was distant. I was always a bit scared of him, to be honest. I never knew what answer he’d give me. Well, it was mostly no, like if I had a favour to ask or money that I needed for something. Or he’d come back and say yes, but make me feel really bad about it. I always wanted to see more of him, spend more time with him, because he really was fun to hang around with. I told him that at the end, when he was really sick: ‘I’m going to miss hanging around with you, Dad.’ He was a good friend, but not a great father.”

Jason knew his father as a penny-pinching man, which is perhaps understandable in someone who grew up without financial security. Burns always worried about the money running out, never certain there would be another coaching job, another fat contract. While he was perfectly willing to pay for his children’s education—sent Jason to a private school as a teenager, though the boy didn’t like it and left after just one year—he was stingy about big-ticket items that he viewed as indulgences. “That was a choice he made, not to spoil us with toys,” says Jason. It was his mom who bought him his first car, a used ’86 Honda Accord. Upon graduation from high school in 1995, Dad gave him an ’88 Toyota. He never bought his son a motorcycle, nor did he give him one of his own.

Some of Burns’s miserliness is just plain incomprehensible. For game seven of the Stanley Cup championships, Jason drove to Jersey, picking up Maureen on the way. Jason sought reassurance that his dad would provide tickets for them. “He said, ‘Uh, I’ll see.’ You’ll see? Here I am, driving seven, eight hours, to see this game and he’s going to
try
to get me tickets?” When Jason and Maureen arrived, they discovered their father’s close buddies all had tickets to the game, no problem. Clearly, that still bothers, that he had to plead to be allowed inside the crowning glory of his father’s career.

But Jason has some of his father’s stubbornness, which he demonstrated that night, after Jersey won the Cup. “I demanded to go and see the press conference after. I followed my dad around. I wasn’t going to let him say no. I remember meeting him under the stands and giving him a big hug.
‘Wow—you just won the Stanley Cup!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty cool, eh?’ I drove back to the house with him later. We were alone in the truck and still we didn’t say much. We always had trouble talking.”

Jason grew up thinking his dad was spooning out their time together, limiting accessibility even in the summer weeks they’d spend together in Magog. “He didn’t like having to carry around the burden of children. He didn’t like the responsibility of children. We’d spend a lot of time driving around in his truck, but even then we didn’t talk much and hardly ever about personal things. We’d talk about hockey mostly. When I was young, I’d only see him maybe three or four times a year, for a week maximum. So I didn’t want to spend time arguing, ‘Why don’t you do this, why can’t you do that?’ I didn’t want to get off to a bad start and waste the whole week. I was always careful about what I said, because he’d get pissed off. And he could be a bitch about it—not talk to you for a whole day if he was mad. He was a big baby that way.”

He accepted his father’s emotional limitations, but regrets the distance they never quite managed to close, even when serious illness mended some of the breach. Burns was actually more paternal towards some of his most beloved players than he was with his own son. “I couldn’t give him what those guys gave him. I was not the one who was going to win a hockey game for him. What could I give him? I couldn’t go out and buy him a motorcycle. And the little things I could afford, he already had. I could only love him, but I don’t think he understood the love I wanted to give him.”

Terminal cancer would heal some of that emotional remoteness, but not all of it. “A bit,” says Jason. “He said to me a couple of times that he hadn’t been a good father. He knew. What I think is he never really tried to make it up. I told him, at the end, ‘Maybe you waited too long to say it.’ But that’s all right. I love him. Oh yeah, I love him a lot.”

P
ATRICK
R
OY
was having his Number 33 sweater retired at the Bell Centre. Not just raised to the rafters and honoured, but withdrawn from the numerical canon, never to be worn again by a Montreal Canadien. “I have come home,” the legendary goaltender, thrice a Vezina Trophy winner, told the crowd that gave him a five-minute standing ovation on November 22, 2008. He’d wanted all—well, nearly all—his former coaches to attend the ceremony. Pat Burns was in the house.

Earlier that afternoon, they’d had a quiet moment together at the brunch arranged for Roy. “It’s over,” said Burns, revealing what only a handful of family members and friends knew. The battle he’d waged against cancer for so long would not be won. “As much as that was a happy day for me, I was hurting inside,” Roy recalls. “Pat wasn’t angry, no. Maybe he kept that inside. From what I saw, he seemed very much at peace. It’s what he told me, that he was at peace. It was pretty much the first time I felt he was very open with me. I thought he looked good, but he knew that the end was starting. I don’t want to say I was privileged that he shared this. But it made me so appreciative of that moment, because I knew it was probably the last time I might be with him.”

The sad news that Burns was facing a third battle with cancer was broken in January 2009 by
La Presse
, the French-language daily. When reached by the paper, Burns had little choice but to confirm the diagnosis, though he would have preferred to keep this very private matter confidential for a while longer. “I know what you people are like in Montreal. You’re capable of dramatizing everything, if it suits you. The truth is simple: the cancer has returned. But never fear: I’m still alive. I’m not in great shape, but I wake up every morning, I play golf, I ride my motorcycle and I work, despite the illness. I haven’t given up.”

Terminal illness is a foreign country. The clock starts ticking down on all of us from the moment of birth. But knowing the end of days is imminent, that there’s no more to be done, attempted, is obliterating. It is a grieving for oneself, a glimpse of what the world will be like when you’re no longer in it. Burns had only a short time between learning that his condition was incurable and having that knowledge become public, being transformed into the Dying Man. He wished that was not so. He recoiled from pity. And yet he was touched by the outpouring of love and support.

