The gaining of coaching wisdom does indeed take time. But Burns, with no repository of NHL playing experience to draw upon, had to make it up as he went along in his AHL mad scientist’s lab, concocting a team ethos out of bluster.
Life in the minors could be a dead end for players—those rebuffed by the big league after the proverbial cup of coffee, now playing out the string and resentful of young teammates on the opposite trajectory, one ding-a-ling away from a call-up. Burns, providentially, inherited a squad with a dozen emerging players who would make that NHL leap, several of them known quantities as ex-Olympiques or members of the Canadian junior squad chased from Prague. The 1987–88 roster included Mike Keane, Sylvain Lefebvre, Stéphane Richer, Stéphane Lebeau, Brent Gilchrist, Éric Desjardins and, in time for playoffs, Mathieu Schneider. In short order, they would become an extension of their coach’s persona, each taking a piece of that into their NHL lives.
“I think we understood the game together, Pat and I,” says Mike Keane, who came out of juniors in the Western League to play for Burns in Sherbrooke, both of them arriving the same year and known to each other from the world juniors. (Upon his return from overseas, Keane had a tattoo of Garfield the Cat waving a Canadian flag tattooed on his chest. “Actually, I was going to get it on my bum, but we had a game that night and you can’t sweat on it, and I couldn’t have a patch on my bum,” he explained to a reporter.)
Burns saw in Keane the embodiment of those qualities he most admired: grit and heart, sand and soul, assets that would later make him a natural, if controversially anglophone, captain in Montreal. As well, Keane just plain tickled Burns’s fancy, though he could damn him with faint praise for it. “If we didn’t have him on the buses, things would have been a lot quieter,” Burns once harrumphed. “He’s nuts. The guy never sleeps and he’s talking all the time.”
Keane: “I was lucky enough to have Pat at a very young age. Young players now, I think they’re missing the part where a coach says, ‘You know what, you’re not the best player anymore and you’re not the most important player on the team.’ You might get a firm talking to, and that’s your wake-up call. There’s life and there’s playing the game on and off the ice, representing your team, your teammates, and you have to respect what that involves. Pat Burns taught me that. My first year as a pro, in Sherbrooke, I learned so much from him.”
That team finished third in its division and was eliminated by Fredericton in the first round of the Calder Cup playoffs. As Keane notes, the parent club in Montreal was “always taking our best players,” leaving Burns with huge roster holes to fill, ad-libbing with the lineup and demanding instant allegiance to the system he imposed. “Pat taught players how to play,” says Keane. “And if you didn’t do it, you wouldn’t play. He’d be very clear—do you understand it? If you signed off, saying, ‘Yes I do’ and then you didn’t show it, well, that would be your fault for being so dumb. He’d say, ‘But you told me you knew what you were doing!’ He was lenient enough, but if you kept on making the same mistakes, not helping yourself or the team, then you weren’t going to play and he was going to figure out some other way. The way he coached, it wasn’t like nowadays, when you get three or four or five chances. You got yelled at. Right or wrong, I understand the game has changed. I understand the game evolves every year. But when you have someone harping on you, yelling down your throat, an intimidating man who just wants the best for the team and for you, it gets through pretty quickly.”
It didn’t matter to Keane that Burns had never played in the NHL. “Just because you didn’t play the game doesn’t mean you don’t know the game. Scotty Bowman never played, either, and he wasn’t too bad. Pat was a student of the game. He was very good at his systems. I find it funny that some people didn’t like his coaching style. Look at his NHL career, which speaks for itself. Everywhere Pat went, he was successful right away.”
Keane put his faith in Burns, and that fealty was mutual. He slotted Keane onto his first line with centre Brent Gilchrist, another prototypical “Burns guy,” and both later advanced to Montreal with him. “We were two twenty-year-olds, first-year pro, and Pat was great for us,” says Gilchrist. “He put us on the top line in Sherbrooke and expected a lot from us, but showed us a lot of trust too. If we stepped out of line or did things that he really disagreed with, there’s no question we heard about it. But he helped us tremendously by teaching us how to be pros, how to put our work hats on every day.”
