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“Well, I don’t approve of that. You guys used to be friends and I think you should mend the fence.”

Burke then told Brendan he should mind his own business.

At one point, Burke’s wife also overheard Burke on the phone, this time talking to Glen Sather of the Rangers, where Burke asked Sather to act as an intermediary to set up a fist fight between him and Lowe.

“It got a point where Kevin challenged me to a fight on a radio interview,” Burke told Jurksztowicz. “I’m like that’s not really how you challenge a guy to a fight. If you want to challenge a guy to a fight, you pick a place and a time and you show up. So I called Glen Sather and I said, ‘Look, this guy went on the radio and challenged me to a fight.’ I said, ‘I’m going to be at Lake Placid at the U.S. junior camp.” I gave him three dates. I told him I’d rent a barn and I’d pick the address and the time and I’d fight Kevin Lowe.

And you were serious, Jurksztowicz asked?

“Dead serious. It got to the point where Gary Bettman called me an and said, ‘I hear you guys are thinking about having a fight and if you do I’m going to suspend you both indefinitely.’ That’s how crazy it got between me and Kevin. He’s as stubborn as I am. And there’s no doubt in my mind if we had bumped into each other right about then, we would have fought. No question. He’s not afraid of me. We would have fought for sure. Anyway, my wife overhears this, I think I’m in the privacy of my backyard in California and my wife says, ‘You idiot. You’re going to fight this guy? Are you crazy? You’re a general manager. So it never came to anything, never came close to it.”

After Brendan died in a car accident, Burke recalled what his son had told him about Lowe.

“After the accident, one of the first people was Steve Tambellini called and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Burke told Jurksztowicz. “And I said, ‘Steve, I’ve got to mend the fence with Kevin.’

The two did talk and patch it up, Burke said. “Which is what Brendan wanted. So hopefully it took a little bit of that edge off me. Not the edge I need to compete but maybe the vindictive side.”

P.S. And here is some evidence of just how heated this feud got.