Burns basked in his plumped celebrity as “new thinker” genius while always carefully commending his players. “The secret has been twenty-five good individuals who can pull together and who care about hockey and want to give their best to the game. It’s funny, but three or four bleep-bleeps on a team can screw things up. Well, we don’t have any of those.”
Except that he did have an expletive deleted—and Burns used them all—in the exasperating enigma that was Stéphane Richer, fallen idol. Coming off a fifty-goal season, the quintessential Flying Frenchman had fallen to Earth with a crashing thud and nobody could fathom why, least of all Richer. The young superstar tortured himself like a hockey Hamlet, trying to regain his Midas touch and tattered self-confidence. Acutely sensitive and mentally fragile, Richer had become a haunted man, repeatedly subjected to upbraiding by his coach, Burns monumentally mistaken in the belief that harping would be helpful. He’d known the twenty-two-year-old for nearly a decade and should have realized that a boot in this particular butt would pay no dividends. He punished Richer by reducing his ice time, which only exacerbated the scoring funk. A ten-game suspension early in the season for clubbing the Islanders’ Jeff Norton with a stick set the template for a season of woe. When Richer took himself out of a game, claiming the flu, Burns sat him for the next match. When the Richer melodrama appeared on the front page of a Montreal paper twice in one week, Burns went ballistic. “I’m fed up to here with Richer,” he thundered.
At the Forum, cheers turned to jeers and Richer was stricken. “When I make a check, they laugh. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Look at him; he finally hit someone.’ ” Reporters dined out on the purported breach between player and coach. The more Richer took his grievances to the media, the more Burns seethed. “I feel like I’m in a war,” Richer told journalists, bewildered by the controversy that raged in the papers and his aimless season. Roommate Guy Carbonneau stood in as layman therapist, providing the emotional support that was not forthcoming from an unsympathetic coach. Never a patient man, Burns was galled by the whole soap opera. “All that we’ve accomplished as a team suddenly doesn’t seem to matter,” he harrumphed. “All everyone is talking about is Stéphane Richer. I coach the Canadiens, and what’s important to me is the team. I can’t be concerned with just one player. I’ve played him regularly and on the power play. I can’t do any more. I can’t go out and play for him and I can’t stop the fans from yelling at him.”
In fact, Burns would claim for years afterwards—even from his deathbed—that he loved Richer like a son. That may have been the problem. Burns was no doting dad. He didn’t show the love. And Richer, who personified the term “flake,” often appearing to inhabit another planet, drove him nuts. “Huh, he loved me so much he traded me,” Richer says now, not without affection. “It doesn’t make sense, but it makes sense.”
That trade was still far in the future, though, during the season of 1988–89, a crucible year for Richer. In retrospect, he doesn’t blame Burns, or the hounding media. He was susceptible to depression, mood disorders that would not be diagnosed until middle age. “I was struggling inside,” he says. “I didn’t even know why. If I knew why at the time, it would have been easier to talk about. At the time, I was young. You don’t know what’s happening, [you’re] looking for answers and not finding any. I’d ask myself, ‘Why am I struggling like this?’ I didn’t have any fun on the ice. With Pat, it’s A or B, there’s no in-between. I tried to talk to him. I said, ‘Pat, I’m struggling with some things.’ But Pat, he didn’t want to be involved with this. He had enough coping with me while I was struggling on the ice.”
While grappling with his personal demons and finding no solace in the game that had turned on him, Richer was also burdened with the guilt of disappointing a man who’d plucked him as a boy from a dead-end small town. “He brought me up. All my buddies were on drugs. How would I have survived if he hadn’t done that? What would have become of me? I said to him, ‘Come on, Pat, you’ve known me from when I was fourteen, you know my background, you’re supposed to understand that I’m struggling.’ But he wanted to win so bad. When I saw him dealing with all the issues some players were having off the ice, I was, like, it doesn’t matter if I sit down and talk with him now, he’ll never listen. I told him once, ‘Pat, you don’t see me in the bar at four o’clock in the morning, you don’t see me drunk.’ But it was like he was deaf.
“It didn’t matter if I had a good game or not; he was always on my case. If I scored two, I should have scored three. He was always that way with me. From the moment I first pulled on a jersey in Hull, he was so tough on me, people have no idea.”
