Coach: The Pat Burns Story by Rosie Dimanno

seen who was able to do that.”
    The impish part of Burns delighted in “screwing around” with his players, says Robitaille, getting inside their heads, but usually with a tactical purpose. There was a kid on the team, local boy, whom Burns adored because he played with ferocious emotion. “One time Pat came on the bus when we were travelling to another city. He was talking real loud. Then he winked at me and said that the centre on the team we were going to face was a real tough guy and that we might be making a trade to get him. It wasn’t true, but Pat was trying to get that Hull kid all revved up. And of course, when the game started, he went right after that hotshot as soon asthe puck dropped. Pat did whatever he had to do to get the best out of you and help us win.”
    The Burns Rules were simple. “You have to perform, bottom line,” continues Robitaille. “If he said we had a curfew, everybody respected it. But he was a disciplinarian in the way that made sense. He wanted you to be a better hockey player. He wanted you to be respectful of the organization and the city that we played in, but he let you be a human being. He knew it was a game and had to be fun.” Then, adding with a chuckle: “Of course, it was more fun for him when we won. But he helped me become a better player in the sense of understanding the sacrifices you have to make in order to win. And that’s everything, as far as a player is concerned.”
    Although Burns, in his second season with Hull, told reporters he was giving himself two years to make the NHL—and met that self-imposed deadline—he never gave his junior players the impression of just passing through, eyeing a finer prize up ahead. “We didn’t think that way, not even him,” says Robitaille, who would make the leap directly out of junior and play nineteen seasons in the NHL, sixteen of them during three separate stints as a Los Angeles King, where he’s now president of business operations. “He and I kind of started together, but whatever we were doing at the time, we thought that was the greatest. He loved being a coach in junior. Then he went to the AHL and he loved that. I don’t think when Pat went to the AHL he thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be two years in the minors and then I’m going to the National Hockey League.’ He went to the AHL and just thought, ‘I want to win here.’ He looked at the team and thought, ‘I’m going to do the best that I can here.’ When he turned to the NHL, he didn’t think, ‘I’m going to coach in this league for ten years.’ I know he thought, ‘What can I do for this team to be the best team it can be today?’ And he grinded that into us in juniors, too.
    “That’s probably why he was only in one city three or four years at a time, because he did so much about
that
day—what was important
that
day.” Which, frankly, is a euphemistic way of saying Burns could also exhaust his players by being so remorselessly demanding, paying the penalty when players—or a cabal of them—ultimately revolted years later,in the NHL. “He never protected his own angle,” notes Robitaille. “It was never, ‘Okay, if I make this decision I’ll be here longer.’ ”
    Few players had a more complicated relationship with Burns than Stéphane Richer, the quixotic French-Canadian luminary, heir apparent in Montreal to the reverence bestowed on The Flower, Guy Lafleur. He possessed a similar flair and flourish, if not the emotional equilibrium necessary to withstand the pressure unique to being a Canadien. Richer’s tendency towards depression, mental brittleness, is a subject he’s opened up about only in recent years; at the time, he was pigeonholed as a flake, even a diva, and he certainly tested Burns’s patience.
    Richer was only a child when their paths first crossed, fatefully so. “He’s the one who saved my life. I always say, if not for him, I’m sure I would never have become a professional hockey player. He