Absolute Monarchy : Murray Is Ruling His Kingdom the Way He Sees Fit--With Passion, Intensity and an Iron Fist

With 7:15 played in the third period Monday night, the ice at the Great Western Forum looked like two hours after a parade.

Litter everywhere. Gloves. Sticks. Bodies. Kings. Mighty Ducks.

Referees Rob Shick and Brad Meier were trying to sort out the carnage that had begun moments earlier when the Kings’ Aki Berg and Ducks’ Teemu Selanne tangled in the corner.

There was blame to assess and punishment to mete out, and while the officials met, only the side wall of the King bench was keeping a slightly built, almost waifish-looking guy in a dark suit from jumping into the face of Craig Hartsburg, once a player who knew his way around a penalty box.

Andy Murray, getting ready to rumble?

No, Murray conducting another coaching clinic, assigning responsibility to Hartsburg and holding him accountable in language bluer than the lines across the ice.

“I was trying to indicate to him that he was wrong in what he did,” said Murray, translating into something that can be printed in this newspaper. “We did not run Selanne. If we had, he would have had reason.

“He was wrong tonight.”

So Murray, a marginally talented hockey and football player in college, lectured Hartsburg, an NHL veteran who took the Ducks to the playoffs last season while Murray was coaching Shattuck-St. Mary’s in the schoolboy championships. The topics were accountability and responsibility, and the professor deviated from his mild-mannered, classroom demeanor to indulge in some passionate prose.

The Kings have been hearing it since Murray was hired in June. First, there were individual meetings, then letters, then a Saturday night session before training camp opened Sept. 5. That night, he let them know how fortunate they were to be playing a game for a living.

“He’s passionate because he wants to win, but that’s everybody’s job in here,” says Rob Blake, whose opinion was sought by management during the process that ended with Murray’s replacing ousted King coach Larry Robinson.

“You’ve got to find that in you.”

It’s never far beneath a surface of calm control with Murray, who works with a loose-leaf notebook in which he has probably written on every page, “Do it your own way.”

“He might win the Stanley Cup. He might get fired by December, but he’s going to do it his way,” says Tom Skinner, the hockey coach at Brandon University in Canada and Murray’s friend for 20 years.

It’s the key to understanding Andy Murray, who has worked much of his life to get where he is and figures that he has earned the right to set the agenda.

“I think all . . . coaches should be yourself,” he says. “Coach your own game, not somebody else’s. Too often, coaches are caught up in the fans and the media and management and so on and start abandoning their coaching style and don’t follow through with what they believe in. Then, all of a sudden, things don’t go well and they say, ‘I should have done it this way.’ ”

Murray’s way involves control, from assigning lockers to the players, to setting up schedules and practices in minute detail, to arriving at the arena three hours before a game to make certain things are just so.

He delegates to assistants Mark Hardy, Dave Tippett and Ray Bennett, but is never far from any decision.

And Murray’s way involves intensity, with little wasted time or motion.

“I think, as a coach, you never want to cheat the people you’re working with,” he says. “I told these guys that if I don’t push you as hard as I can push you, I’m cheating you. I don’t want to do that.”

Drills are never for exercise. Everything is evaluated, numerically if possible. Signs and slogans are everywhere, even in conversation: “Tough to Play Against.” “Before Players Care What You Know, They Want to Know That You Care.”

“There may be things I can’t control, injuries and so on, but I truly believe through research and so on that there’s a certain methodology that makes success,” he says. “So everything we do has a purpose. Most of our drills, if you watch them, have a conditioning element . . . a skill element and . . . a tactical element.”

The message is clear: deviate from Murray’s way at your own peril. And any deviation had better be for good reason and, more important, had better work.

It’s all a part of a plan Murray has developed over his 48 years, using vocational string saved from hockey jobs from Canada to Switzerland to Germany to Japan to the U.S. Murray is better known around the world than he was in Southern California when he was hired to replace Robinson, becoming the 19th coach in the Kings’ 32-year history.

Murray is a rink rat, the way Rick Pitino was a gym rat and Lou Holtz and Bill Parcells are, well, maybe field mice. He identifies with them.

