No. 90: PAT BURNS, PART I / What was said in the smoking room stayed in the smoking room ... until now. Quality time alone with the NHL's angriest man & the best coach in his time.
I had strange private audiences with the Hockey Hall of Fame coach. Wish he was still around, but he'd kill me if he were around to read this.
Pat Burns would be celebrating his 71st birthday today. I don’t know how many folks thought he’d make it to that age. I’d have bet the under and he might have too. It’s a good excuse to pay tribute to one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve written about.
Today’s entry is a chapter about Burns that you’ll find about halfway through my memoir for Audible—yup, that painful reliving of my life and times that gave this SubStack its name. The text is here to read in its entirety for paid subscribers. As always, I think you can have a look at it if you sign up for a free trial. If I do a print version of the memoir I might not include the Burns chapter—in fact, I was talked out of dropping it from the Audible Original by Susie Bright, my editor with the outfit. Her advice was something along the lines of “don’t you dare.”
I was never sure if How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) should be directed at a Canadian or American audience. They’re different animals to be sure. This will definitely hit harder north of the border and the closer you get to Montreal and Toronto.
While Pat Burns coached the New Jersey Devils to a Stanley Cup and also worked the bench for the Bruins, he was and remains much more a name in Canada than the U.S. by virtue of being the rare coach who had runs with both the Canadiens and the Maple Leafs.
I don’t know why we got along well. I’m not saying he had a soft spot for me, because he was a man utterly without soft spots. I’m not saying he trusted me, because I’m not sure who earned his trust outside his family.
The last time I talked to him was back in ‘06 when I was working on When the Lights When Out, my book about the brawl between the Canadian and Soviet teams at the 1987 World Juniors. Burns had been the assistant to Bert Templeton behind the Canadian bench and if I hadn’t been able to him, well, it would have left a conspicuous hole in the narrative. Burns had been diagnosed with liver cancer not long before I phoned him and left a message. I didn’t expect a call back, but he did. We ended up talking for almost an hour, half the time about the bench-clearing in Piestany and half the time about nothing in particular at all.
I asked how he was feeling, never saying the C-word, just vaguely tap-dancing around the subject. I figured he’d beat it, but all he could was fight it off. He had a few years after that, a few good days in years, a few miles to ride on his Harleys on those days. In the piece below I recount a times we met and talked on his turf—you might think I should have gone back to see him towards the end, but he made it pretty plain that he didn’t want to be seen, that he had other priorities.
As I say in the deck below the headline, he’d kill me if he could read this, but that would just be keeping up appearances. In character, as it were.
DON’T GET TOO CLOSE TO YOUR SUBJECTS
(WITHOUT A DESIGNATED DRIVER)
PAT Burns went into the Hockey Hall of Fame as a coach in 2014. "Too late, “say I. Too late he’d say too, if he could. After a years-long battle with cancer, Burns died at age fifty-eight in 2010.
The old boys on the Hall of Fame committee had plenty of notice regarding Burns’ health, but couldn’t find it in their tiny, hollow hearts to fast-track his plaque. We’ll never know why they passed over the three-time winner of the Jack Adams Award, and winner of a Stanley Cup with the Devils. Their strict observation of secrecy makes Freemasons look like blabbermouths. The only good reason to hold Burns name back, would've been the assumption that Pat’s embarrassment of going in alive would have killed him even earlier.
I was just a rubber-necking fan back in ’93 when Burns went face-to-face, mullet to mullet, epithet-for-four-lettered-epithet with Kings’ coach Barry Melrose, storming between the benches.
With the possible exception of Doug Gilmour and Wendel Clark, Burns was Joe Toronto’s favourite Leaf. Everyone recognized his glower, his menace enough to make houseplants wilt. Everyone knew his backstory, the ex-cop who made good in the game. He was iron fist in a mitten knit with razor wire, cruel but fair. Doubtless, he was a despot, but he was our despot.
I covered the Leafs on a daily basis near the end of Burns’s glorious run with the team, commencing with the lockout season of 1995 and through to the very bitter end in March ’96. We got off to an inauspicious but memorable start. A colleague at the paper introduced me to Burns on my first day as a card-carrying beat guy. This was like giving me a tour of the zoo and beginning by feeding me to the lion.
I said something to the effect of good-to-meet-you. He was singularly unmoved, and my extended hand went un-shook.
“Are you the guy who wrote that I dye my hair?” he said.
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