The Days And Nights Of Johnny Torts

Lightning coach John Tortorella has waited 16 months to defend the Stanley Cup. You think he's not ready?

Pray for Johnny Torts. Pray for this irritable, irascible man who cannot unwind. Pray for him even though he has a Stanley Cup and a growing reputation as one of America's best coaches. Pray for a man made famous by the phrase "Shut yer yap!" A man who once told a college teammate more or less the same thing, that teammate being his little brother.

Pray for Johnny Torts because one of his best Lightning players describes him thus: "Very-how would I describe it?-he's got a temper. But a different word from that. You know, the Italian guys, when they snap?" Pray for him because even a 16-month vacation could not soothe him. He tried to relax, tried to detach. He tried gardening. He tried Pilates. "My wife didn't want me around," he says. (Feel free to pray for his wife, too.)

John Tortorella spent the long NHL off-season preparing for the next NHL on-season. He'd arrive at the dark, iceless arena in downtown Tampa by dawn, work out, then watch film until his eyes were bloodshot. He broke down hours of game tape from the 2003-04 season, finding the perfect play to illustrate every single scheme and strategy he wanted his team to learn when players returned. After months of this, he had his opus-Hockey the Torts Way-to hand out to players. Then he chucked the whole thing and started over. After a few more months, he had a better version. Trashed that too, and started over again. Then the lockout ended, and colleagues say-whisper, really-that this was the moment when Johnny Torts really got impatient.

So if the man was intense before, what now? How will he be after so many months of frustrated idling? How can his perpetual inner rumble not fuse with the pressure to repeat and result in a 10-million-volt Lightning meltdown? He's already sent a letter to his players and he pledges to "reteach" the game. Yikes. "Part of my concern," says Bolts captain Dave Andreychuk, "is that he has to realize we need to just go out and play."

Tortorella—like the NHL itself these days—seems too combustible, too tightly wound to have any real chance of lasting greatness, let alone likability. But friends of the coach, and fans of the sport, know better. The reason to pray for Johnny Torts this season is that American hockey needs this tortured soul as much as it needs head coach Wayne Gretzky.

WAIT A minute. Why have any compassion for a hockey coach? Especially a hockey Coach of the Year with a Cup under his belt? Especially a man who terrorizes subordinates with barked orders and foul moods and curse words ("I'm tired of f-ing waiting!") that work as both verbs and adjectives? A man whose lips curdle as if he'd just smelled three-week-old milk, who raises his voice in normal conversation as if he were constantly ordering from a drivethrough? Why should anyone pray for this guy?

Ask Craig Ramsay. The Lightning assistant is as cool as Torts is hot. When prompted to describe his boss, Ramsay's first response is predictable: "He's a pain in the ass." He also says Torts was the kind of player back in the Atlantic Coast league he always wanted to poke-check. In the helmet. "He can't skate, shoot or pass," Ramsay says. "People like him are why I hated playing exhibition games." But Ramsay also says Torts is "one of the very, very best coaches." And he tells a story.

Buffalo comes to town during the 2002-03 season. A Sabre skates into the Lightning crease and barrels into goalie Nik Khabibulin. The refs don't see it. Neither does Tortorella. But everyone sees Pavel Kubina come out of nowhere and crosscheck the perp. The ref raises his arm, Kubina goes to the bin and Torts turns red as a raspberry. Buffalo scores to tie the game (of course), Kubina slouches back to the bench and Tortorella screams at his defenseman in front of the entire team: "You caused the goal!"

Ramsay pulls his boss aside at intermission, tells him: "You're wrong." Torts calls up the incident on videotape to see for himself-Kubina was protecting his goalie. So the head coach marches into the locker room for another public display. But this time he apologizes. "As hard as he is," Ramsay says, "he will change."