The Richer riddle aside, Montreal was firing on all cylinders, overtaking Calgary for first place overall in the league—the two teams would play leapfrog for the rest of the season—and everything was well in Burns World, though he was constitutionally incapable of disbelieving that catastrophe lurked just around the corner. Courtnall describes him as “kind of a doomsayer.” So he continued to push relentlessly. “He was afraid to give us a day off,” says Roy. “If we had a day off and we sucked the next game, the next day he would go at us and say, ‘That’s the last time you guys are going to have a day off … it’s payback now.’ ”
At the Forum, Roy never got a day off, and he flourished with the workload. In late March, he tied the unbeaten streak for goalies in their home barn—25, set by Bill Durnan in 1943–44—and did it on just four hours’ sleep, his girlfriend having given birth at 3 a.m. to their first child, son Jonathan. Then he broke the record, undefeated at the Forum all year with a record of 25–0–4—twenty-nine wins in a row dating back to the previous season; overall, 33–5–6 on the year.
Through the final weeks, Burns spelled his veteran players, even sending Robinson to Florida for five days to rest up. Youngsters from Sherbrooke were called upon to fill the holes and get a taste of the NHL. Montreal won ten of its last fifteen games, a tad off their torrid pace, which cost them the Presidents’ Trophy as top team in the league. They finished with 115 points—their highest since 1981–82—2 behind Calgary and a whopping 27 points ahead of Boston.
It was often said of the Canadiens that they owned the Stanley Cup and just sometimes rented it out. Burns & Company squared up for the playoffs, intent on bringing their heirloom home.
Chapter Six
So Close
“They raised the Cup in our rink, and that killed Pat.”
CLAUDE LEMIEUX is writhing on the ice. He appears to be in agony. At the Montreal bench, trainer Gaëtan Lefebvre starts clambering over the boards to render first aid. Pat Burns grabs his sweater, pulling him back. “Let the SOB lie there.”
It is game one of the 1989 Stanley Cup final in Calgary, and Lemieux is a lonely figure under the white glare of TV lights. No teammate has come to help. No penalty has been called against Jamie Macoun, who had done nothing more to cause this drop-dead pantomime than lightly tap Lemieux’s leg with his stick. As it dawns on him that assistance isn’t forthcoming, Lemieux stops thrashing, wobbles onto his knees, laboriously stands erect and skates to the bench. Not a word is uttered.
“I just remember lying there thinking, ‘Where’s the trainer?’ There’s twenty thousand people in the building, it’s the playoffs, and nobody’s coming. I was like, ‘Are you friggin’ kidding me?’ And then I have to get back to the bench. It was very embarrassing.”
One of hockey’s most notorious pests and a hammy injury faker, Lemieux has wearied of revisiting this humiliating incident. The story changes constantly. Twenty-three years later, in his downtown Toronto office, Lemieux says he wasn’t faking. Much. Entirely. But he’s vague about the pre-existing ailment that Macoun’s touch-wood activated. He’d had a sore ankle, he seems to recall. And there was definitely an abdominal problem, which took more than a year to properly diagnose. “I was hurt. I wasn’t faking. I went down and I was in a lot of pain.”
What pained and exasperated Burns was the chronic penalty baiti
ng at which Lemieux excelled and which had become a very tired act by the spring of 1989. At the time, Lemieux certainly seemed to acknowledge he’d been emoting when queried by reporters. “I used to do it in ’86 when we won the Cup, but it’s not working this year,” he said. “If the referee, Andy Van Hellemond, had called a spear and they’d got a five-minute major and we’d scored, I’d be a hero.”
He was not his coach’s idea of a hero. Burns hated phony theatrics and considered such bush-league antics unworthy of a Canadien. If genuinely injured, Lemieux was the bad boy who’d cried wolf once too often, though Burns had picked an odd moment to wise up his great pretender, with seven minutes left in a playoff final game that Calgary would win 3–2. “I told him it doesn’t work anymore,” growled Burns. “The referees aren’t stupid.” Even prior to the episode, before the series had opened, Lemieux’s well-known diving habits were mocked in a Calgary newspaper cartoon. It depicted him convulsing on the ice and the caption read: “As far as injuries go, Gary Suter is out indefinitely. Mark Hunter is day-to-day and Claude Lemieux is listed as minute-to-minute.”