Gilchrist, who would go on to play fifteen years in the NHL and is now coaching a midget team in Kelowna, has thought about where Burns learned his insights into the game and offers a theory. “The work ethic of a player is very similar to the work ethic in life. Pat was able to somehow transfer what he’d learned about life to what a player is going through, what a player is faced with. There aren’t many guys who haven’t played hockey at a high level who can transcend that and coach at a high level, but he was one of them.
“He taught me a great deal about playing the game in my zone. As a centreman, throughout my amateur career, it was goals, goals, goals. That’s what I did, I scored. When I got to Sherbrooke, for sure to get to the next level, I had to learn how to play in my own end, learn about the defensive side of the game. Pat understood that. One thing Pat taught me in Sherbrooke, and continued to teach me my first few years in Montreal, was the whole repertoire of skills you need in the NHL. Montreal was always deep in centres—certainly, in those days they were—so Pat put me on the wing. From there, I learned to play all three forward positions, offensive roles, defensive roles. I look back on my long career in the NHL and I know it was possible because of the versatility I learned under Pat. That started in Sherbrooke.”
In that single minor-league season, Burns speedily developed a reputation for outrageous behind-the-bench antics and opera-tenor emoting. “Sure, I was a bit of a showman coach in junior hockey,” he would acknowledge later. “But we had to do everything possible to get attention, attract fans and pay the bills.”
Cunningly or naturally, there was never an off-switch for Burns emotionally, not even a dimmer dial. “Pat just couldn’t hide what he was feeling,” Gilchrist recalls fondly. “It came out of his pores.”
His volatility extended to his players, but there were redemptive features. “I remember him having all-out yelling matches, going one on one with players, and hard things were said. The thing is, he didn’t mind if you came right back at him. Fifteen minutes later, it would all be forgotten anyway. It was emotional, heat-of-the-moment stuff, everybody got what they had to say off their chest and Pat wouldn’t hold a grudge. That’s where you get the trust of players. You could unleash on him with your own emotions when it’s raw and right in front of you. Afterwards, it was just, ‘Okay, let’s move on.’ ”
Burns’s closest friend, Kevin Dixon—they met in Sherbrooke, where Dixon was working in real estate and the incoming coach was looking for a property to rent—reveals that Burns detested having tête-à-têtes with his players off the ice. He did not do avuncular or confidant very well; it was a strain. “Pat hated sitting in his office, on the other side of the coach’s desk, with his players.” If so, he kept this aversion well concealed. “There’s no doubt his door was always open,” counters Gilchrist. “But did it even need to be? Because there was nothing hiding behind that door, nothing that you needed to talk about in private. Pat was a communicator, so you always knew where you stood. Sometimes, that wasn’t a good place to be, but it was always in the open. He wasn’t playing a bunch of head games with you. If he was upset, you knew it. If you said you didn’t know why he was upset, you were lying.”
Defenceman Sylvain Lefebvre had also landed in Sherbrooke that season, after playing junior for the Laval Titan, and he concedes Burns was a shock to the equilibrium for many of the younger guys who’d never before been exposed to so fiery a temperament. “Everybody knows now how passionate Pat was about the game and coaching. I think he was probably even more showing his passion d
own in the minors, where there wasn’t the media around like he had later in Montreal and Toronto. A screamer, definitely, in the minors and in the NHL. Hey, you don’t change spots on a leopard.”
Lefebvre recalls with amusement—although it wasn’t so ha-ha at the time—Burns’s colossal clashes with opposing coaches, particularly Milbury in Maine and Rick Bowness in Moncton before the latter’s promotion to the Winnipeg Jets. “Oh man, those were good rivalries, unbelievably intense.” Everything in Burnsie World was intense, though, including practices. “We learned very quickly that he wanted us to work hard, to have good practice habits,” says Lefebvre, now an assistant coach with the Colorado Avalanche and still practising what Burns preached a quarter-century ago. “His favourite line was: ‘You play like you practice.’ That was his trademark, and he instilled it in all of us. He was really tough, not just on the young players, but tough on everyone, so at least he was fair about it. And he was very direct, which sometimes hurt. Some of the younger guys who could not adjust or who could not take criticism had problems with that kind of hardcore coaching. But if you realized he was being tough because he wanted you to succeed, to get better, then everything was fine.”
