News from October 1996

Tuesday, October 30th, 1996.

Pavel stars in Canucks win

Pavel Bure scored the Vancouver Canucks first goal, assisted on another, as well as hitting the post on another occasion, in a Canucks 6-3 win over the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. The effort earned Pavel the 1st star of the game.
The win by the Canucks was their first back-to-back win (that's 2 games in a row) in 5 months (that's 32 regular-season and [playoff games), with the last time being in March of this year.
Bure, who had a highlight film goal to open the scoring and made a great play to set up Linden for his game clincher, said he thinks the team is finally starting to get comfortable with Renney's defensive system.

"With the new system, in the beginning, we didn't really know what to do," said Bure. "Right now, we're still thinking where to go, but we scored six goals and we still had three guys back. I think we're familiar with it now."

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Saturday, October 26, 1996.

PHEW !

The Vancouver Canucks hung on to a chaotic last few minutes to defeat the Pittsburgh Penguins 2-1 before their first sell-out crowd of 18,422. This was the Canucks first win over the Penguins since 1991. Corey Hirsh in the net for the first time before a home crowd this season, stared down Mario Lemieux on a penalty shot late in the third period. Pavel's attempt to score his first point of the game failed when he missed a shot on the empty net. Although having a strong game, Pavel was left without point.

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Wednesday, October 23, 1996.

A replay loss with Colorado for Canucks

Colorado scored 3 third-period goals to break a 1-1 tie to put away the Canucks in the rubber game before a Vancouver crowd of over 17,000. Pavel played on the 'Russian' line of Mogilny and Semak, but the line did not score any points.

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Saturday, October 19, 1996.

Pavel and the Canucks, Avalanched by Colorado... and Bure'd !

The Vancouver Canucks tonight were trashed and soundly beaten and by the Colorado Avalanche 9-2. Pavel Bure scored his goal with the score 9-0 with only 2 minutes left in the game to spoil the shut-out bid by Patrick Roy. The goal by Pavel, brought his season total up to 3 goals.

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Pavel Bure has resurrected business

If his new company is successful, he will be watchmaker to the stars instead of watchmaker to the Czars. Pavel Bure has resurrected his family's long-dormant business of making fine watches.
The Canuck winger said he isn't sure where his new company will go, as last summer was a production of only 50 limited edition Pavel Bure watches. When he was home, Bure hand-delivered one of the watches to Russian prime-minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Another of the gold time pieces was sent to ailing president Boris Yeltsin.

"When I was born, it was my great-great grandfather's company," Bure explained. "They named me after him. He was huge; he was making watches specially for the Czars. Still, a lot of times I see in history books, his name is still there. I am the sixth generation of the watch company."

The inner workings of the watches are assembled in Switzerland and the solid Russian gold casing is added in Russia, Bure said.

Don't expect to see the watch in Sears' Christmas catalogue. The price of the luxury time pieces: about US$30,000 each.

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Thursday, October 17, 1996.

Solid Win

Pavel set up the first and last goals (the assist for this one though was for some reason not credited to him), in the Vancouver Canucks 6-1 win over the previously only unbeaten team in NHL, The Dallas Stars tonight in Dallas. The team chartered out immediately after the game for their next venue in Denver.

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Mystery ailment bothers Bure

DALLAS - Has Vancouver Canuck star Pavel Bure been seeing stars or is he just plain sick?

A touch of mystery surrounded the Russian Rocket's absence from a late afternoon practice following the team's arrival here Wednesday. The Canucks meet the Dallas Stars at 5:30 PDT.
Head Coach Tom Renney said Bure had a headache and has been experiencing "those little black spots" ever since he was shoved into the end boards opening night by Calgary Flames blue-liner Todd Simpson. Renney added that this has had some effect on Bure's performance. The Rocket has two goals and two assists in five games.

"I don't think it's serious at all and he'll obviously play," Renney explained. "The doctors said keep him away from contact and any real physical exercise for a few days and see how that might help. It's just precautionary; he doesn't need any tests or anything. I don't know how much it's bothering him, to tell you the truth, that would be for Pavel to answer."

So we asked.
"It's my stomach, it doesn't feel so good," replied Bure, stumping those who were expecting a response about headaches, although blows to the head can cause nausea.

Bure certainly appeared to be in the throes of some sort of ailment as his eyes were watery and his face pale.
But he managed to summon his sense of humour when told he didn't look so hot.
"I don't have to look great today," he smiled, "the game is tomorrow."