What wounded Lemieux most deeply was that no other Hab had made even a pretence of helping him off the ice. “I can understand that,” he says now. “If the coach holds the trainer back, I think the team is going to be hands-off. No teammate is going to run over.” The silence on the bench was crushing. “I remember saying to the trainer, ‘What the eff?’ And then I knew. I was totally embarrassed and I was truly hurt. After that, I thought, there’s no way I’m going to keep playing here for this guy. I knew I was going to ask for a trade.”
Lemieux and Burns had been rubbing each other the wrong way all year, dating back to the player’s unsportsmanlike penalty (for arguing with a referee) and game misconduct in Montreal’s first home game of the season. Many times, they’d sparred verbally. Burns believed Lemieux was malingering when he complained about a sore groin that never much improved.
“I had this mysterious injury that couldn’t be diagnosed. It was a stomach tear, but no doctors could see anything. Pat thought I was faking an injury, like I didn’t want to play for him and this was my way of doing it. That was foolish, because if you’re going to get traded, you’ve got to be healthy. So that wasn’t a very good assessment.”
He says Burns also mocked him for wearing a visor. “He thought guys who wore visors were cowards. He was always making comments from the bench to guys who wore visors. In the back of his mind, he felt that if you’re going to play a tough game, you can’t wear a visor. To me, wearing a visor was about protecting my eyes from all the stickwork that was happening. It had nothing to do with not being tough or not wanting to fight, because I fought a ton in junior hockey and I wore a visor back then. So we weren’t in agreement, Pat and I.”
Lemieux suggests an undercurrent of tension may have arisen simply from the fact they were so much alike—emotional and stubborn. When sent down to Sherbrooke four years earlier, Lemieux was so distressed that he took a stick and shattered all the windows of his car. Burns could relate to that kind of passion. But as coach and tempestuous player, uh-uh. “It was too much fire for both of us in a setting like Montreal, where everything is looked at under a microscope,” says Lemieux. Away from the ice, Lemieux claims he and Burns got on surprisingly well. During those ’89 playoffs, Lemieux had opted to doss down at a Montreal hotel because he had young kids at home and needed quiet. Burns was staying at the same place. “One night he said to me, ‘Come sit down, we’ll have a beer.’ And we got along just great. But there was that blockage once we got to the rink.”
There was constant aggravation over Lemieux’s ice time, a recurring theme in media coverage. Burns clearly had a preference for the likes of Mike Keane and Shayne Corson, hard-nosed types. “Those were his boys and he loved them. I loved them too, as teammates. And I knew they were very important players on the team. But not at my expense. I had a career, I had a living to make. I didn’t like the fact that Pat didn’t believe in me as much as I thought he should. I thought I was a much better player than he thought I was. And it turned out, in hindsight, 20/20, that I was right and he was wrong.”
All that sturm und drang that erupted after the Calgary game, says Lemieux, could have been averted if Burns had counselled him better, opened his eyes to the error of his feigning ways before it came to a head. “These things, most coaches don’t tell you to do it, but it was part of my game early on. For me, I was trying to create an odd-man situation for our team, and it would work most of the time. I wish Pat would have come to me and said, ‘I just don’t want you to do that anymore.’ But we didn’t have that kind of communication, so I’d do it, and if it worked it was great and if not, well, he didn’t appreciate it. He definitely taught me a lesson, but it would have been better if we’d talked in a private room.”
Lemieux had been a rookie on the Montreal team that won the Cup over Calgary in 1986 and he contributed tremendously to that triumph, scoring ten goals in twenty games. He also bit the finger of Jim Peplinski during a postgame brawl. But he had just two goals and two assists to that point in these playoffs. When Burns put him on the Black Aces line at practice the next day, Lemieux knew he would not be in the starting lineup for game two—which Montreal, regrouping, won 4–2. That triggered another blast against purported anti-francophone bias, from one high-profile correspondent, Réjean Tremblay, then of La Presse, the Montreal daily. Tremblay accused Burns of making scapegoats out of the French-Canadian players. Snarled Burns: “I’m not anti-francophone. I’m anti-asshole.” That l’Affaire Lemieux column got Tremblay booted off the Canadiens charter when the team flew back to Montreal.