At the time, Lefebvre was fixated on his own career and didn’t spend much time mulling over whether Burns was NHL-bound. “I couldn’t have said that his destiny was to coach in the NHL. He was just coming out of junior himself, working his way up. But, yeah, you knew there was something special there.”
The Montreal Canadiens saw it too. And at the conclusion of the 1987–88 season, that scandalously carousing NHL club was in need of what a Pat Burns could deliver. Enter the homicide dick.
Chapter Five
Under the Montreal Microscope
“The pressure is unreal and the spotlight is always there.”
AT THE 1988 MEMORIAL CUP tournament in Chicoutimi, Serge Savard was besieged by reporters with the scent of blood in their nostrils, all clamouring for confirmation of rumours that Jean Perron had stepped down as coach of the Montreal Canadiens. The GM denied denied denied. “He’s on holidays somewhere on a beach,” Savard extemporized, by way of explaining why Perron was not in attendance at the junior championship, where hockey people annually congregate to take the measure of young comers.
Everybody knew that Perron’s status was tenuous. Montreal had been eliminated by Boston in the second round, four games to one, their first playoff series loss to the Bruins in forty-five years, and fans were incandescent with rage. That the club had racked up 103 points, its best record in six years, was promptly forgotten. Ousted by detested Boston was an indignity that traumatized. Perron, cold and autocratic, was the perfect villain. More detrimental to his health as bench boss were ongoing dispatches from inside the dressing room of a player revolt. Savard had been inundated with complaints about Perron all season from Larry Robinson, Chris Nilan, Chris Chelios, Claude Lemieux and others. Some spoke out publicly, others from behind closed doors and under cover of anonymity. They whinged that Perron, a brilliant strategist but icy technocrat with an academic background, never talked to them, never spent time with them, didn’t understand them.
As a rookie coach three years earlier, Perron had steered the team to its twenty-third Stanley Cup. The bloom was off that rose by the spring of 1988. The trifecta of one Cup, one division title and one regular-season crown was deemed insufficient, and Perron’s coaching style was seized upon as root of the problem: the team’s talent was not being directed properly on the ice. Full-out insubordination was afoot, with Perron perceived as too distant, too stiff-necked and utterly incapable of imposing discipline on a rump group of playboy players who had earned an off-ice reputation as the Wild Bunch.
On-ice, they chafed under Perron’s defensive strategy, although that approach had just resulted in the fewest goals allowed, 238, by any team in the NHL that season. The players felt oppressed by Perron, even as they continually undermined his authority, and the dissidents had the ear of those in the front office. President Ronald Corey had been displeased when, during the Boston series, Perron seemed to have lost his nut, threatening to have his players take Bruins mainstay Raymond Bourque out of action in retaliation for Stéphane Richer’s fractured thumb—courtesy of a slash by defenceman Michael Thelven—which really did spell doom for the Canadiens, their fifty-goal scorer sidelined. Corey, however, felt the Canadiens’ image had been debased by rhetoric more suitable to the World Wrestling Federation.
Mere days before he was announced as a coach-of-the-year finalist, Perron joined Mike Keenan and Jacques Martin among the ranks of sudden ex-coaches, resigning May 16 because of what were described as “philosophical differences” with Savard. Those “differences” were more in the nature of an impasse over the disciplining of several key players. It was, in actuality, a firing. And that set up a hiring. Replacement names bruited in the media included Michel Bergeron, Jacques Lemaire (again) and even captain Bob Gainey. Savard claimed no other candidates had been approached and that the job was offered to only one individual.
On June 8, 1988, Pat Burns was introduced as Montreal’s eighteenth and youngest coach, the latest in a long list of hockey savants, with a subset of skippers—Lemaire, Claude Ruel, Toe Blake, Al MacNeil, Bernie Geoffrion—who’d ultimately stepped down, driven bonkers by the manifold pressures of coaching in a city where every move was scrutinized by reporters from five newspapers and several broadcast stations, not counting the 16,084 coaches in the stands every night.