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Sunday, October 13, 1996

Bure and Canucks burned

Playing a matinee game against Boston Bruins, the Vancouver Canucks got stung with only seconds left in overtime, to lose 5-4 to the Boston Bruins, although outshooting the opposition more than 2-1. Pavel was left scoreless, although playing a strong game with many shots on goals and with some spectacular plays.

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Saturday, October 12, 1996.

Bure and Bure

Pavel Bure came close to duplicating his brothers feat tonight in a 5-3 win over the St.Louis Blues. Pavel scored the insurance goal and added an assist, whilst Valeri scored 2 goals in a 5-2 win over the N.Y. Rangers. Both boys were the 3rd star in their respective games.

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Wednesday, October 9, 1996.

Pavel scores his First Goal of the Season

Pavel Bure scored his first goal of this short season on the games' first play and shot on goal, 14 seconds into the game in losing 2-1 to the Buffalo Sabres before a home crowd. Although the Canucks outshot the Sabres almost 2-1, goalie Dominic Hasek made some unbelievable saves, including one goal line save in which he (Dominic) blindly placed his glove behind his sprawling body, to stop a Pavel shot, that had the puck drifting inches from the goal line!
The Vancouver Canucks record for the quickest goal is held by the captain, Trevor Linden at 9 seconds into a game.
Pavel was the third star of the game.

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Sunday, October 6, 1996.

Zilch Points Tonight!

The Canucks came out playing without their regular flash, and ended up losing to the Edmonton Oilers 2-0.

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Saturday, October 5, 1996.

Pavel plays his first NHL Regular Season Game in almost a year

Pavel Bure set up the Vancouver Canucks' insurance and last goal, in their 3-1 win over the Calgary Flames in the NHL season opener, before a home crowd of 17,501. But it was Bure's collision with the boards midway through the third period that many fans won't forget.

The Russian Rocket had been flying by Todd Simpson on the outside, but the Calgary defenceman gave Bure a hard push on the way by, knocking him forward and forcing him to slide helplessly into the end boards at high speed. Bure managed to break the impact by sticking out his arms but still hit the boards hard with his head.
Gino Odjick then jumped into to fight an unresponsive Simpson and was given a minor for his trouble.

"It was a really dirty play," said Bure of Simpson's push that went unpenalized by referee Paul Stewart. "I saw the boards coming fast and just put out my hands. Now I know how hard the boards are."

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Saturday, October 5, 1996.

Return of the Rocketman

by Sean Rossitier - IceAge

It was only an exhibition, but it was against Calgary. It is never too soon to send warmest greetings for the forthcoming season to the Canucks' great rivals. So when Pavel Bure was slashed by pesky former Canuck Ronnie Stern late in a 4-1 Canucks win at General Motors Place, Pavel replied by dropping his gloves to duke it out. And, great athlete (if not boxer) that he is, he delivered a powerful straight right hand to Stern's helmet.

Under the headline "Canucks relieved Bure injury only dislocated finger," the Sun's hockey writer exhaled and quoted Pavel: "I almost puked when I looked at it. I thought "I'm done for the rest of my life."

The night Pavel injured his finger happens to have been one of 24-year-old Mike Burnstein’s first games as the Canuck's trainer. As the two of them spotted Pavel holding his right wrist in his left hand, assistant coach Glen Hanlon leaned over to Burnstein and said, "Don't mess it up, Kid. This is a five-million-dollar hockey player."

Burnstein can laugh about it now. In fact, Burnstein started training to be a trainer when he was eight years old and a stickboy for his brother's minor hockey team in Hamilton. He came up like any player, with a solid education, hands-on junior experience and time with the Canucks' America League affiliates in Hamilton and Syracuse.

But nothing could have prepared Mike Burnstein for 1995-1996 and the practical education in orthopedic medicine that awaited. Little could we have known. Or, Pavel Bure, for that matter.

The day the Canucks' 1996-97 training camp opened at Whistler, Pavel was in Scenic Burnaby, alone on te Blue A sheet at the 8-Rinks complex with his father and personal trainer Vladimir Bure, himself and Olympic swimmer, and a bunch or orange road cones, six pucks and a couple of extra hockey sticks. The sticks were hanging, shafts down, from the net's top shelf to create one-foot vertical scoring zones inside each post. It was 11am, the end of a gruelling hour-long session of timed drills, with each drill and its duration entered on a chart by Vladimir.

