Burke's Law: A Life in Hockey

YOU SHOULD NEVER START A FIGHT, BUT YOU SHOULD FINISH EVERY ONE

I COULDN’T SLEEP.

Objectively, there wasn’t a lot of reason to be nervous. We were coming home to Anaheim, up three games to one on the Ottawa Senators in the 2007 Stanley Cup final. We had lost only five games—total—during the playoffs, we had knocked off the mighty Detroit Red Wings in the conference final, and we had the series under control against an underdog team that should have been happy just to be there.

But I couldn’t let myself think that way, and I kept tossing and turning all night long with worst-case scenarios running through my mind. What if Scotty Niedermayer gets the flu? What if somebody blows out their groin during the pre-game warm-up? If the Senators win, then we’re back in their rink for Game 6. If they win that, then it’s Game 7, and those are always a coin toss. I was worried about everything. It was a fucking nightmare.

The truth is, the Stanley Cup playoffs aren’t fun for a general manager—they’re exciting, but not fun. You’re cursing your players, cursing the referees, worrying about everything that could go wrong, and it’s all out of your control.

My wife, Jennifer, tried to reassure me.

These guys aren’t going to let you down, she said. You’re not going back to Ottawa.

She was right, of course, but that night, it didn’t help a bit. We were so close to claiming the greatest prize in sports. There’s no championship that’s harder to win, and when they engrave your name on the old silver chalice, it’s there forever. After the long, unlikely journey I’d been on since the first day I put on a pair of skates, there was no way I was taking it for granted.

The next morning, I pulled into the parking lot at the Honda Center at dawn, which was part of my daily routine.

If you run a hockey team in Canada, everyone knows who you are, and you can pretty much do whatever you want around the arena. But not in Southern California. Not down the block from Disneyland. The security guys at the rink never seemed to figure out who I was—or at least they never acknowledged it. They’d ask me for ID every time, and they would never let me enter through the door that was closest to where we parked, even though I had a master key that would let me in. I had to go through the official security entrance, which was a colossal pain in the ass.

Today, of all days, I wasn’t in the mood to play that game again.

I’ve got this key, so clearly I’m somebody here, I told the security guy. I’m not showing my ID to anybody, and no matter what you say, I’m walking through this door. You can go ahead and call your supervisor if you like, but I’m going in—and by the way, I’m winning the Stanley Cup tonight.

At least they didn’t throw me out.

—

Chris Pronger got hurt in that game—so all my crazy fears weren’t completely unfounded. But they shot him up and he stayed on the ice, and by the third period we had a comfortable lead.

With five minutes left in the third period, John Muckler, who was running the Senators, came over to my box and congratulated me. Muck’s a good guy, but in that moment, all I could think was that the fucker was trying to jinx us. I didn’t start to relax until Corey Perry scored to make it 6–2 with three minutes to go.

This was the moment a hockey person dreams about their whole life, and I was going to enjoy it. I went down to the bench to watch the final seconds tick off the clock. The players were all excited and yelling, and our owner, Henry Samueli, was hollering as well, though mostly unintelligibly.

Our video guy came down, and when the clock hit zero, he shouted, The Chiefs have won the championship of the Federal League!—a line right out of Slap Shot. Everyone who loves hockey loves Slap Shot. We all laughed our asses off.

It got surreal after that. I went on the ice and did an interview with Ron MacLean, but I honestly didn’t remember doing it until I saw it on an NHL Network replay years later. The crowd was so loud that I was yelling into the mike.

And then it was my turn to lift the Cup, but I have bad shoulders—I had surgery on one of them that spring. If you watch the tape, you can see that I have trouble getting my arms fully extended because my shoulders were fucked, even though the Cup weighs only about 35 pounds.

I was looking for my wife in the crowd, but I couldn’t find her. Meanwhile, there was chaos all around me. What a moment. It was like climbing Mount Everest. But it wasn’t like we didn’t see it coming.

