I was thinking about relationships in sport, in the context of the Toronto Maple Leafs' courtship and hiring of Brian Burke as their new president and general manager.
Reporting and analyzing sports is the only work I've done since graduation, but I suspect our business is no different than any other. So much depends upon the quality and even the length of your relationship with members of the industry, at every level, from trainers to team presidents. Over time, you develop a level of trust with some and a healthy level of mistrust with others, the ones that tend to mislead or fail to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Burke has always been one of the good ones. We met for the first time in the fall of 1985, in Moncton, for the Calgary Flames' training camp. Burke was there to visit with a client (Neil Sheehy, I think). We arrived at the rink together and Burke introduced himself. He was just getting started as a player agent, but had forged an early relationship with Rod Beaton, USA Today's hockey writer at the time. Burke said something like, "Rod Beaton speaks highly of you," and I replied: "Rod Beaton speaks highly of you."
From there, we exchanged pleasantries, business cards and Burke extended an invitation to get together for lunch next time I was in Boston. We did — at a posh restaurant, probably Legal Sea Foods, and we talked about our respective backgrounds. He grew up in a big Irish family; I went to Catholic high school, where 49 per cent of the population was Italian; 49 per cent Irish, and two per cent other. I was part of the two per cent other. We were eating something fancy (expense accounts were pretty generous in those days) and living pretty well, but I remember him saying his favorite meal was still boiled dinner — corned beef, cabbage and potatoes in one pot.
Intuitively, you knew, even in those early days that Burke was destined for success. He was smart, ambitious and unflinchingly honest, the one quality I thought might actually work against him, as time passed and managing the message became a league-wide doctrine. Thankfully, it didn't stop him at all.
And the one thing Burke figured out early in his career was how the newspaper (and subsequently, television, radio and online) business worked. Our job was to ask questions; it didn't mean he had to answer them all, or freely dispense every nugget of information that we wanted to extract. But he was usually pretty good, in part because in his three previous incarnations as an NHL GM — in Hartford, Vancouver and Anaheim — he understood that an important part of his job description was growing the business.
Teams did that through winning, through its style of play (up tempo, aggressive) as well as through marketing and community initiatives, all designed to get people into the rink, watching and developing an affinity for the team.
Selling the product won't be as much of a challenge in his new gig, given the depth and breadth of the Toronto market, and the love (or hate relationship) so many fans have with the Maple Leafs franchise. Burke wasn't in Hartford long enough to make a tangible marketing difference there, but the Canucks — under his watch — improved little by little on the ice, and grew in leaps and bounds off the ice. In Anaheim, he put the finishing touches on a team with a strong, young nucleus of players assembled by, among others, Bryan Murray, Al Coates and David McNab.
Just how Burke goes about getting the Leafs on the winning track will be the most compelling part of watching the new regime operate — who stays and who goes among players and front-office staff.
However, it will be interesting to see how Burke handles the communication demands in a market that's unlike any he's ever worked in before; and in an era with more information sources than ever before.
Burke's never been afraid to try new things. The year his Ducks won the Stanley Cup, he wrote a trading-deadline diary for USA Today that was astonishingly good reading. Even if only referenced players who were actually traded (so as not to compromise the relationship between teams and players who were talked about, but not moved), his candor wasn't especially well-received by every member of the general manager's fraternity.
