Hockey Confidential (30 page)

“My dad would get upset he didn't have much say with me anymore,” Keefe said. “But my family was still supportive of me. They were still coming to watch my games. They were still giving me money. My whole time I played in the OHL, my parents were at games, I'd still go home, visit, eat dinner there.”

Futa and the Majors had seen enough.

“It was a game where Barnes had taken what seemed like his 25th instigator penalty, and we had lost again,” Futa said. “Other kids on the team and their parents were getting upset. You could feel it all coming apart at the seams. It was out of control.”

St. Mike's decided to trade the four of them, but Frost wouldn't permit them to be broken up. It had to be a four-player package deal. Futa knew there was no way the Majors would get equal value for what they were giving up in terms of the quartet's actual hockey-playing ability, and he knew Frost would have to broker the deal with some other OHL team. Keefe had an incredible 37 goals and 74 points in only 38 games; Jefferson had 18 goals, 40 points and 116 PIM in 27 games; Cation had 9 goals, 30 points and 129 PIM in 36 games; Barnes had 11 goals, 25 points and a whopping 215 PIM in 31 games, including 24 fighting majors.

“We had made Jefferson our captain,” Futa said. “It was entirely work ethic–driven. No one worked as hard as he did. Sheldon was the best player in the league going away, the top scorer in the league on a last-place team. Sheldon was a warrior, an absolute warrior. His knowledge of the game was incredible. The Professor, that's what he was called. I thought you could at times see him thinking through all of this. He knew this wasn't right.”

At the OHL trade deadline in January 1999, St. Mike's traded all four to Barrie, getting back five players. It was not a good hockey trade for the Majors, but Futa was just relieved to be free of the lot of them. Mind you, even now, Futa still has a tough time reconciling how they could be so good and yet so bad; fiercely dedicated to improving as hockey players, but such terrible teammates and people.

“I can't say I disagree with any of that,” Keefe said, looking back on those days. “It was crazy at times. I think anyone who would know me knew me as the guy who would speak up and disagree [with Frost] on something. I would say, ‘This is stupid.' As I got older, I got more wits, became a little more independent. A lot of the things we were being advised to do by Frost just didn't make sense. The isolation [from our teammates], that was the biggest thing. He just didn't want us around other players that he perceived as bad influences.

“I also didn't like the signals from the stands. That was very stupid. He had certain signals for Jefferson and certain signals for me. Jefferson would follow them to a T. My signals were different, really basic—skate more, move your feet, shoot more. Quite frankly, I wouldn't look up. We would feud a lot because I wouldn't follow the signals. . . . I rebelled often, but I always stayed within the group.”

Barrie brought more of the same. If anything, it escalated to
even crazier levels than at St. Mike's.

Bert Templeton was the GM/coach who made the trade for Frost's boys. The feeling was Templeton, a legendary OHL hard-ass, a no-nonsense, tough-guy coach and manager, would tame the group. He tried. He battled with all four and with Frost as well. But when the Colts, with the second-best regular-season record in the OHL, lost to Oshawa in a seven-game, second-round playoff series, Templeton was fired, replaced as GM/coach by Bill Stewart.

Keefe, though, was rewarded for his productivity in his first OHL season by being chosen by the Tampa Bay Lightning in the second round of the 1999 NHL draft.

What unfolded in Barrie the next season, 1999–2000, is legendary—if by “legendary” you mean a gong show of epic proportions. It might be the single craziest season played in any league. Ever. There should be a book devoted entirely to the sheer nuttiness (not all of it, by any means, Frost-related) that transpired that season with the Colts, who on the face of it had a spectacular year, winning the OHL championship and playing in the Memorial Cup.

Early in the season, Cation was suspended 15 games by the OHL for his part in a brawl with Oshawa. In the same game against Oshawa, Ryan Barnes was suspended for 25 games for swinging his stick and breaking the fingers of Generals assistant coach Curtis Hodgins—who sued Barnes, the Colts and the OHL and was awarded damages of more than $20,000. Stewart was stripped of his GM duties by the league after he stowed a Ukrainian player, who didn't have the proper paperwork to get into the United States, in the equipment compartment under the bus to cross the border for a game in Erie, Pennsylvania. Colt defenceman Ryan O'Keefe was suspended for 24 playoff games for a slew-foot that fractured the ankle of an opposing player. The list could go on and on . . .

