“The message was not getting through anymore.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1991, Pat Burns was named assistant to Mike Keenan for the Canada Cup series. Team Canada would spend eight weeks together, from training camp in August through the finals—a two-game sweep over Team USA—in early September. Brian Sutter was also an assistant coach. The two became Laurel and Hardy, a brace of buffoons who brought lightheartedness to the occasion with their juvenile pranks, Sutter more often getting the best of Burns. He’d order a stack of pizzas to be delivered to Burns’s door and place wake-up calls for three o’clock in the morning. He’d sneak into Burns’s room, filling his suitcase with hotel towels and ashtrays. “I’d be carrying it to the airport thinking, ‘Geez, this is heavy.’ ” After Canada copped the Cup—undefeated in the series with six wins and two ties—Burns and Sutter made off with the trophy during celebrations and paraded it in a golf cart driven through the hotel lobby, goalie Ed Belfour also stuffed in the back. In the wee hours, they stealthily deposited the Cup in Keenan’s bed as he slept, Godfather-style. In retaliation, Keenan called hotel security to have it removed and stashed, announcing to reporters the next morning that it had been swiped.
Frivolities finished, it was back to serious business when the NHL season opened. The league was celebrating its seventy-fifth year of operation, and Montreal and Toronto wore vintage replica uniforms, coaches in cardigans and fedoras, when the teams faced off at the Forum for their opener, Canadiens winning 4–3. Notable for his absence was Stéphane Richer, who’d cleared out his locker on September 20, traded to the Devils, future captain Kirk Muller received in return. “I think Stéphane will be a better player in New Jersey because he’s going to a place where there’s less media attention,” opined Burns, reflecting on the relentless spotlight that had been trained on Richer and how he withered under that stress. “A player has to be really strong to deal with it.” That Montreal had lost a star who had twice put up fifty-goal seasons Burns dismissed as inconsequential. “The importance of fifty-goal scorers in this league is a lot of garbage,” the coach said, unconvincingly and nonsensically. Later, he expounded on the Richer soap opera. “When I sat Richer out for even a shift, he would move down to the end of the bench where the French TV camera was set. He would sit there with this really sad, kicked-dog look on his face, knowing that the picture was going across the province with commentary about Richer being sat out by bad Burns again. One time, Richer had two French-Canadian rookies who weren’t playing sitting with him, looking sad. I wanted to ask them which one heard no evil.”
Of course, Burns was a gritty guy who was overly fond of grinding third-liners and often careless with the egos of genuine stars. That first week of 1991, he benched Denis Savard during a game in Detroit that Montreal won 4–1. Savard was piqued, and the French media took his side. Burns saw the blowback coming. “When you bench a guy on a French club, there’s always a howl from the fans back home. It’s hanging time for me tomorrow. My house is probably burning down right now. I love Denis Savard but he’s got to learn to listen to me. He’s got to get my message.”
Was that when it began, the fatal fissure between coach and club, coach and media, in what would be Burns’s swan song season in Montreal? At the end of the year, Sylvain Turgeon bitterly remarked, “He has the biggest ego on the team and if he’s not the star of the show, he’s not happy.”
Nobody saw the alienation looming, certainly not during Montreal’s fast start, 14–4–1, nor through the midpoint of the season, the Canadiens sitting atop the league on January 1, 1992, owning the best defensive record in the NHL, and doing it all without a single scorer in the top twenty-five. They weren’t a flashy squad, but efficient and resilient as the team transitioned seamlessly through roster-rebuilding changes. “We don’t need a hero,” said Burns. “That’s one thing I try to stress. I know fans like a Lafleur, a Béliveau, a Geoffrion. The press would like one. But I’m sorry to say we don’t have one. They tried to put pressure on Stéphane Richer and he couldn’t handle it. We’d like to have a different hero every night.”
Melodrama actually occurred off the ice when a Montreal doctor announced at a press conference that a female patient who had died of AIDS two years earlier claimed to have had sex with about fifty NHL players. This stunning revelation came just days after NBA star Magic Johnson disclosed he’d been infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). Suddenly the bed-hopping habits of professional athletes became a topic of conversation everyone was having. Burns, quite enlightened for the times, ordered that a condom machine be installed in the trainer’s room. “I’m not distributing them myself. I’m not out there handing them out like candy. But in Montreal, the players are well known and recognized. They might have that macho thing about not wanting to go into a pharmacy and have everybody looking at them. So I told them, ‘Boys, they’re at your disposal. And don’t use them for water balloons!’ ”
He defended athletes against the bad rap they were getting for promiscuity. “Being in the field as a police officer, I saw politicians getting involved with hookers and whatnots. Let’s not pick on professional athletes. They are the most exposed because they’re public figures, but you could find politicians or travelling salesmen looking for female companionship in any bar in any city.” Burns revealed that 90 per cent of NHL players had been tested for AIDS already, either of their own volition or as part of the application process for life insurance. “But having a blood test is a personal thing. I can’t take anybody by the hand and lead him up the hill to Montreal General Hospital.”
