Free Coach: The Pat Burns Story by Rosie Dimanno Page B

about two o’clock in the morning, and he says, ‘Guess what? They’ve offered me a contract!’ I said, ‘That’s terrific.’ Then he turns around and says, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t want me to stay and coach your team no more?’ He took it the wrong way.”
    Burns wasn’t joking; typically, he would look through the wrong end of the telescope, searching for the negative, an implied criticism. “He said, ‘Jesus Christ, I just signed a contract with the junior team and you want to get rid of me?’ I said, ‘Pat, I don’t want to lose you, but this is your opportunity knocking.’ But he was nervous, very nervous. I’m sure if I’d said, ‘Don’t go, you’re working for Wayne here’ and all that, he wouldn’t have gone. I more or less kicked him out the door by saying, ‘You can’t refuse Montreal.’ And he called me back a few hours later, around 6 a.m. He said, ‘Okay, I’ve signed and I’m on my way home now. We having breakfast?’ ”
    Burns had consulted with his ex-wife, Suzanne, on the offer because they’d remained friends. She thought he should go for it. That contract with Sherbrooke would pay Burns $35,000 for one year. A metamorphosing dandy, he immediately bought new suits.
    The AHL was more than a feeder league for its NHL masters. It was barrelhousing hockey with a distinct identity, devoid of coddling of players—some of whom were on their way up, others on their way down, career paths that often transected and clashed. Elbows were sharp, noses frequently out of joint and grudges stoked. Coaches, with no on-ice canvas to paint a hockey portfolio, carved out personality niches to get noticed, because nobody wants to be stuck in the minors forever. Restraint was a rarity.
    “I had no idea who Pat Burns was,” says Mike Milbury, recalling the salad days of a coaching rivalry that would later assume epic proportions in the NHL. A New Englander by birth, a former Bruins defenceman and future Boston skipper before turning GM on Long Island, Milbury entered the AHL coaching ranks the same year as Burns, making his debut with the Maine Mariners, Boston’s affiliate, and winning coach-of-the-year honours his first season. “All I knew was he was coaching a team in the organization that I had grown to hate. It was the American Hockey League, but it was still Montreal versus Boston on a minor scale. Pat was formerly a cop, and you didn’t really need to know him personally to get that he didn’t have a funny, smiley disposition. He was a very serious and very intense guy. In that first year, I had a very good team. He had a good team, but not good as mine. We had some serious battles. He was ready for it and I was ready for it.”
    They came to their coaching labours from opposite ends of the spectrum. Says Milbury: “I’d been thirteen years playing in the NHL and now I’m back in the American League level and piling on a bus to go to Sherbrooke.” Milbury and Burns would never cultivate much of a relationship away from the rink; though the latter would eventually follow in the former’s footsteps, plying his coaching trade for Harry Sinden in Beantown, each seared by the experience. “It was a time when you didn’t really converse much withthe other coach,” says Milbury. “There weren’t a lot of coaches’ conventions. It was just, ‘How do I beat the crap out of this guy’s team?’ Both of us were vocal, but I think it resulted in some pretty good hockey.
    “We yapped at each other plenty of times. The smallest slight on the ice could be reflected in the coach, and neither one of us would let it pass. It was a way to keep your team alert and awake—‘Look, this guy’s out of line and you’ve got to take care of him.’ We never got into it physically, but it set the stage for a couple of memorable Boston-Montreal playoffs in the late ’80s. I came to know Pat as a guy whose strengths really were in making sure his team was ready to play, which I think