Cocksucker is just one of the words Burke promised Brendan he'd never use again.

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Brian Burke is the fourth of ten kids from an Irish Catholic family. His dad worked as a salesman for Sunbeam, and every time he got a promotion, the family moved, working their way through Rhode Island, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston until they finally settled in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb outside Minneapolis, when Burke was 12. Hockey is king in Minnesota, and Burke was determined to compete. "I didn't have any equipment, I didn't know how to play, but I went down to the neighborhood rink in the middle of a team practice and asked the coach if I could play. The first game I played, I could hardly stand up." By his senior year of high school, he was good enough to make the team at right wing.

A year after that, he was a walk-on for the Division I team at Providence College in Rhode Island. In his second year he earned a half scholarship, and by the following season he was getting a full ride. But he never kidded himself about his talent. He was a mediocre skater and lacked finesse with the puck. Along with this unique gift for ruthless self-appraisal, Burke possessed size, hostility, and a ferocious work ethic. He was always the first on the ice for practice and last off, while maintaining a 3.9 GPA his last three years.

When he graduated, he had two golden tickets in his hand: admission to Harvard Law School and a two-year contract with the Philadelphia Flyers to play for one of their farm teams, the Maine Mariners. He put Harvard on hold, but after a year in minor league hockey, he took a hard look at the depth of the Flyers bench and asked his general manager for advice: "He told me, 'If you were my son, I'd tell you to go to law school.'" Burke graduated from Harvard Law in 1981 and went to work as an attorney representing NHL players. A decade later, he was G.M. of the Hartford Whalers. In his interview for the job, he told the owner, "If you hire Brian Burke to run your team, there will only be two hands on the steering wheel, and they'll both be mine." It's a warning he has issued to every potential employer who ever interviewed him. That includes his three-year stint in Anaheim (where his team brought home the Stanley Cup in 2007), the prestigious G.M. position for the Olympic team, and his current megawatt gig in Toronto.

Brendan was Burke's third child. He was born in 1988, just as Burke's career was taking off in Vancouver. Burke has six kids, four grown children with Kerry and two little girls with his second wife, Jennifer. After Burke and Kerry divorced in 1995, she moved back to Boston with the kids. Over the next decade, he spent countless hours in the air flying back east two weekends every month to see his children: "The physical wear and tear of that was tremendous, but I made it clear to my bosses in Vancouver and later Anaheim that I had committed to these two weekends. And now, especially after what happened with Brendan, I'm glad I did that."

Brendan was 16 when he told his family he was quitting hockey. He hadn't started playing sports until he was in seventh grade and was never an outstanding athlete, but he'd played for Xaverian Brothers High School, a small Catholic school outside Boston, since he was a freshman. He was six feet four and ungainly and played goalie because he could fill the net. Like his dad, he was passionate about hockey and had spent hours at NHL arenas with Burke, studying the game, meeting other general managers and the league's top players. His family was surprised when he quit but accepted his explanation that he wasn't keen on riding the bench his senior year. What they didn't know was that Brendan was sick of listening to the locker-room slurs about faggots and homos and the dreaded cocksucker. He was terrified that someone would out him to the other players, and he wanted to leave the team while his teammates were still his friends.