Hockey Confidential (28 page)

Many of Downie's fellow Bruin supporters would no doubt strenuously object to those views—“heresy” is a word that might come to mind for some—but Downie the deep thinker has reconciled his love of the Bruins, however big and bad they may be at any given time, with his own feelings.

“I don't like fighting,” Downie said. “I just don't. I don't think it does what people [who support it] say it does. It's a tired conversation. I don't think I like the NHL's version of hockey as it is practised at times. Shawn Thornton . . . I know he fights, but he can also play. You should have fourth lines who can play, like the Bruins' fourth line can play. You want to be tough like the Bruins? Fine, then have a fourth line you believe in. And have them play hockey.

“Harry [Sinden] was one of the early [old-school] guys who came around and said fighting had become too much, even for him. What the NHL is facing now is, ‘Can you give up two dollars to maybe make five? Would you risk alienating a core group of fans to bring in twice as many [if there was less fighting]?' I think there's a big bait-and-switch going on in the NHL right now. It's like, ‘Parents, bring your kids to the game, the kids eat half-price.' It's like taking your kid to a Disney film, and halfway through it, a porn scene breaks out. Bare-knuckle fighting scares kids more than almost anything on earth, at least until they become inured to it. I'm sorry, I don't see it. To me, sports are meant to hint at man's ideal, not just mirror our reality, which is, ‘This is how we solve things in life: we fight.' There's got to be a better way.”

In the absence of that, Downie will always be able to take from hockey what is forever embedded in his heart and soul—the image of his dad, Edgar, fist in the air, at the lonely end of the rink, to say nothing of brotherly love and the Downie boys' spiritual connection that includes the Bruins.

“We will,” Downie said, “always be carrying on Harry's work.”

Regrets?

Sheldon Keefe pondered the question and paused before he answered.

Maybe he was taking stock of them, running through the inventory in his mind, with no shortage to choose from.

Or maybe he hesitated because he's not inclined to look back, determined instead to focus on the here and now, or perhaps a future that seems as bright and promising as his past was, at times, dark and disturbing.

But the head coach of the Soo Greyhounds of the Ontario Hockey League also knows that, as hard as he runs on the road to redemption, he can't pretend his past never happened, can't deny who he was or what he did. And he knows how all of it, for better or for worse, has shaped the man he's become and still hopes to be.

“I regret a lot of things,” he said. “Everything, really. Just around who I was when I played junior hockey, all of that in general—a lot of incidents, how we acted, how we conducted ourselves . . . the truth is, I lost years of my life, especially how I lived in isolation, so focused on the task. I lost years of my life, I really did.”

He knows who to blame for that.

“Just myself,” he said. “Just me.”

This is Sheldon Keefe's story. It is not so much a story of
what he was or what he did—a lot of which has already been told—as much as it is a story of who he is and what he's doing now in his quest to be a good son, brother, husband, father, friend and member of the hockey community, working hard, one person at a time, to convince the skeptics and doubters he's worthy of their respect and trust.

This is not David Frost's story.

This is not Mike Danton's—or Mike Jefferson's—story, either.

Their stories, to varying degrees, have been told. Countless times. You're likely familiar with some aspect of a sordid hockey saga that exposed not only the dark, seedy side of the game but the worst of those directly involved with all of it for the better part of a decade beginning in the late 1990s.

Frost is a pariah in the game of hockey: a disgraced minor hockey coach turned disgraced agent turned
persona non grata
, who gained the trust and confidence of a small cadre of teenage hockey players, only to control their lives like some sinister Svengali. All the while he sidestepped intense media inquisitions, police investigations and a bevy of criminal charges, leaving him with no criminal record, though he didn't fare nearly so well in the court of public opinion. Frost pleaded guilty to assault of one his players in 1997, but was granted a conditional discharge in open court. In 2001—when a photograph surfaced of a half-naked 13-year-old taped to a chair, who subsequently alleged he was abused by Frost when the photo was taken in the summer of 2000—a year-long police investigation failed to result in any criminal charges after multiple witnesses, including Keefe, alleged the boy was lying about the context of the events leading to the photo. In 2006, Frost was charged with 12 counts of sexual exploitation involving teenage boys and girls in Deseronto, Ontario, during the 1996–97 hockey season when Frost, then a Junior A coach, lived in a motel room with a few players, one of them Keefe. Eight of the 12 charges were later dropped, and in 2009, Frost stood trial on the remaining four counts of sexual exploitation, an offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But he was acquitted on all charges. He was also charged with fraud in 2007 for using a credit card belonging to Mike Danton, but was found not guilty after Danton said Frost had permission to use the card. In 2012, Frost self-published his professed own story in e-book form in
Frosty: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Going Up the Ranks to the NHL
, in which he said: “I am not the devil. I took a handful of long-shot kids and beat the odds. In turn, a few of my players made it to the NHL.” In the years since then—as of the spring of 2014, anyway—Frost had virtually disappeared from the hockey landscape.

Mike Jefferson—or Mike Sage Danton, to which he legally changed his name in 2002 after a stormy and highly publicized estrangement from his family—pleaded guilty in July 2004 to a failed murder-for-hire conspiracy a few months earlier that the FBI said was to have targeted Danton's agent and former coach, Frost. Danton was playing for the NHL's St. Louis Blues at the time of his arrest. Danton was sentenced to seven and a half years in a U.S. federal prison, but was incarcerated for slightly more than five, transferred to a Canadian prison in the Kingston, Ontario, area in March 2009, was subsequently released and granted full parole in September of the same year. At his parole hearing, Danton maintained the target of his murder conspiracy was not Frost, but his own father, Steve Jefferson, something Frost had also claimed in the wake of Danton's conviction. After being paroled in 2009, Danton attended and played hockey for two years at St. Mary's University in Halifax. In the years following, up to and including the 2013–14 season, Danton played lower-level European pro hockey in relative obscurity in Austria, Sweden, Slovakia, Kazakhstan, Romania and Poland. In 2011,
Toronto Sun
columnist Steve Simmons wrote a book entitled
The Lost Dream: The Story of Mike Danton, David Frost and a Broken Canadian Family
.