But it was also the year in which Frost's group of four became three. Barnes decided he'd had enough. His NHL team, the Detroit Red Wings, was obviously giving him guidance, but he'd grown weary of all that went with being in the so-called cult. Still playing on the same line as Keefe and Jefferson, for a time they wouldn't pass him the puck. They wouldn't talk to him. He was an outcast in their group, but was welcomed back into the Colts' team fold, where the rest of the players hated Keefe, Jefferson and Cation.

“I think [Barnes] got outside pressure rather than some awakening,” Keefe said, looking back on it now. “Whether it was his family or the Red Wings, he said, ‘This isn't working for me.' . . . Whatever it was, he made a good decision.”

Barnes, who went on to play only two NHL games but still had a seven-year pro career, is a player agent in Ontario now.

“I haven't ever really talked [publicly] about those days, and it's probably best not to say anything now,” said Barnes, who'll always be known as last into the “cult” and the first out.

Keefe said being hated by their teammates was eating him up, but he still refused to leave the group. Frost had this incredible hold over him and the others, though Keefe said his relationship with his family was still functional in his final year of junior.

“As a young kid, I don't remember thinking any other way,” Keefe recollected. “We were having success, it was going well. But it was intense, it was hard, it was draining. Our teammates hated us; we hated them. There was so much friction. We thought we were doing things the right way. No one worked harder than us. We would do full workouts after the game. Frost made us. We couldn't say no—we were under his control. How does that happen? I don't have an answer. I don't know other than we respected what he was saying. I don't know the exact definition of a cult, but you could certainly say that about us. It was a following, and he had that influence on us to follow him, to isolate us from the rest of the team.”

The problem, really, was that in spite of what was an untenable situation, at odds with everything the team game of hockey is supposed to be about, Frost's boys were individually having incredible success and their team was on the way to winning a league championship. Against all odds.

The old four-man power play from St. Mike's was a good example of that.

“In Barrie, we also ran a four-man scheme,” Keefe said. “Barnes in front of the net, Jefferson down low, Cation on the point, me on the half-wall; the fifth guy might as well not have even been there because he wasn't part of it. We had the No. 1 power play in the league, or close to it, playing four on four.”

Keefe shook his head at the memory of it, seemingly in equal parts amazement and disgust.

“I never knew this until after the fact, but [Bill Stewart] told the fifth guy, the other defenceman playing with us on the power play, that when we set up offensively, he was to skate back down into his own end and stand by the goalie. [Stewart] just wanted to show everyone in the rink how ridiculous it was that we weren't including him as part of the power play,” Keefe added. “I didn't even know that had happened until after the game. I was so focused on the four-man group, it was irrelevant to me who that fifth guy was. I didn't even know he was missing. It's crazy, and it's even crazier we succeeded. It goes against everything. None of it makes any sense.”

The totally dysfunctional Colts were a train wreck, albeit a winning train wreck. Stewart, who possessed a tremendous hockey mind, could be a crazy cowboy of a coach at times. The whole team behaved like idiots at the 2000 Memorial Cup, both on and off the ice. The organization had a season-long running battle with the league and OHL commissioner Dave Branch, who had suspended multiple Colt players and Stewart. The team walked out en masse from the Memorial Cup banquet when Branch started to speak. They pulled all sorts of stunts on the ice, they were constantly in the news, ultimately losing in the Cup final to Rimouski. And while Jefferson was running his mouth nonstop at the Memorial Cup, garnering headlines for verbal attacks on Brad Richards and Ramzi Abid, amongst others, Keefe did something on the first day of the tourney that would haunt him.

