One thing cops and hockey players have in common is they’re not big on showing emotion. If you’re gonna fight criminals or win the Stanley Cup, you have to be tough. Same goes for hockey coaches. At least it did for Pat Burns, the perpetually scowling bench boss of the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Boston Bruins, and New Jersey Devils, who died in November 2010 at the age of 58 after a lengthy battle with cancer. But, as Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno discovers, the guys who are toughest on the outside are often really teddy bears.

DiManno tells the familiar story of how Burns, a Gatineau police officer, was tapped by owner Wayne Gretzky to coach the major-junior Hull Olympiques. Burns then rose to the Canadiens’ farm team in Sherbrooke and later the NHL, where he won an unprecedented three coach-of-the-year awards and, the crowning glory, a Stanley Cup as coach of the 2003 Devils.

A well-known lover of motorcycles, women, and playing guitar, Burns was a good old boy who lost his father at an early age, then spent the rest of his life around men and boys and hockey, either pleasing general managers who could be taken for father figures, or mentoring emerging players who flourished under Burns’s regime combining tough love and clowning around together.

What’s more intriguing is Burns’s life off the ice, yet that subject is left underexplored here. The author is not entirely to blame for this omission, since Burns didn’t open up to many people and trusted even fewer. Notwithstanding DiManno’s numerous interviews with former cop colleagues, family members, and loads of hockey insiders, there’s a lingering sense that her subject remains an enigma.

There’s a lot of hockey talk in this book, yet DiManno only fleetingly touches on the more personal aspects of Burns’s life – his imperfections as a father, the deep emotional scars left by the loss of his own father, and the fictions we all create for ourselves in order to be loved – or to keep the pain at bay.