Missing the first days of this season's camp was only the last of a series of obstacles Pavel Bure has overcome to play this season. The bruised kidney he suffered with the Russian national team in the World Cup of Hockey was just one more setback in his recovery from an injury he was at first told would cost him ten days. He thought he might play in last spring's playoffs. Then he missed the World Cup. Now he was missing the first four days of camp.

Vlad, standing in sneakers at the middle of the blue line, would feed each puck to Pavel, standing just outside the right-wing faceoff dot. Pavel would one-time it at the foot-wide far side opening.

He could have cheated. He could have aimed for the stick instead of the post; miss to that side and the puck's in the net, at least. But he kept gunning for that far post, and missing. One more puck...

WHAM! He hammered the last puck at the far goalpost. He didn't take anything off his shot to make it more accurate. The drive was hard enough for the puck's aerodynamics to take over. It's front edge was up, and the shot sailed past the top corner and was still rising when it hit the glass. It made a rolling double impact - Ka-Boom! - putting an extra exclamation mark on the end of this, one of the final drill-sessions in Pavel's eleven months of private torture.

He paused for a moment, staring at the puck's line of flight, grimaced, turned and slammed his stick against the boards. He did even that gracefully, making it a follow-through from the shot in which he spun toward the boards and hammered his stick at the dasher, breaking off the blade of his space-age Bauer Composite stick. The blade flew into the bench area closest to the zone where he had been shooting, testimony to the force of its impact. Acting as his own gofer, Pavel gathered up the six pucks with the shards of wood grain at the end of his stick, returned to the boards, and sat on top of them, looking down. Then he turned to me.

"How are you?" he asked. He seemed genuinely interested.

"I'm okay," I said, amazed he would ask, but covering up the fact that I was frozen to the marrow after watching him work out for 40 minutes or so. More to the point, I asked, "How are you?"

"I'm okay too," he said. He made it sound convincing.

On the whole, of course, things were a whole lot better for Pavel Bure at summer's end than they had been for most of the past year - 'this hard season,' as Vladimir Bure puts it. Pavel was whole again.

People forget that he played most of a month last season with the dislocated knuckle and damaged finger ligaments, drawing praise from the laconic Alexander Mogilny just for suiting up. That was before he suffered "the most devastating injury in the 26-year old history of the franchise," as the Sun's Archie McDonald assessed it. Pavel's knee injury is referred to in medical terms as an isolated anterior ligament (ACL) tear.

What happened the night of November 9th at Chicago is that when Steve Smith grabbed Pavel from behind, his right shinbone, or tibia, kept moving forward, pulling away from the bottom end of the thigh bone, or femur. The anterior cruciate ligament secures the two bones roughly end-to-end, running from the back of the femur to the front of the tibia. This is an evolutionary weak spot left from the moment homo erectus stopped walking on all fours. This is the joint we call the knee.

Everyone in the Canucks organization remembers where he or she was when they found out Pavel was injured. Burnstein was at the game, of course, although he was at the far end of the bench in Chicago's United Center. Vladimir Bure saw it on the big-screen TV at his condominium on the Fairview Slopes. Canuck strength coach Peter Twist saw it on the monitor in the conference room of coaches' department deep within General Motors Place. Dr. Ross Davidson was operating at that time at the University of B.C. hospital, but was recording the game on his VCR. Burnstein, who was there, saw the least. Pavel disappeared behind the Black Hawk net and then re-appeared when the play was stopped, down and holding his knee in the corner.

"I felt it right away. I felt something pulling" - Pavel holds his clenched fists together and slowly pulls them apart, making a guttural tearing sound deep in the back of his throat, chhhhhhh! - "pulling apart. The pain was really powerful the first 30 seconds."

"But I got up myself and skated to the bench. I thought maybe I should stay on the bench, not go to the dressing room. I thought, maybe it's not that bad. Ten minutes later I thought 'It's fine'"

"I've got red flags going up in my head," says Burnstein, who was 24 then and cannot be a father-figure trainer on a team with an average age older than his. "But he wants to play. I'm saying no."

Burnstein insisted on a trip to the dressing room, did an examination, and requested Chicago's team doctor to do the same. The knee seemed quite firm to them. Burnstein, young but highly-qualified, was aware of how the muscles surrounding an injury go into a protective spasm to compensate for the trauma. Pavel was brushing it off. The Chicago doctor prescribed, as Pavel remembers it, "10 days maximum" rest and rehabilitation. The diagnosis was a sprained knee.