On the ice, everything felt safe as houses. Burns’s security had been assured with a contract renegotiated in December that made him the highest-paid coach in the NHL, among those not also functioning as general manager. The three-year deal reportedly paid Burns $350,000 a season. “There are probably twenty-one coaches giving me a standing ovation in their offices right now. The coaches have all been waiting for someone to do this.”
Columnist Réjean Tremblay describes how he helped launch Burns’s bid for a fat new deal. “One day, he was shaving in the dressing room as I passed by. He opened the conversation by saying, ‘Do you think a coach like me plays a big role on the team?’ I said, ‘Pat, you’re the heart of the team.’ ” At the time, Montreal had an enforcer by the name of Mario Roberge, a low-scoring winger with a limited role. Burns asked Tremblay, “Do you think I’m more important than a guy like Mario?” Tremblay replied, “No comparison.” Burns: “So I should earn at least the average of what the players are making.” In those years, that meant around $400,000.
“I understood the message,” says Tremblay. “The next day, I wrote a big column saying a coach like Pat Burns should get a new contract. In those days, the relationship between the writers and management was very close. So I got a phone call from Serge Savard. He said, ‘Reg, are you Pat’s new agent?’ ” Burns got his plump raise with no apologies for it. “To be president of the United States is a lot different from being president in Zimbabwe, just like coaching in Montreal is different from other cities. Now watch, I’ll get a pack of angry letters from people in Zimbabwe.”
He was happy, not a care in the world beyond the usual day-to-day aggravations, his team seemingly serene. “I’ve said before I’d like to stay in Montreal my whole life, and this should make it a little longer.” GM Savard was equally pleased with locking Burns into the franchise. “My wish now is never to have to make another coaching change in my career.” Now there was a proclamation to tempt fate.
From January, the team started to lurch, sliding through the standings. Still, there was no immediate panic. When not using them to achieve his own ends, Burns continued squabbling with the media. Now, though, there was more of an edge to the thrust-and-parry. Burns increasingly showed his contempt for journalists, and the feeling was mutual. “I don’t think he hated us personally, but he hated the way we were doing our job,” says Tremblay. “Don’t forget, before Pat Burns, we covered Jean Perron. Perron had a master’s degree, so he was a new type of coach for us. Pat Burns was the former cop/tough guy. You could not intimidate Pat Burns. Personally, I thought he was a tough son of a bitch. But he could take it better than most guys. Maybe we were harder on him than we had been with other coaches. Nobody wants to destroy a man, but, when you believe a guy has the strength to take a hit, maybe you go a little bit further in your criticism.”
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.’ ”
Fletcher was keen but needed to run the idea by his board of directors. Meehan urged him to do it quickly, because there was a press conference to make the announcement of Burns’s termination scheduled for Montreal the next day. Coincidentally, Meehan had just been contacted by Jacques Demers, who wanted to get back into coaching, though he was making a mint as a TV commentator. So now Meehan had two new coach clients. He was frantically juggling balls in the air.
Meehan spoke again to Savard, who was seeing Burns that night. Then he got back to Fletcher. “Are you on?” Fletcher said yes, and they talked money. It was a done deal except for the signature on the contract. Burns was over the moon, if gobsmacked. On the blower with Meehan, he kept repeating, “Are you serious?” Meehan was clear: If you want this to happen, it will happen. “Coach the Toronto Maple Leafs? Oh yeah.”
In Montreal the next day, the announcement of Burns’s departure was made to a mostly shocked media horde. Burns, emotional, claimed reluctance to leave, insisted he wasn’t running away—anybody in the room care to dispute that?—but admitted feeling overwhelming pressure to resign. “When you’re criticized openly, in the way I have been, I don’t care who’s in the seat, it’s really hard to take.” The flower of Montreal journalism, caught napping, was thunderstruck. And they were still clueless as to what was about to unfold five hundred kilometres down Highway 401. Meehan had booked plane tickets for himself and Burns. They went directly from the Montreal presser to the airport. During the flight, Burns was bewildered. “I can’t believe all this happening.” Recalls Meehan: “He was in seventh heaven.”
Landing in Toronto, Meehan and Burns went straight to Maple Leaf Gardens for a first face-to-face meeting with Fletcher and their second press conference of the day. Welcome the new Toronto coach: Pat Burns.
It was a win-win dénouement, or actually win-win-win, because Meehan placed Demers with the Canadiens. The agent was justifiably pleased with himself. “Montreal was happy to move Burns out, both sides got their settlement, Pat could say he hadn’t been fired, and the Canadiens got a new coach who ended up taking them to the Stanley Cup. There was no bitterness. Everybody was happy.”