“I thought Pat had done something a coach should not do,” says Tremblay. “You just don’t leave one of your players on the ice, even if you know he’s acting. What I wrote is that he seemed to favour players who were tough guys, like Chelios and Corson. The way he talked about them, he’d use their nicknames, you know? A player like Stéphane Richer (for example) was too sensitive to be part of Pat’s gang. Maybe this is the difference in sensitivity between French and English.” Looking back, Tremblay is more sanguine now about what happened then, stressing that he and Burns resolved that disagreement; indeed, Tremblay would become a media conduit for Burns later on, columnist and coach exploiting each other with slyly planted stories and scoops. “He was not anti-francophone, I don’t think; he was anti–soft players. And Claude … well, Claude had problems with his coaches everywhere after Pat.”
Press rewind.
The Canadiens teed up that Cup final against Calgary, a replay of 1986, by acquitting themselves with ferocity and flair through three earlier rounds. Before the games started, Burns went out and bought himself a new set of suits, establishing a tradition he would maintain throughout his career. Come the playoffs, he’d replenish his wardrobe. He loved shopping, dropping between $900 and $1,200 per ready-to-wear suit, preferring Canadian designers to Europeans, a valued customer of Aquascutum in Montreal. His rule: No suit worn twice on any road trip. Apart from the thirty-five-or-so suits he’d amassed, there were literally hundreds of ties, selected to suit his mood. And he was in a marvellous mood.
The Canadiens wiped out Hartford in the Adams Division semifinal, W-W-W-W, Montreal displaying a powerful transition game and relentless in capitalizing on the opposition’s mistakes. No surprise in the outcome; Montreal had a 7–1 record against the Whalers in ’88–89, were thirty-six points better on the regular season and had ousted them two years in a row. “Everybody except some psychic in Edmonton picked us to lose,” said Hartford captain Ron Francis. Lose they did, though three of the games were decided by one goal, two of them in overtime. The sweep gave Montreal an eight-day rest to deal with niggling injuries before meeting Boston.
Bruins were decided underdogs, 0–7–1 in the regular season versus Montreal and badly banged up. Burns tried mightily to present his team as the disadvantaged side and longer shot. Nobody was buying it. That perception was
not eroded when the Canadiens churned out a 3–2 win in a soporific opener, Montreal asserting its signature defensive potency, nor by the 3–2 overtime result that followed in game two. “Destiny’s Doormats” the Bruins were being called. Yet there were some Cassandra voices that warned Montreal was playing just well enough to win, and now was headed to the hostile environs of the Boston Garden.
In game three it was a plucky Boston team that battled back from a 3–0 deficit for 3–3 and 4–4 ties, only to succumb 5–4 on Russ Courtnall’s breakaway with 6:08 left to play in regulation time. Now Montreal had a stranglehold on the series. But Boston drew on its own grit in game four. The Bruins struck first, but that lead was erased when a misplay by Michael Thelven handed Russ Courtnall a breakaway. The disgusted audience treated Thelven to a hail of loafers, dress shoes and sneakers to show their displeasure. Thelven atoned by unloading a hard drive in the second period that sailed past Brian Hayward in the Montreal net, Boston up 3–1. A heart-stopping too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty with just over five minutes left in the game, Bruins ahead 3–2, brought back nightmares of the infamous night ten years earlier that will follow Don Cherry to his grave. In the box seats, GM Harry Sinden and owner Jeremy Jacobs looked at each other. Admitted Sinden, “We both said the same thing—‘1979.’ ” This time, the Bruins survived unscathed—holding Montreal to only sixteen shots and emerging with a 3–2 win—and the series returned to Montreal. “Believe me, we wanted to finish it in four,” said Burns. “But instead, they lit a fire under themselves.” The coach singled out Shayne Corson and the entire D crew for scorching. “Our defence spent almost the whole game on their butts. We’ve got to start winning the battles in the corners and along the boards.” He demanded they be meaner and tougher and stingier.
Corson responded by scoring his first goal of the series in game five to break a 1–1 tie in what was eventually an altogether thrilling 3–2 series victory for Montreal. Stéphane Richer, who’d lit the goal light just once in the Adams Division final and had been justly accused of failing to answer the bell, notched the winner. Facing reporters afterwards, Burns got in a last word first. “Before you say we didn’t play well in this series, give Boston some credit. [Coach] Terry O’Reilly did a tremendous job with the talent he had. It was a slugfest.” For the fifth time in six seasons, Montreal had vanquished the Bruins. This was not good enough for some. Along press row, a columnist absurdly suggested Burns had actually plotted the game four loss—with Hayward in the net instead of the invincible Roy—because he coveted a series win at home. It’s just that kind of media town.
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