It’s supposed to be bad luck to talk about winning a Cup before it actually happens, but with that Anaheim team, we started talking about it in training camp. We knew how good we were, and after we got Pronger, we were loaded. We had made it as far as the conference final the year before, which gave our young guys some valuable training experience. And then we started the season with at least a point in each of our first 16 games.

That was a team of destiny. I will believe until I die that those Ducks could have beaten any team that has won the Cup since. Maybe Washington would have given us a bit of trouble, but that’s about it. Teemu Selanne. Ryan Getzlaf. Corey Perry. We had all kinds of skill. J.S. Giguere was the best money goaltender in the business. You want to hit? We’ll beat the shit out of you. You want to fight? We do that better than anybody. We fought in the first round of the playoffs, we fought in the second round of the playoffs, we fought in the third round of the playoffs and we fought in the finals. You may never see that again. It was a tough team, but we could play—even our fourth-line heavyweights, George Parros and Shawn Thornton, could play. And Randy Carlyle was the perfect coach for them.

After the game, the dressing room was jammed. My parents were there, and I remember going into the coaches’ office and sitting there with my mom and dad, just savouring the moment. My dad was so proud.

And then Pronger came in. When the game ended and our guys were celebrating on the ice, he skated off by himself and grabbed the game puck (some of the media guys actually criticized him for that, because he wasn’t immediately with his teammates). He walked over to me and handed me the puck. You put this team together, he said. This is yours.

I still have it.

Now it was time for me to take a drink out of the Cup. My son Brendan and my daughter Molly had already had their chance. Then the players started chanting, Burkie wants a drink! Burkie wants a drink! Travis Moen and Parros were holding it, pouring in champagne and warm Bud Light. It was a disgusting mix, and 20 people had already slobbered on it—but it was the best, sweetest drink I’ve ever had in my life. At least it was until they tipped it up and poured it all over me.

The party was going to continue for most of the night, and I was exhausted. I told Jennifer that I was finished and had to go home. Let the players party on. I needed to get some sleep.

I’ll never forget that night. I’ll never forget the whole journey to win it. I’ll never forget the satisfaction. When I went to bed that night, I slept well for the first time in weeks—because in the playoffs, you don’t sleep. But that night, I slept like a baby as a Stanley Cup champion.

Looking back now, I savour those moments. They’re what we strive for. The ultimate. As a general manager, you have to put the right players and the right coach in the room. You’re not the guy who wins the Cup, but you’re the architect.

We had the coaches over to the house the next day, and then later in the summer we had a big party back in Vancouver, where we closed down a restaurant for the night, and none other than Gordie Howe walked in off the street. It was a pure coincidence.

Okay if I crash your party? he asked.

Whatever you want, Mr. Howe.

We had the Cup in the room, and Gordie was showing people his name engraved on the rings.

—

Hockey has been a miracle in my life, and in my family’s life. I’ve travelled the globe. I’ve educated four kids, and I’m educating two more now. The sport has given me so much, and it has given me a voice.

I’m hoping that when people look back on my career, they say five things: he had the right values and made a difference in the cities where he lived and worked; he was a family man, and he brought some good young people along with him. I’ve been a mentor, and I’m proud of that. Oh, and the fifth? He won a Cup.

It’s been a great ride, and it continues. I’m still part of the hockey scene as part of the media, and I still love it. I can’t wait to go to a morning skate tomorrow. I feel the same excitement I’ve always felt.

And I know, especially, that I have been extremely fortunate to have lived the life I’ve lived.

—

I know you’re not going to believe this, but I was a shy kid. It will surprise you less to know that I was always up for a scrap.

I’m the fourth of 10 children in an Irish Catholic (I guess that part is self-evident) family. My oldest brother Bill, my late sister Ellen and my brother John came before me. We were born in consecutive years—May, June, May, June. My mother never got a rest. I was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in June 1955. Mom took a year off and then had my sister Joan Rachel, followed by Andrea, then Christa, then the twins—Matthew and Victoria—and finally the baby of the family, Meghan.