Great. He yells, then apologizes when he's wrong. How kind. Guy still seems like a tyrant. And a control freak. Take an airplane ride with the man. He's white-knuckling it from the words "Welcome aboard." And when the team plane hits a pocket of turbulence, he spins around in his seat and stares daggers at Tampa travel ops man Phil Thibodeau. As if Tibs could do anything about it. But once, in a particularly bad wind shear event in Denver, Torts instructed-pretty much ordered-Tibs to land the plane in Colorado Springs. Except he used some of those verb-adjective combinations to do it.

Isn't this the type of whistle who almost destroyed hockey? Sure, he came in at the perfect time and used his troika of teaching—accountability, conditioning and attitude—to jolt a happy-to-be-here franchise into order. But isn't Torts the sort of Frankencoach who scares 'em and then wears 'em into clutch-and-grab zombies? The type of tyrant who gave rise to the left-wing lock and every ungodly device that takes the spontaneity out of the game?

Ask Vinny Lecavalier. He's had his share of run-ins with the coach. Torts even stripped him of his captaincy before his first full season in the top job. In fact, Lecavalier was 11 dialed digits from being dealt to Toronto in December of 2001. "At one point," Lecavalier says, "I didn't want to be here." And when he found out in July he would become a free agent, he did spend a good 24 hours considering life after Torts. But then, he says, "I do believe in his system." And he tells a story about his off-season, in Russia.

"I kind of missed the way things were," Lecavalier says. "On the ice, the system, I missed that. When you go to Russia, you see things these guys do, and it wasn't good. And nobody shoots. The shots would end up being a maximum of maybe 20. A lot of turnovers. Our team, everything's on the net. Safe is death. Torts is mad when you don't shoot the puck."

So he verbally abuses people who screw up, but still wants them to take chances. What is it with this guy?

Ask Nigel Kirwan. He's here at the first hockey event at the St. Pete Times Forum since the awarding of the Stanley Cup. It's the last week of August, and though training camp hasn't started, nearly every Lightning player shows up for the gala dinner on the eve of the first annual John Tortorella Celebrity Fishing Tournament. Most people crowd around Lecavalier in his sharp suit jacket or Andreychuk in his new mullet or Torts' new friend, Scotty Bowman. But Kirwan, the team's video coach, might know Torts better than anyone else in this room. "People make him out to be some ogre," Kirwan says. "He's so not." Kirwan, of course, has a story too.

A month after the Lightning won the Cup, Torts and Nigel planned a fishing trip to Alaska, where the air would be cool and the salmon would be everywhere. The day before the trip, Torts called Kirwan three times for advice on what to bring. They chatted and made a date to meet early the next morning at the rink before heading to the airport. Then, after a good night's sleep, Kirwan got a call from Torts, who was already on his way to the Forum. "I'm not coming," Torts said. Kirwan sped downtown. Torts showed with no luggage. The coach offered him a ride to the airport, explaining that he couldn't sleep all night thinking about getting on that plane. Kirwan wondered how a man who takes dozens of cross-country flights a year couldn't jump on one more. Tortorella spoke softly, saying he had to take those trips during the season because a game waited in another city. There was no game this time. So he had a choice. And he made it. He dropped Kirwan curbside at the airport. Kirwan waited for an explanation, anything. But Tortorella said nothing. He looked down and around, then got back into his car and left.

Back at the dinner, Tortorella steps to the dais and takes the mike. "I'm not gonna spend too much time up here," he says, and a Lightning official mutters to himself: "No s-." The coach offers his pat line: "It's not about one particular person. It's about a group of people." Seconds later, Tortorella steps aside for a highlights montage of the Stanley Cup Finals. The coach is shown in the victorious locker room, drenched in champagne, saying pretty much the same thing: this has nothing to do with the coaches and everything to do with you guys. Then the video flashes to Tortorella's office, where the coach watches his staff celebrate from a corner, back against a wall.

The film ends and Tortorella disappears, so eager to get off the stage that he forgets to thank his players for coming. On the floor, Ramsay nurses a beer alongside his son. "He's shy," Ramsay says. Team president Ron Campbell seconds: "He's an introvert, strange as that seems." Out in the concourse, Kirwan thirds it. "He has two things in his life: family and coaching. He's a very private guy. Not an ego guy. There are a ton of people who want to be his friend. I'm fortunate, I think, to be one who is. I think."

