'This story isn't about me," said Brian Burke, talking on his cellphone during halftime of a Toronto Raptors game. "It's about my son, and his courage. It's not about me."

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Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke.

Photograph by : National Post

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He is only partly right. When Brian Burke took the general manager's job in Vancouver in 1998, it was because nobody else was hiring. He had tried like hell to get the Atlanta job, but it didn't work out. He was stuck on the West coast.

So Burke took his four children from his first marriage to lunch, and he made them a promise. "You won't lose one day with your father," he said. And for 11 years he would fly from Vancouver -- and then from Anaheim -- to Boston for weekends, twice a month.

For all the talk about how the Toronto Maple Leafs are the Vatican and how the next guy who wins a Stanley Cup here will have schools named after him, Brian Burke didn't come here just to slay the blue-and-white beast. Brian Burke came here because of the kids --Molly is in Maine, Katie and Patrick in Boston, and Brendan is in Oxford, Ohio, and headed for law school in New England next year. As their father, he wanted to be closer to his family.

But when he was still in Anaheim, Burke's family life took an unexpected turn. In a wonderful and deeply felt story on ESPN.com,John Buccigross tells the story of how Brendan told his family and his hockey team at the University of Miami (Ohio), where he is the student manager for the No. 1-ranked team in the NCAA, that he is gay. And the story is also about how he told his dad. It is deeply affecting. Everyone should read it. Now, Brian Burke might not be the epitome of hockey machismo -- hello, Don Cherry -- but he is unapologetically gruff and tough and unwilling to suffer fools. Until a recent change of heart, Brian Burke was one of the loudest voices against legislating against headshots in the NHL; he remains one of the front-line defenders when it comes to fighting, to hitting, to the caveman ethic of the game. Burke is a tough guy. Oh, and a Catholic.

And in 2007, at 19 years old, Brendan had to tell him. He worked up to it.

"You tell your friends first, because you choose your friends," Buccigross told Bob McCown and me on The Fan 590 yesterday. "Then he told his sister, and ... he told Patrick.

"But his dad was the mountaintop."

So on Dec. 30, 2007, Brendan watched his dad's Anaheim Ducks lose to his dad's former team, the Vancouver Canucks, in Vancouver. And afterwards, at Burke's Vancouver condo, he just said it. And nothing changed.

"It wasn't like: Deep breath, pause. What's the right thing to say?" Burke said in a telephone interview last night. "It didn't change anything. I love him, and I'm proud of him. The story isn't about me. It's about what my son's doing.

"I don't think I did anything different than any parent who loves their kids."

He's right, and he's wrong. Burke is right that Brendan's courage in telling his family, and the hockey team for which he works -- who, to their credit, responded with a collective shrug, and offered support even from unexpected circles --is admirable.