The great thing about having all those brothers and sisters was that there was always someone to talk to, always someone to read with, always someone to play a board game with.

I was a skinny kid with glasses and crooked teeth (I got braces in high school.). My older brothers could have been embarrassed having me hang around with them, but they never acted that way. They let me tag along, which is why I wasn’t afraid of playing against older kids in sports, and why my musical tastes skewed a little bit older than those of other kids my own age.

My older brothers were my heroes then, and they still are today. Not that we always got along—and they were always willing to fight. Bill and John and I would fight at the drop of a hat.

Dad was bewildered by that. He’d been involved in only one fight in his entire life. When he was in the navy, he had a beef with a guy, and they settled it in the boxing ring.

I’ve only had one fight in my life and you guys have 25 a year, he’d say to us. What’s wrong with me as a father?

When you grow up with two older brothers who both looked after you and toughened you up, you wind up not being afraid of anything. I was never bullied, never picked on, even though I was a small kid.

Some of that attitude also came from my grandmother Burke. I remember a time when we were visiting her in Clifton, New Jersey. I was out playing by myself and these two neighbourhood kids jumped me and beat me up.

You go right back out and fight them again, she told me.

So, I went out, full of fear and trepidation because those kids were bigger than me—but I had a mandate from Grandma, and I wasn’t going back and facing her unless I carried it out. I beat ’em both up.

That’s all right, then, Grandma said—that was her favourite phrase. You should never start a fight, but you should finish every one of them.

—

The Burke side of the family came from County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland. My great-grandfather Patrick Burke—my son is named after him—got off the boat at Ellis Island in 1861. The American Civil War had just begun, and like a lot of Irish émigrés, he joined the Union Army. He spent a year in the infantry before figuring out that riding a horse was easier than walking—that’s when he re-enlisted in the cavalry, where he spent another three years.

After the war ended, they sent him to Colorado to fight Indians. He was mustered out there and moved back to Jersey City, where he got a job in construction as a hod carrier—one of the guys who carried the mortar up three and four storeys and delivered it to the bricklayers. It must have been back-breaking work.

Like a lot of Irishmen in those days, he didn’t get married until his 40s—which is why it’s possible for me to have a great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War, though some people find it hard to believe. He didn’t have kids until the 1880s.

His son, my grandfather, became a clerk in Tammany Hall—the organization, dominated by Irishmen, that effectively controlled New York politics for about 150 years. Tammany Hall was known for patronage and corruption, but it obviously served my grandfather well. He would brag to us that during World War I, when food was being rationed, he had all the meat he wanted. He was proud to be part of the Tammany machine.

My father and his two brothers grew up in Jersey City. After serving stateside in the US Navy during World War II, my dad went to Fordham University on the GI Bill. My mother’s brother, my uncle Roger, was a combat veteran who served on destroyers, and my father’s younger brother, my uncle Bob, joined the US Army just as the war was ending and wound up with the occupation troops. He met and married a woman from Germany, then became a career army officer, serving in Korea and Vietnam before retiring as a full colonel.

I’m part of the first generation of my family that didn’t serve, which maybe explains the strong allure the military has for me.

My father worked for Sunbeam, the appliance manufacturer, and climbed steadily up the corporate ranks. His job, and his promotions, kept us moving around. My parents started out in St. Louis, then went to Milwaukee, where the first two kids were born, then to Providence (two more), Philadelphia (three more) and Chicago (three more).

My first memories are of life in Chicago, where I went to kindergarten through Grade 5. We had a small house with a master bedroom and nursery on the main floor, and three bedrooms upstairs. Four of us boys shared one bedroom, the girls had another, and my mother insisted on keeping one empty for guests—we had 10 kids, and we still had a guest bedroom.

I wasn’t an altar boy, but I was a devout Catholic kid. I’d get up at 5:30 in the morning and go to 6 a.m. Mass with the nuns who taught me, head back home for breakfast at seven, and then go to school. Like most Catholic boys, I briefly thought about becoming a priest, but then it was a firefighter, then a soldier—I went through all the classics.