Savard’s coyness at the Memorial Cup notwithstanding, the contract had been signed weeks before it was disclosed, a period during which Burns was ordered to say nothing. The cone of silence caused Burns to sweat bullets. “It was weird,” recalls his friend Kevin Dixon. “We kept teasing him—‘Hey, did you really sign that thing? Aren’t they ever going to announce it?’ Pat was getting worried. He said, ‘Maybe they found someone else.’ ”
When the deal was finally announced, Savard stated Burns would have “carte blanche” to do whatever he felt necessary to bring an oft-wayward team into line. “The first thing we looked at were people who are successful and why they are successful. Pat commanded respect from his players.”
The first person to send a congratulatory telegram—this in the days before email—was Wayne Gretzky. It said: See you in the Stanley Cup final. “Wayne was the first to ever tell me I’d coach in the NHL,” said Burns. “I said, ‘Get out of here.’ He said, ‘No, I’ve watched you work for two years and you’ll be in the NHL.’ ”
Burns was instantly propagandized as a “players’ coach,” an un-Perron, albeit one without a single day of NHL experience on his resumé. But it was his cop chops that were hyped in the media. As a former policeman, Burns knew from delinquents, and this assortment of Habs had more than its share. So went the reasoning, though Burns pushed back against the stereotype when addressing the media horde, insisting he would not be walking into the dressing room carrying a big stick.
“It’s a dream come true to be able to come into the Forum and know I’m the coach of the Montreal Canadiens. But I’m coming here as a coach, not a policeman.”
Back home in Gatineau, the Burns family was stunned. “We were totally, totally shocked,” says sister Diane. “I couldn’t believe my brother had made it as an NHL coach. I couldn’t believe he would be coaching the Montreal Canadiens. And he became an instant sensation.”
The Habs always preferred hiring from within the organization, and Burns had been no farther than their own backyard in Sherbrooke. “I wasn’t going to put him in Montreal right away,” recalls Savard. “It’s just that we decided to make a switch, the job became available and we never thought for a moment to go somewhere else. It was a very, very easy decision for me to make.” Then, a tad patronizingly: “I don’t think there were many coaches available at that time.”
Still, it’s unlikely Burns would have been summoned so speedily had it not been for his cop background and swinging homicide-dick reputation. “To m
e, he wasn’t a policeman, he was a coach,” says Savard. “But in his first life, he was a policeman. That was his whole alter ego, Pat the Policeman. It really helped him because he had that reputation—that he could be very strict and people would listen to him. That’s one quality that is very necessary for a coach, that the players respect him and listen to him. Jean Perron was a wonderful person, but he didn’t have those abilities like Pat did, discipline-wise. It happens to a lot of coaches. Sometimes you lose the players and the players lose respect for you. It becomes very difficult to coach when you don’t have good control of a team.”
Bob Gainey, who’d been a buffer between Perron and the players, sizes up the key contrary qualities of the two coaches. “Jean came from more of an academic university background and Pat was from a traditional minor hockey, junior hockey grass roots. Their personalities were as different as their background. Jean was very analytical and Pat was a roll-up-your-sleeves type, raw and edgy, but passionate, with good intuition and good instincts.”
The Habs were seen to be in need of behaviour correction after bar brawls and reckless conduct had made headlines. A quarter-century later and returned to the Canadiens as a consultant, Savard remembers it differently. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he objects. “We didn’t have any problems worse than other teams. If you have a group of twenty-five players, there’s always two or three guys that would break the rules at some time, that would go to bars, that would have one drink too many at times. We’d won the Cup with those same guys, mostly, in 1986, so we had a good group there.”
“We had a lot of character,” concurs Patrick Roy, the dynastic goaltender who’d captured a Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP on the ’86 Stanley Cup team. “That’s why we won in ’86 and why we went as far as we did in ’89. But I could understand why Serge thought he needed a coach with a better grip. Burnsie was a good fit for us. He was different from Jean Perron, more strict, tougher. He was very demanding on the players. He had his views, but I thought he was fair. If you didn’t want to work hard for him, then you were going for a good ride.”
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