"It wasn't that sore," Pavel says. "I almost wasn't limping." Burnstein noticed the same thing. But Pavel was walking with his feet parallel. Skating involves a lower-leg twisting thrust .

When Davidson, the Canucks doctor, alerted to the situation by a phone call from Burnstein when he arrived home that night, ran the tape, he knew it was more serious than that.

"I had concerns from watching how it happened. I saw (on the tape) the mechanism of how it happened. It was not a twisting sort of injury - the knee collapsed forward. He couldn't release his feet because he was so close to the boards. He grabbed his knee when it happened. When I examined him those fears were confirmed."

Another bad sign was that, by then, Pavel's pain was general rather than localized. The lack of pain that gave Pavel hope was actually a negative symptom. The Magnetic Resonance imaging picture gave Davidson and Burnstein a fix: it was the ACL. Torn.

So that was the first psychological blow. When Ross Davidson said six-to-nine months, Pavel thought he was kidding: "I said 'Yeah, right. How many days?'"

It so happens that Dr. Ross Davidson's speciality is reconstructive surgery. Although he sounds as if he could be from the northeastern states, Long Island or Connecticut, he was born and grew up in Auckland, New Zealand. He came to UBC to study orthopedics because this country has a reputation as a world leader in that field. In 1977 he accepted a fellowship to study ligaments and reconstructive surgery at Eugene, Oregon. He was supremely qualified to rebuild Pavel's knee.

"You can't just sew it back together," Dr. Davidson says. "It doesn't heal. The ligament sits right in the joint, and it never gets any better."

"So you reconstruct it. First we arthroscope the knee to see the damage. We wanted to see whether part of the old ligament was usable."

"You can either use the patient's own tissue, tissue from a donor, or artificial tissue. Artificial ligaments are breaking down from the time they are installed. Donor tissue can be rejected. It can carry infection. We used some of Pavel's hamstring tendons. There are four on the inside part of the leg. We laced the tendons right up the centre of the old ligament. It heals around the new material."

"You hope for a return of the nerve and blood supply. It's like and internal splint around which the old ligament tries to heal."

The operation took one-and-a-half hours to complete. For Vladimir, this was the worst part of the entire 11-month process. He knew Pavel was in good hands, but seeing his elder son anesthetized and dopey on painkillers when he came to was heart-wrenching.

Burnstein has watched a videotape of the operation, as viewed by a tiny camera encased in the probe Davidson used for the arthroscopic surgery. Like a video game, things came at you faster than they could be listed: blood vessels, nerves, bones, muscles, ligaments. But watching it was no fun. Burnstein did so to get a picture of the internal workings of Pavel's knee. He thought there was a lot going on in there.

Given the seriousness of his injury, Pavel Bure was uniquely blessed throughout his recovery. Few professional athletes can call upon the services of a personal trainer who has known them since birth. Not many have their rehab programs designed and monitored by a medical and training staff as astounding as the Canucks'. And of course this program had a singular specimen as its centrepiece.

"The doctor knows the human body," strength coach Peter Twist says, listing the Pavel Bure rehab team. "The trainer knows physiotherapy. I know how the human body works" - so much so that he has written two books on conditioning for hockey. "And here Vladimir is. He knows Pavel as a person."

"Any player is devastated by being injured. It's hard not knowing if you're ever coming back. Your future is somewhat unknown. What an asset it is having Vladimir in town here."

And yet pointing out his advantages perhaps minimizes the agony and frustration Pavel endured. Pavel has watched the videotape of his injury half-a-dozen times. Each time he felt again the pain, which, even if you have experienced it, is indescribable. Each time, he says, "I wait for the pain that will come in two or three seconds."

He tells me this as he stands in what is, for now, his own personal dressing room at 8-Rinks, a dressing room built for close to 30 players, with all of last year's Canucks' names over the stalls, but occupied this morning only by him and his father. With Pavel absent from training camp, Dr. Ross Davidson is turning down media request after media request on the grounds that the main story at Whistler should not be the team doctor.

The first week after the operation November 15th, the knee was iced and immobilized. The day the stitches came out of his knee Vladimir had Pavel in the pool, swimming with his upper body, using a Pull-Board for lower-body buoyancy.

Swimming, with his father the Olympic freestyler as his coach, was the program until mid-January.

"I had no concerns about Pavel doing his rehab," Davidson says at Whistler. "I foresaw possibly having to slow him down rather than speed him up."