“I’ve read [Parcells’] book,” he says, and you can tell it was an investment, not a leisure-time pursuit. “I’ve read all the books about Lou Holtz. I’m not much for reading real technical, scientific books, but I like reading biographies and autobiographies about successful people, and not just coaches. I do a lot of reading about business executives who have done their jobs well. When these people talk, Red Auerbach, Rick Pitino, they’ve done it.”

He’s been trying to do it since he was born in Manitoba to a family of means, those means being a string of car dealerships. Murray played at Brandon, then coached there and faced a decision there when his father died. Murray found himself coaching the university team, teaching a full class load and running a car dealership at night.

Something had to give, and it was the family business when he escaped to Switzerland to coach a team there. He spent eight seasons coaching in Europe, doing it his way and winning. Even quitting a lucrative job at Lugano, Switzerland, because the team owner told him to play a Swiss goalie or else.

As usual, Murray had it his way.

He had two visions, one of coaching Canada’s national team, the other of being a head coach in the NHL. He took Team Canada to a gold medal in the 1997 World Championships, with Blake as one of his defensemen, but the other quest eluded him.

Murray was a finalist for coaching jobs at Winnipeg, Florida, Pittsburgh and with the Mighty Ducks, most of the time losing out to guys with NHL resumes.

It rankled.

He soldiered on, involving himself in Canada’s hockey coaching program, conducting clinics, teaching, coaching and polishing his reputation, even while taking a year out of the mainstream, at Shattuck-St. Mary’s.

“I don’t know about being a good coach or a bad coach, but I’m honest,” he says.

It’s what he told a judge in Winnipeg during a 1995 trial in which Murray sued the Jets for breaching his contract as an assistant. The team was trying to turn him into a pro scout, then to let him go when he spurned the assignment. Finally, he was accused of telling Nelson Emerson and Stephane Quintal that they were being traded just before a midseason game.

Prepared as usual, he showed up in court with letters from both, which explained the incident and exonerated Murray, who won a settlement of more than $175,000.

It, perhaps, set back his plan to be hired as an NHL head coach.

“It was fair and just,” he says. “I think one of the problems with society is that people don’t stand up for what they believe in because they’re afraid of the consequences.

“That’s the same way I’m approaching this job. I’ll do it the way I want to do it. If it works, that’s outstanding. If it doesn’t work, I did it my way and that’s the way I wanted.”

It’s his way, but it’s skewed by what he learned in a summer of discovery. Murray talked with the Kings and was told the who, what, where and when of a miserable last season. It was left for him to decide how to fix it.

The how was work and discipline, which Murray equates with control.

“We want to put our stamp on this team,” he said before the first practice.

That day, 24 or so other NHL teams scrimmaged. The Kings ran drills, with the accent on ran, and then were told they did almost as well as his Shattuck-St. Mary’s team had a year ago.

The selling of Andy Murray to the Kings had begun in earnest.

“We had it the easy way the last couple of years,” says Blake. “We had a coach who wanted you to go out and play because it was going to be easy and that didn’t work. If [players] complain about this style, well, eventually you have to buy into something and the other one didn’t work.

“He wanted to bring in discipline right away. He talked with guys and knew that we lacked it and he wanted to make it a point.”

The point was that this was no book-taught coach spouting theory. The coach’s door always being open was no cliche. It was open, and the coach came through it. Hardy, Tippett and Bennett were told to make contact with every player every day, even if it was only a nod or a stick rapped across the shin pads.

“If you haven’t played in the NHL, you’re always labeled as being a technical guru,” Murray says. “That’s the handle you’re given. But I like to think my people skills are my strongest asset. That I’m demanding, but fair.”

Hours upon hours on the ice were followed by a 4-0 victory over Phoenix in an exhibition in Las Vegas. And when the Kings fell to a quick 2-1 deficit against Colorado three days later, Murray called time out and blistered them. The professor cracked his whip, and they responded with an overtime win.

But those were exhibitions. The Kings are 3-1-1 with three more to go before beginning the season with seven games on the road. There will be a quick evaluation of Andy Murray, and he knows it.

“Players are telling me they’ve never had a harder training camp, and they’re patting me on the back,” he says. “Everything’s going pretty good, and we’ve looked pretty good. . . . Everybody’s excited. . . . Everybody’s enthused.

“But . . . how do we respond when we’ve had a couple of losses? When we’ve had three games in four nights on the road? That’s when you’ll be able to measure our team.”