So peel back the angry curtain and find something kind of endearing. That shut-yer-yap rep? That shredding of Flyers coach Ken Hitchcock for talking to Lightning players after a 6-2 Game 2 loss in the Eastern Conference finals? That was not another blown fuse. It was calculated. Torts told GM Jay Feaster he was planning to do it. And when the team got off the bus at the Wachovia Center before Game 3, Philly fans allowed all the players peaceful entry into the rink before giving it to the opposing head coach. Just as Torts had hoped they would. Tampa won that night, and took the series.

And how about Kubina, who's faced more wrath from Coach than anyone? Torts once called his play "absolutely disgusting" before benching him. But when the defenseman suffered a concussion in Game 3 of the Cup Finals, Torts gathered Feaster and Ramsay for a meeting with him before Game 4. Kubina insisted on playing. Torts and the Tampa brass told him no. "If they didn't care about me," Kubina says now, "they'd have let me play." Torts still gets the chills when he tells that story.

NOW IT'S time to ask John Tortorella. Step into his office, the lion's den. Pretty spare. Not much in the way of reflected glory-no Coach of the Year trophy glinting in the fluorescent light, no Stanley Cup ring on his finger. "I've worn it twice," he says. "I'm so burnt out reminiscing. Enough."

This is where Vinny Lecavalier learned he no longer deserved to wear the captain's C. And it was in here that Torts took Kubina's "A" away. Rumor has it that players have been reduced to tears in this room. Believe the rumors.

He sits ramrod straight in his chair and clasps his hands on his desk. He is ready. With one ground rule: "This is not about me," Torts says, beginning to order at the drive-through. "It's about the team. No personal questions!" So no, he will not pose for a picture for this story. No, we can't talk to his wife or his brother or his kids. His parents? "My dad was an electrician," he says. "My mom was a housekeeper. They were fair, strict, honest. I don't think it's a big deal."

He'll talk about hockey. That's it. And that's the only way he knows to talk about himself.

He'll talk about the lockout:

"I was mad when it all came about. Then mad turned to absolute anger. Personality conflicts hampered it. I don't think there was any trust from either side. There has to be a trust. That posturing-it drives me f-ing nuts. Let's get to the point. We get so polarized. We forgot about the game."

He'll talk about the playoffs:

"A coach's job is to push and prod and kick. But once the playoffs start, it's not about playing hard. It's not about playing hard. You become with them. You're trying to relieve pressure. You want to be with them, but you can't."

And he'll talk about the title defense:

"I don't look at it as defending it. Yes, it will be a defense. But the mind-set, that's a fear of mine. Are these guys willing to pay the price? Nineteen back-to-back games, 16 three-games-in-four-nights, 19 three-in-five, 14 four-in-six. That's what scares me. You lose a bit of your edge. It turns into a disease. The disease of me."

So pray for Johnny Torts. Pray for a man who loves the game so much that he'll stand in front of thousands of people looking at him, which he hates. Pray for a man who screams the blunt truth to ward off all the fakery, laziness and waste that he dreads. Pray for him because he stays out of the way, admits he's wrong, wants scorers to score and won't even sit for a picture. Pray for him because he turned a crappy playing career into a glorious coaching run by studying, asking and listening.

Pray for him as you'd pray for hockey. Because the American game cannot come back on the strength of a Terrell Owens or a Shaquille O'Neal or a Derek Jeter or even a Jeremy Roenick. This sport relies on people like John Tortorella. People who won't make us fawn or laugh, people who really have no clue how to take center stage. These hockey people will not run after microphones or smile only for the cameras. They're quirky and bombastic and, yes, that turns some fans off. But they work hard. They are willing to learn. They are intensely loyal to their sport. They may toil for the next few months in obscurity, but if we're still around come springtime, we'll see them for what they have always been, for what they have secretly made themselves: brilliant.

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