Contrary to what has often been reported, Keefe did not refuse to shake Branch's hand when he was given the OHL championship trophy. He shook hands with the commissioner on that occasion before accepting the trophy. It was during the opening ceremonies of the Memorial Cup that Keefe went down the line of dignitaries, shaking hands, and refused to do so with Branch. It was on national television. It would be convenient to blame this on Frost or the “cult,” but as Keefe recalled it, none of that came into play in his mind.

“It was a totally spur-of-the-moment thing by me, just me,” Keefe said. “I made a split-second decision, a really stupid decision.”

The Colts were a fractured, dysfunctional group, but the common bond they shared at the time, from the coach on down, was an anti-league, anti-Branch sentiment.

“One of the things our whole team had sort of rallied around was an ‘us versus the world' mentality,” Keefe added. “People don't realize this, but we had a big sign in our dressing room that season that said, f--- the league. We had so many run-ins with the league, so many guys suspended. People have always tried to tie me not shaking hands with Branch as part of the Frost influence, but with the mindset our whole organization had, it was nothing more than a spur-of-the-moment decision by me. It was foolish.”

Looking back, the only word Keefe can come up with to describe that final junior season is “mind-boggling.”

“We won the OHL, but no one liked us,” he said. “We were a fragmented hockey team, and looking back on that now, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It makes me really wonder [what we were thinking]. It also makes me have a lot of respect for Bill Stewart. To coach, and win, in that environment—that was an incredible job by him.”

In the six-year, mostly mediocre, professional hockey career
of Sheldon Keefe, there was never any time when David Frost wasn't a factor in his life. But the irony is, as pro hockey served to put some physical distance—as well as a smaller but steadily increasing measure of emotional detachment—between him and Frost, their relationship caused Keefe more personal aggravation than even during the most tumultuous times in junior hockey.

It's almost as if his bill came due for all that success in junior.

Keefe never played more than 49 NHL games in any of his three seasons with Tampa, playing parts of each year in the minors. He had a modest 12 goals and 24 points with 78 PIM in 125 career NHL regular-season games.

In the summer of 2002, Frost became a player agent certified by the NHL Players' Association, but even before that, from the time Keefe showed up in Tampa in the fall of 2000, Frost was “representing” Keefe. How Frost was certified by the NHLPA, given his track record and history, was the subject of much conjecture at the time, but most everyone assumed it was owing to his closeness with Bob Goodenow, executive director of the association. (In December 2005, when Frost's toxicity in the hockey community was high—and also, perhaps not coincidentally, after Goodenow had stepped down as executive director that summer—Frost “resigned” as an agent.)

Frost would regularly harass Lightning management, complaining about how the diminutive free-agent signee Marty St. Louis was playing more than Keefe for coach John Tortorella. In his book on Danton and Frost, Steve Simmons quoted Tampa GM Jay Feaster at length, saying how most everyone in the organization liked Keefe as a person, but the constant haranguing they got from Frost, and Keefe's reluctance to accept more development time in the minors, ultimately was the player's undoing in Tampa. The same sort of situation was playing itself out in New Jersey with the Devils, who had selected Jefferson 135th overall in the 2000 NHL draft, the summer after the Colts' OHL championship. Cation, by the way, never played pro hockey, heading off to a Canadian university career at St. Thomas University in the fall of 2000.

When Keefe's three-year entry-level NHL contract with Tampa expired, the Lightning retained his rights by making him a qualifying offer. He signed a one-year contract, but was put on waivers before the regular season began. Keefe was claimed by the New York Rangers, spent a month there, but never played in a game before being put on waivers again and being reclaimed by Tampa. The Lightning sent him to Hershey of the AHL, where he played the 2003–04 season. He “loved” it in Hershey, had a good season with the Bears, and with each passing year, Frost's pervasive influence slowly receded.

“It was extensive still; we spent time together in the summer,” Keefe said, noting he and Frost bought real estate together (Frost owned a house and Keefe a cottage on a piece of property in Battersea, near Kingston). “But he was not at my games—some, but not many—and we spent more time talking by phone before or after games than seeing each other. It was a habit, but as I got older in pro, it started to become less. We talked less, he was involved less. I made more decisions on my own.”