picked me out from this little town in Quebec, brought me to play for his midget team in Hull. Pat knew I was a lonely kid from up north who was supposed to be good, I guess. He was still a cop at the time, but he knew people around who were watching young players. Pat called my dad and asked if I was willing to leave my hometown to go to Hull. That was a big step for me. My dad said, ‘Well, it’s up to you, kid. Do you want to go there? Then you call Pat. We’re not doing it for you. You be a man.’
“Here I was, a fourteen-year-old kid thinking of leaving home. But Pat said, ‘I believe you can do something right in your life.’ ”
The adjustment was difficult. “Scared? Oh man. When you play minor hockey with all your buddies and suddenly you’re playing in a big city like Hull—full equipment, new pants. I was like, ‘Wow, what just happened here?’ ” He was also the smallest player, only five foot three and 135 pounds. Burns put him on the fourth line. Then he shot up to five foot ten by the end of the season.
Hull Kiwanis, Burns’s midget team, was a culture shock for the yokel Richer. “For Midget AA, they were pretty good. All the guys were older than me. We were supposed to win everything, and we almost did. It wasfunny, though. Pat used to put his policeman’s stuff on the table, put on the hockey gear for a couple of hours, then change back into his policeman clothes, get in his car and go back to work.”
After enticing the young Richer to Hull, Burns showed him no favour, cut him no slack for his rawness, his disorientation. “It was always, ‘Do you realize how lucky you are?’ A lot of times, I was the one who had to pay the price for everyone else. Trust me, he was tough. We were all scared of him. Pat was a good hockey man, but he forgot that we were only fourteen and fifteen years old.”
Richer would be drafted onto a Midget AAA team but would be reunited with Burns, with considerable misery for both, several years later in Montreal, after playing his junior hockey in Granby and Chicoutimi. “In juniors, I wasn’t dreaming about the NHL. I was just trying to survive, pretty much; never thought about the next level, whatever it might be. But I knew if I wanted to do something great in my life—like Pat had told me—I had to take care of myself, accept the discipline. When you’re away from your family, it’s easy to go astray. Pat understood that and kept a very close eye on me.”
The life skills Burns imparted, in tough-love mode, came with the job as a junior coach, even though in his personal life he was, in those days, a distant and only sporadically involved dad. Burns was ushering his protégés towards maturity while teaching them how to tap into depths of potential most didn’t quite realize they possessed.
Yet there were surprisingly few technical tutorials at a level of organized hockey—both midget and juniors—where instruction is a primary component. “He was never a technical coach,” says Richer. “Pat didn’t know anything about technique, to be honest. I don’t think he even knew that word at the time.”
Cam Russell, who landed with the Hull Olympiques as a sixteen-year-old, shares that assessment. “He was a motivator all the way. There wasn’t a lot of technical coaching in him: one defenceman in the corner, onedefenceman in front of the net, forecheck hard, backcheck hard and make sure you give 100 per cent every shift—and if you didn’t, you’d hear it from him. The biggest thing with Pat was accountability, and it didn’t matter who you were. Our best players were our hardest-working players, and that’s a great credit to your coach when you can get your skill guys to be your hardest-working guys.”
When Russell arrived, Gretzky was the team’s owner, the clincher in his opting for the QMJHL. As a teen from the Maritimes, Russell—from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia—could have chosen from any of the three junior leagues in Canada:
“Here I was, a fourteen-year-old kid thinking of leaving home. But Pat said, ‘I believe you can do something right in your life.’ ”
The adjustment was difficult. “Scared? Oh man. When you play minor hockey with all your buddies and suddenly you’re playing in a big city like Hull—full equipment, new pants. I was like, ‘Wow, what just happened here?’ ” He was also the smallest player, only five foot three and 135 pounds. Burns put him on the fourth line. Then he shot up to five foot ten by the end of the season.
Hull Kiwanis, Burns’s midget team, was a culture shock for the yokel Richer. “For Midget AA, they were pretty good. All the guys were older than me. We were supposed to win everything, and we almost did. It wasfunny, though. Pat used to put his policeman’s stuff on the table, put on the hockey gear for a couple of hours, then change back into his policeman clothes, get in his car and go back to work.”
After enticing the young Richer to Hull, Burns showed him no favour, cut him no slack for his rawness, his disorientation. “It was always, ‘Do you realize how lucky you are?’ A lot of times, I was the one who had to pay the price for everyone else. Trust me, he was tough. We were all scared of him. Pat was a good hockey man, but he forgot that we were only fourteen and fifteen years old.”
Richer would be drafted onto a Midget AAA team but would be reunited with Burns, with considerable misery for both, several years later in Montreal, after playing his junior hockey in Granby and Chicoutimi. “In juniors, I wasn’t dreaming about the NHL. I was just trying to survive, pretty much; never thought about the next level, whatever it might be. But I knew if I wanted to do something great in my life—like Pat had told me—I had to take care of myself, accept the discipline. When you’re away from your family, it’s easy to go astray. Pat understood that and kept a very close eye on me.”
The life skills Burns imparted, in tough-love mode, came with the job as a junior coach, even though in his personal life he was, in those days, a distant and only sporadically involved dad. Burns was ushering his protégés towards maturity while teaching them how to tap into depths of potential most didn’t quite realize they possessed.
Yet there were surprisingly few technical tutorials at a level of organized hockey—both midget and juniors—where instruction is a primary component. “He was never a technical coach,” says Richer. “Pat didn’t know anything about technique, to be honest. I don’t think he even knew that word at the time.”
Cam Russell, who landed with the Hull Olympiques as a sixteen-year-old, shares that assessment. “He was a motivator all the way. There wasn’t a lot of technical coaching in him: one defenceman in the corner, onedefenceman in front of the net, forecheck hard, backcheck hard and make sure you give 100 per cent every shift—and if you didn’t, you’d hear it from him. The biggest thing with Pat was accountability, and it didn’t matter who you were. Our best players were our hardest-working players, and that’s a great credit to your coach when you can get your skill guys to be your hardest-working guys.”
When Russell arrived, Gretzky was the team’s owner, the clincher in his opting for the QMJHL. As a teen from the Maritimes, Russell—from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia—could have chosen from any of the three junior leagues in Canada:
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