The hardest part of this process for Pavel was the loneliness. Injured players cease being members of the team. Pavel Bure is more social than most hockey players, more adept with the press, a born phrasemaker in what is, after all, his second language.

"When you play hockey, there's emotion," he says. "You win, you're really happy. Not being with the team - it is the hardest part. For the most part, I had to train by myself."

Not that he is dismissing Vladimir or Peter Twist, his usual on-ice workout partner. He missed the camaraderie, the give-and-take with his teammates. So it is with heartfelt gratitude that, like any hospital patient, he gratefully acknowledges his visitors. Gino Odjick, Geoff Courtnall, and Trevor Linden showed up for workout with him. Sergei Tkatchenko, a goalie drafted by the Canucks in 1993, did a lot of monotonous dry land training with Pavel, as did his younger brother, Valeri.

Asked if there was a low point in his rehab, a valley he had to crawl out of, Pavel at first says there was no such thing. He is a naturally upbeat guy, but he did hit a wall in his rehab in February.

February is a woebegone month most places, but is positively suicidal in Vancouver. Pavel normally spends half of February touring other NHL cities, but last February the nonstop workout routine started to get to him. One day - he can't remember the date - the physical wonder that is Pavel Bure just shut itself down.

"It was in the gym, eight months ago. We'd just go every day. Same routine. Bike 45 minutes. Weights 45 minutes. Go to the ice and skate 45 minutes. Is boring. No emotion, you know?"

"I walked in there and I couldn't do anything. (There comes a point where) You can't work out any more."

He mentioned this setback to his agent, Ron Salcer, who also happens to represent Kings defenseman Rob Blake. Blake, of course, suffered a torn ACL about the same time Pavel did. And he, too, had hit the workout wall "Almost the same day," Pavel marvels. There may be some kind of scientific insight for sports medicine in this, the two-and-a-half month rehab barrier.

"The Canucks understood," Pavel acknowledges. "They would give me three or four or five days off. And it helps, you know."

"Twelve weeks," Ross Davidson explains. "The healing is starting to take place. You're going to the gym and working hard. But you're not seeing a lot of results for the work that you're doing. "

"A defining moment in Pavel's rehab?" Peter Twist asks. "For me the defining moment came later on, five months or so into it, early March, I think. The drills we had Pavel doing incorporated parts of the team's system, like breakouts. There was a point where the end of a drill featured Pavel driving full-speed to the net and making a move that he spontaneously just would do to score, without planning anything, the way he would in a game.

"This one time, he stopped on a dime in front of the net, on one leg - his right leg - from a full-speed position," Twist recalls with a mixture of recalled joy and wonder. "He hadn't done anything like that before."

"I asked him about it. He said that at that time, in that moment, he had forgotten about his knee."

About that time, Vladimir thought a change might be as good as a rest. The Bures flew to Los Angeles for the second half of March. Vancouver may not be the worst place in the world to spend March, but LA has it's attractions, Vlad thinks. "It's always dry, it's always warm, and there's a nice breeze from the ocean." In a different city, Vlad feels, one day off each week feels like a vacation. And Pavel could commiserate with the fellow Salcer client he calls "Blakie."

When Pavel returned to the ice in full equipment in late March, often working out with such picturesque props as parachutes and tennis racquets, he set off a media frenzy of speculation about his imminent return that persisted to the end of the Canucks' season.

The rehab took longer than most, Twist notes, just because he is Pavel Bure. While his recovery, fuelled by his appetite for hard physical labor, was so rapid he pushed the rehab envelope, there was father to go to resume the level of explosive power of the NHL's Mr. Excitement.

Pavel and Twist were on the ice in Denver during last spring's playoffs. It was late April, Pavel had vowed to return for the Stanley Cup finals, and most of the club brass was gathered in one corner of McNichols arena watching the Rocket undergoing some pre-flight checks.

The drill was a typical one, involving Pavel taking a breakout pass from Twist, accelerating out of the zone, and heading toward a set of cones he would stickhandle through on his way to the net, when...

...Suddenly, Pavel awkwardly to the ice, grabbed his knee, and began to writhe in pain.

Twist couldn't help glancing at the assembled brain trust. "They were all standing,' Twist remembers, chuckling. "We had their undivided attention."

The problem, Twist thinks, is that he and Pavel started laughing too soon. They didn't have the heart to keep the joke going any longer. That would have been too cruel. Besides, when the patient starts joking around, full recovery is right around the corner.

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