Brian Burke isn't just a legend of the NHL. He's a fists-up, knock-your-teeth-out gladiator. But when his hockey-loving son came out of the closet and died soon after, he was thrust into a strange new role: advocate for gays in a macho sports culture. He's no cheerleader—he looks like he hates every minute of it—but locker-room homophobia may have finally met its match.
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He tells the boys that it took a lot of courage for his son to tell him he was gay: "If you look at the line of work I'm in, the macho image that I have, I'm probably the biggest proponent of hard-nosed hockey that there is on the planet." He reminds them of the Welsh professional rugby player Gareth Thomas, one of the most rugged guys in the world, who recently came out. Some of the kids are bored, and you can see it in their restless legs. He grabs their attention back with a story about bullying when he was in ninth grade. "We had a boy with a learning disability in our class, and I came out of gym class and someone had tipped his books on the floor. Then someone kicked this kid, as hard as he could, as he bent down to pick up his books. I grabbed the kid who kicked him and threw him right through the trophy case on the other side of the hall. Broke all the glass, knocked all the trophies down. I just snapped. I didn't think it was right." This is the Brian Burke everybody in the room recognizes.
Burke finishes talking, invites questions, and steps back from the podium. The room is dead quiet until Burke needles them: "Not one question in a whole room full of kids?" When a student asks if he regrets tossing that bully into the glass case, Burke doesn't hesitate. "No. I know your teachers would like me to give a better answer than that, but no.... It seemed like a really good idea at that time, and the bullying stopped."
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