He had been a tough guy all his life, but dying with grace, on the few terms he could still control, required a different kind of strength, a hard softness, a relinquishing and resignation that ran contrary to the essence of Burns. “You could never show him that you were feeling sorry for him,” says Lamoriello. In the many hours they spent together over nearly two years after lung cancer was detected—a far longer period of endurance than doctors had expected, because Burns did not go gently or feebly to his fate—Lamoriello witnessed a kind of metamorphosis, the one gift the disease imparted. “He mellowed. Quite frankly, in my opinion, Pat released a lot of things that he’d harboured, what he’d hidden away. He appreciated that he had just so much time to find out that he was a good person, that he was okay. I always felt that he was, but Pat didn’t. I think that’s what kept him going for so long, seeing how people really felt about him, realizing, ‘I’m not disliked.’ Because of the experiences he’d had in life, he’d mistrusted everybody. He got his trust back in the end. He became comfortable in his own skin.”

Burns let his children into his life to a degree of intimacy and compassion that had been beyond his capacity before, most especially with daughter Maureen, as willful in nature as her father. Burns had been mostly a figment father when she was a child, had a more stable relationship with son Jason. With both, though, he’d tried to atone in later years, each spending long summer stretches in Magog. He became close, as well, with wife Line’s children, Stephanie and Maxime Duval, especially Stephanie, who visited frequently. When their mother moved to Boston to be with Burns, her then-teen kids resided primarily with their father, an advertising executive in Montreal.

“Pat and my mom were such a good fit, a great match,” recalls Stephanie. “The first I met him was at a restaurant. He told me after that he was nervous about meeting us, but I never felt that. He wasn’t paternal towards me, because I already had a father. He took his place as my mum’s husband, not my father. It was kind of perfect, because I never had to struggle with a two-dads situation. But he became a wonderful friend. I could go to him for advice about things that I wouldn’t want to share with my dad or my mother. He had a different approach, and always a very interesting one. Pat knew how to say things politely but with the gloves off. I could talk to him about anything—work, life, men sometimes. It was like having a close girlfriend, but with a man’s opinion, you know?”

In the years of sickness, particularly after the cancer came back a third time, all the children—now adults—drew closer to Burns, providing an emotional buffer. “Pat was sick, but he didn’t make it dramatic or morbid,” says Stephanie. “It wasn’t at all hard to be around him. He was just himself. He never said, ‘Why has this happened to me?’ He wasn’t angry—at least, I didn’t see that. What I saw was his strength and his courage. He got a lot of comfort from having his family around him, his kids and his grandson.” Maureen had a little boy, Samuel. “I remember our last motorcycle ride together. It was in New Hampshire, just from the restaurant to the house. Pat was so sick by then. But it’s something I’ll never forget, hanging on to him on that bike.”

In the last year of his life, Burns got rid of all the motorcycles—sold
one to Larry Robinson. The only Harley remaining in his New Hampshire garage belonged to a friend. Burns insisted on returning it personally by riding the bike back to Magog. Many tried to dissuade him from making the trip. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he shrugged. “I’ll crash and get killed?” Pal Kevin Dixon met him at the Vermont border anyway.

Sheer stubbornness kept Burns active, doing the things he enjoyed for as long as he was able, continuing to scout games, too. He needed to feel useful, that the small service he could provide to the Devils mattered. Inoperable cancer would not slow him down until all reserves of strength were depleted. “Right now, I’m just enjoying the time left,” he told reporters who encountered him at a game in Tampa. “The crying and everything, that’s all finished. That’s over.” He also rejected any further chemo treatments because it was about quality of life, not quantity, now. “I told my family, ‘That’s it. We’ve done all that. Let’s just enjoy what we have here.’ ” It was a decision he would later revisit and reverse because he did want more time, even the little bit that more chemotherapy might permit.

Serious illness is not mind over matter, though. Burns couldn’t will himself to remain robust. Frailness set in, his voice increasingly raspy from the ravaging of his lungs. Yet he continued with his morning radio show because he loved talking about the game, watched as many matches as he could on the dish—and in person when possible—stayed
au courant
. Hockey was a comfort, a solace. And the radio show was wildly popular in Quebec, despite Burns’s strained vocal cords and frequent pauses to catch his breath. “I tuned in just to listen to him and changed the channel after,” says Félix Potvin. “He was so well connected, knew everybody in hockey,” says columnist Réjean Tremblay. “He was one of the most interesting commentators on radio, a huge hit, and good.” Benoît Brunet, a full-time broadcaster himself now, adds: “I always listened to his show. Pat was straight up. He went straight to the point. Even at the end, he was still watching games, talking about teams, making his point understood. He didn’t have to use twenty sentences to do it, either. That’s why people liked the show. He talked hockey and made himself understood to the ordinary person.”

The surge of affection for Burns, quite startling to him, expressed itself in a spontaneous, grassroots campaign to have the coach inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, which just a year earlier had announced new voting procedures to make the selection process less restrictive. An online petition amassed more than seventy thousand signatures within a fortnight. Burns certainly didn’t spend his time waiting for a call from the Hall—which never came, not in his lifetime. When the 2010 inductees were announced, the name Burns was conspicuous in its absence. He did not receive the required fourteen votes from a panel of eighteen that included Scotty Bowman, Lanny McDonald, Mike Gartner, Bill Torrey, Serge Savard and Harry Sinden. Reporters and the citizenry were outraged. Who among that august assembly didn’t think Burns had the proper qualifications? That would never be disclosed because the selectors had all signed a letter of confidentiality restricting them to comment only on those who’d been anointed.