—

Sports was certainly important in my family. My parents encouraged all of us to participate. My dad was a great baseball and tennis player—he played tennis on the day he died—and he especially loved Notre Dame football. He always carried a transistor radio so he could listen to the Notre Dame games, and he took the three older boys to see the Fighting Irish play in South Bend.

My parents would also take the older kids to one big sporting event a year. That’s when I saw my first NHL game: the Black Hawks playing at the old Chicago Stadium. I hated it. They allowed smoking in arenas in those days, and by the second period there was a thick blue cloud hanging under the ceiling. We had cheap seats up high, and you could barely see the ice. All I can remember is coughing and gagging.

But I also had some great experiences. I saw Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus, my favourite player, in a Bears pre-season game at Soldier Field, and I saw the Cubs play at Wrigley Field. What I remember most about that afternoon baseball game was that we were sitting right behind the plate, and my mom noticed that I couldn’t read the name on the back of the catcher’s jersey. She dragged me off to the eye doctor as soon as she could get an appointment, and I wound up with my first pair of glasses.

My older brothers turned out to be terrific athletes in their own right. Both of them started on undefeated state high school champion football teams. But in our family, academics took precedence over everything else.

My father was valedictorian of his class at Fordham, a brilliant guy, and my mother earned a four-year RN degree from the College of Mount St. Vincent. They were both highly educated, and making sure that their children succeeded academically was their No. 1 goal. Every night at dinner, one kid had to bring a new vocabulary word to the table. We had to say it, spell it, define it and use it in a sentence. As a result, we all have great vocabularies.

And after dinner, we had a mandatory reading hour. At seven o’clock, the whole family assembled in the living room to read books. That was before we did our homework. No phone calls, no television. Just all of us gathered together, reading library books. That’s where I got my lifelong love of reading.

—

While we were living in Chicago, my dad was offered the presidency of Sunbeam. But when they told him he couldn’t bring his management team along with him, he turned down the job. In 1966, he was offered the presidency of the rival Shetland Company, which made vacuum cleaners, and he accepted. That’s when we moved to Boston from Chicago.

There was a pond out back of our house where I used to bird-watch. In winter it froze, and the local kids would play hockey out there. I had never put on skates before, but I found an old pair in the garage that didn’t fit, found a stick somewhere, and went out and played—or at least tried to play—maybe a dozen times that winter. That’s where I got my first hockey cut. I fell and smashed my head on the ice, and there was blood everywhere. It took six or eight stitches to close it.

I didn’t play seriously until my family moved to Minnesota. My dad had figured out pretty quickly that he’d been sold a bill of goods about Shetland vacuums. The company was in way worse shape than he had been led to believe. He sued them—unsuccessfully—and took a job with Brown and Bigelow, which was a hot advertising company in those days. That’s why we moved to the Minneapolis area. Dad didn’t last long in advertising—those were the Mad Men days, and he was a very moral guy. After he left, he started his own consulting business, W.J. Burke and Associates (even though, at the beginning, there were no associates), and eventually became wildly successful.

We didn’t have a lot of money in those days, but somehow my parents managed to buy a house in Edina, a high-end suburb of Minneapolis. They chose Edina because it had the best public education system in the state of Minnesota. Ninety-four percent of my high school class went on to university.

It turned out we were also moving to one of the great hockey hotbeds in the United States—and that changed my life.

The moving vans hit a blizzard and took three days to bring our stuff from Boston, and we wound up stuck in a Howard Johnson’s motel in Bloomington waiting for them—ten kids and two parents crammed into two rooms. The Minnesota state high school hockey championship happened to be going on then. It was a big enough deal that they showed all the games on television. It was a Thursday afternoon and there were 16,000 people packed into the old Met Center, where the North Stars played, to watch two games, and then they refilled the arena that night for another two games.

Sitting there, watching television, I fell in love with hockey.

