Free Coach: The Pat Burns Story by Rosie Dimanno

his two linesmen actually fled the scene, seeking shelter in the officials’ room.
    “A big-mouthed yo-yo who can’t wait to agitate the opposition into yet another rumble,”
Toronto Star
columnist John Robertson wrote of Burns in the next day’s paper, from half a world away. It was a panic-stricken apparatchik from the International Ice Hockey Federation who gave the lights-out order in a vain attempt to douse the melee. Soviets and Canadians paired up, apparently intent on killing each other. It was the most wretched episode ever in international hockey, blackening the eye for country, coach and assistant coach, with heaps of I-told-you-so flung back home, Canadian hockey officials excoriated for putting a couple of known “hotheads”—Templeton and Burns—in charge of combustible youths. Yet future Montreal Canadiens captain Mike Keane, who’d gone
mano a mano
in an epic battle with future Olympic and NHL winger Valeri Zelepukin, insists nobody would have been capable of halting what ensued. “Pat and Bert were concerned with the five players on the ice. Something had to be done in a split second. As someone who was on the ice at that moment, I’m glad they did. The last time I looked, we were playing in a gold medal game, so the coaches must have done something right.”
    The game was never finished. Both teams were tossed out of the tournament, and Canada was tossed out of the country, players surrounded by soldiers when they emerged from the dressing room and proceeded to their bus, a military escort accompanying the vehicle to the border. Within weeks, a report submitted to the IIHF disciplinary committee recommended that all coaches and players (except for one goalie from each country because they hadn’t participated in the donnybrook) be disqualified frominternational hockey for terms of up to three years. (Those suspensions would be lifted for the players six months later.) Canada had to forfeit the bronze medal they had been assured of before the gold medal game began. The coaches’ suspensions held until December 31, 1989.
    It was a scandal Burns rarely spoke about in later years, though he remained bitter. “What happened in Czechoslovakia was a spontaneous flare-up and it was blown out of proportion,” he insisted. “It was amazing how many people who hadn’t seen the game knew all about it and who was to blame.” And the players, for the most part, remained unrepentant. “Looking back, it hurts,” says Keane. “But it isn’t a significant part of my life, that somebody didn’t sacrifice a gold medal instead of their players. If we’d won the game, would it have been okay, then?”
    Templeton would wear that disgrace until the day he died, but Burns’s reputation and blossoming career did not suffer. On June 8, he was introduced as new head coach of the Sherbrooke Canadiens of the American Hockey League, one step away from the NHL.

Chapter Four
A Year on Serge’s Farm
    “Pat taught players how to play .
And if you didn’t do it, you wouldn’t play.”
    P AT B URNS could count on the fingers of one hand the people he trusted. His mother, Louise, was the thumb. In the summer of 1987, when he drove to Montreal to be interviewed by Serge Savard for the coaching job with the Sherbrooke Canadiens, Louise came along riding shotgun. Burns was thirty-five years old, a father, a divorced husband and already a veteran ex-cop, yet he still clung anxiously to maternal apron strings on matters of importance, fretful of his own galumphing gaucheness in the bigger world beyond hinterland Gatineau. “He needed her for emotional support,” says sister Diane.
    Sherbrooke was just a small city in the Eastern Townships, perhaps a little more culturally polished than Hull. But as Montreal’s American League farm team, these Canadiens were umbilically tied to
those
Canadiens, although the affiliate had a hobo history, shunting around locales and shuffling place names: Montreal Voyageurs, Nova Scotia