I think I’m a team sports guy by nature. I could never have been a swimmer or a figure skater. Being part of a team appeals to me. I lack fine motor skills, so I’m not a golfer, and even though I played a bit of baseball, I didn’t really have the kind of hand-eye coordination you need to succeed.

But watching that high school tournament, I was hooked. I remember how skilled the players seemed. I loved the grace of hockey. My brothers would become great high school football players—and I became a decent enough football player—but from that day, hockey was my love and my passion.

And seeing those crowds, seeing how excited people were, it dawned on me, even as a kid—we’re in Minnesota now, and if you want to be somebody here, you’d better be a hockey player.

There was an outdoor rink in Creek Valley, not far from our first house in Minnesota, and that’s where I really learned to skate. A guy named Bob O’Connor coached the local bantam house league team there.

I was standing by the boards one day, watching the kids practise, when he hollered over at me, Why don’t you join in?

I’ve never played before, I told him.

Get some gear and give it a try, he said. (Bob O’Connor made it all possible. He was a great man.)

We had some stuff lying around from my older brothers, and my parents bought me a pair of skates. I went to my first hockey practice, and I didn’t even know how to put on the garter belt that holds up your socks. I put my pants on first (they call hockey pants breezers in Minnesota), and then tried to put the garter belt on over them. It didn’t work very well.

When I finally got that straightened out and got out on the ice, I could barely stand up. I was the worst guy on the team—by a long shot.

Before climate change, the ponds of Minnesota were a real gift. They’d usually freeze up by Thanksgiving weekend. The dads would go out and drill a hole to make sure there was four inches of ice, and once they were declared safe, we’d go out there and skate all day and into the night.

Not long after that, the outdoor rinks would open. They flooded them and plowed them every night, and you could skate as much as you wanted to—just like in rural Canada. I’d come home from school, grab my stuff and skate outside until suppertime. And then, after I finished dinner and finished my homework, I’d go out and skate until they turned the lights off at nine—even later on a moonlit night. If I didn’t have chores to do on a Saturday, I would be down there before the warming house opened at nine, putting on my skates while sitting on a snowbank. We would take a break at lunch, take our skates off for maybe a half hour, eat in the warming house and then be right back out on the ice. Some days, I’d be out there for almost 12 hours. That helped me make up for my late start in the game.

My first two years, I played bantam house league—but by the second year, I was one of the better players. In my third year, I made the midget beltline team, which played in a B-level rep league. I was in Grade 10 by then. All the better players my age were playing in Midget A or playing for their high school team. It was quite a thing in my town to be playing Midget B in only my third year of organized hockey, but it certainly didn’t suggest I had a future in the game.

It was during those teen years that I came up with my four rules. I knew that I had a pretty big hill to climb when it came to hockey. I started late and wasn’t the most gifted athlete in the world. But I figured that if I was disciplined and committed and set my mind to it, there were ways I could overcome those disadvantages and succeed. That turned into my four rules. I followed them when I was a kid, and I followed them until the day I retired from hockey. They served me very well.

RULE 1: Be the hardest worker on the ice, whether it’s a practice or a game. (I don’t like guys who only put in their best effort during games.) Never get outworked by anyone.

RULE 2: Be a coach’s dream. Be perfect positionally. Play mistake-free hockey. I would be invaluable to the coach. He’d never look at a game tape and be able to say, Burke, you were out of position. I did everything by the book. Whatever the coach said, I did.

RULE 3: Be a great teammate. Become indispensable. Be a leader when it’s your turn. Be a follower until then. I was the guy who would go over to a teammate and say, Hey, you seem down. Is everything all right? When I was in college, I would take freshmen out to dinner, ask them about their studies and give them tips based on my experience.

RULE 4: Play tough and fearless hockey. I’m going to play hard all the time. I’m going to be tough—which carries a premium no matter where you play.

By my fourth year in organized hockey, I was the alternate captain of the local Midget A team. That’s also when I had my first exposure to hockey in Canada. Our team travelled north to Winnipeg and played four games against the locals. I thought we’d get murdered because…well, because they were Canadians and Canadians were supposed to be so much better at hockey than Americans. There was a mystique that we all bought into.

We stayed with billet families. I remember the dad of the family I stayed with welcoming me to their home. We’re glad to have you here, he said. The hockey’s not going to go well for you, but I hope you enjoy the visit anyway.

Well, fuck you.

We played the River Heights A team in the first game. They had Kevin McCarthy playing for them, who wound up being a first-round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers. We beat them, and then in our second game we beat River Heights B. There was a scheduling screw-up for our third game, against Fort Garry, which meant that we wound up playing them on an outdoor rink in 20-below temperatures.

By this point, I was one of our better players. The Fort Garry coach told one of their players to go after me. He swung his stick at my head—I think he was trying to break my nose. I turned and the stick hit me right by the corner of my eye, and naturally I was spooked. The blood didn’t even make it down to my jaw before it froze. They took me into the warming house, where a doctor showed up and said, Don’t worry, I’ll sew you right up. There were popcorn boxes all over the floor, and the room was lit by a single bare light bulb. I wasn’t going to let anybody get that close to my eye with a needle in those conditions, so I told the doctor, No thanks. I got stitched up at Misericordia Hospital instead.

We beat Fort Garry that day, and then tied St. Boniface the next day—so we finished the trip 3–0–1.

I thought, I can play with these Canadian kids. There’s no fucking mystique here.

—

We won the state midget championship that season, which meant that we got to play in the national midget tournament held in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. That’s where I first met Lou Lamoriello, someone who would go on to have a profound influence on my life.

Lou was the head coach at Providence College in Rhode Island, and he was in Dearborn scouting the tournament. He and Bob O’Connor had played on the same Providence team.

Bob told Lou he had a kid on his team that Lou ought to see—a late bloomer who had been coming on fast and might be a good fit for college hockey.

Lou watched me play in the tournament and wasn’t impressed.

He’s never going to play college hockey, he told Bob. This kid will be lucky if he even plays high school hockey.

—

I did play high school hockey as a senior, but it actually required a bit of luck.

That year, Edina split its high school into two separate schools, Edina East and Edina West. If there had still been just one school, there’s no way I would have made the team. But with the schools being split, I ended up starting for both the hockey and football teams at the new Edina West High—it was so new, we didn’t have our own building ready that fall, so we had classes in my old junior high. Whatever the circumstances, playing at that level in just my fifth year of organized hockey was a real accomplishment.

Even with the split schools, Edina West and Edina East wound up playing each other for the district championship. We lost to them, which meant that I never got the chance to play in the state high school tournament. That’s one of my few regrets from those years.

I also played high school football, at left guard and linebacker. But the only reason I got my letter as a senior was because of the school split.

That year of football did teach me an important lesson about team dynamics that I’ve carried with me throughout my career.

Our coach was a guy named Stav Canakes, who back in the day had played on an undefeated national championship team at the University of Minnesota. We were getting ready for a game against Bloomington Lincoln High School, and more specifically against their star running back John Gilliam. Beat them on Friday night, the coach said, and you’ll all get Saturday off. Usually, there was a film session and a light workout the morning after a game. This was in the middle of hunting season in the fall—and in Minnesota, hunting is a big deal. The guys were all oiling their guns and running their dogs, getting ready for a rare Saturday off when they’d get to go out hunting with their dads.

The game was at Lincoln, and it was a hostile environment. Ron Olsonoski was our star middle linebacker, the nicest guy you would ever meet off the field, but just a belligerent, angry man on the football field, and our strong safety was a tough son of a bitch named Gary Heinzig. The two of them tracked poor Gilliam all over the field and hit him all night, and somehow we won the game.

We got back on the bus, and everyone was excited about having Saturday off. I wasn’t a hunter in those days, but I was sore and looking forward to sleeping in. We got back to our locker room to change, and then Stav came