So there you have it, the checkered pasts of David Frost and Mike Danton (né Jefferson) in all their glory, stories the hockey world would just as soon forget.

There's no denying Sheldon's Keefe's story is, in part, inextricably intertwined with Frost and Danton's. It's not possible to tell Keefe's without touching on the others. But of the three, Keefe's story has a fighting chance to become one of hope and promise, not darkness and despair.

Here it is, through his own eyes, then and now (his comments, unless otherwise indicated, are from an interview conducted in March 2014).

Sheldon Keefe was born in 1980, the middle child to father
Brian and mother Roberta, hardworking people who settled in Brampton, Ontario, a bedroom community northwest of Toronto. Sheldon's sister, Lisa, was four years older than him; his brother, Adam, four years younger. Brian Keefe was a blue-collar guy who loaded and unloaded trucks at a cold-storage plant, a hard existence he continued to work at into his late 50s. As of 2014, he was still at it. As Sheldon said, “My dad hasn't had many easy days [at work].” His mother worked in child care for many years.

Their existence was unremarkable in the sense that theirs was a normal Canadian family whose lives, more or less, revolved around a love of hockey. When Brian grew up in Prince Edward Island, he never played the game, though he was a good athlete, playing basketball and wrestling. But from a very young age, Sheldon and younger brother Adam were consumed by it.

“Growing up it was hockey, hockey, hockey,” Keefe said. “I remember playing on two or three teams in the same winter.”

Sheldon played in the local Chinguacousy minor association, one of the better kids, always scoring a lot of goals. Adam was always the best player on his team as he started out.

Sheldon went on to play AAA rep hockey for Chinguacousy in the Ontario Minor Hockey Association, a good player on a poor team—no match, really, for their local rivals, the powerful Brampton team.

One of Keefe's teammates from a young age was Mike Jefferson. The Jeffersons didn't live too far from the Keefes. Brian Keefe and Steve Jefferson became fast friends—drinking buddies, if you will—spending a lot of time at the Jefferson home. Sheldon and Mike also became friends.

“We lived close to each other, my dad and his dad were close. We [Sheldon and Mike] were close at times and grew more [close] because of our fathers,” Sheldon said, adding he probably met Jefferson for the first time at age seven or eight. “We were very different people, but we hung out a lot.”

Between his major atom and minor peewee years, Sheldon wanted to play summer hockey. The core of the Brampton OMHA team was putting a summer squad together, and Keefe, the best player on the Chinguacousy team, was recruited to be on it. So was a coach by the name of Dave Frost.

As Keefe recalled it, Frost was known in Brampton hockey circles as a hotshot in the coaching ranks, a young guy who was already coaching Junior A with the Brampton Capitals. The Brampton parents who were putting together the summer team asked Frost to be the coach. He accepted.

Keefe doesn't believe Mike Jefferson was on that first summer team, but when the team was put together again the following summer, Keefe and Jefferson were teammates. The team was again coached by Frost. Keefe's recollection is that even though Frost, at first, only coached him on two summer teams and was still busy coaching the Brampton Junior A team, he started showing up at Keefe's Chinguacousy games and “being around a lot more.”

In their major peewee year, the Brampton parents who put together the summer team decided they wanted to move, as a group, to the Greater Toronto Hockey League. Again, they asked Frost if he would be the coach. And again, Keefe and Jefferson were recruited to join them. They all joined the Toronto Young Nationals major peewee team in the GTHL. Frost, who was still coaching Junior A at the time, was the coach.

“We played like a bunch of nobodies,” Keefe said. “The Toronto Red Wings were the hot ticket.”

Joe Goodenow, the son of then NHL Players' Association executive director Bob Goodenow, was one of the big names on the Red Wings. When the major peewee season ended, the best players on the Red Wings, including Goodenow, and the best players on the Nats, including Keefe, Jefferson and another Brampton friend, defenceman Shawn Cation, joined forces on the minor bantam Nats team, which was coached by Frost.

In minor bantam and major bantam, the Nats were a powerhouse team, winning the all-Ontario bantam championship. David Frost and Bob Goodenow—who was one of the two most powerful men in professional hockey at the time—developed a relationship.

Frost's championship Nats were a much greater team than the sum of its parts. Only one player off the bantam Nats, Lance Galbraith, was taken in the first three rounds of the OHL draft—in the third round, to Ottawa. At the time, 16-year-olds could only play in the OHL if they were drafted in the first three rounds, so Galbraith was the only team member going directly to the OHL.

Keefe was a small and physically underdeveloped player in bantam—a good player, but no longer dominant, though Bob Goodenow gave him a nickname that would stick: “The Professor,” reflecting his heady ways as a player and someone who always seemed to be processing things in his mind. Jefferson was small but strong and aggressive, a relentless worker. Neither, though, was good enough to be drafted into the OHL at 16.

It was after the fact, when Frost's troubles first came to light, that newspaper stories were published, reporting Frost verbally abused and physically intimidated his Young Nats players to get the most out of them. If Keefe had any issues with Frost or his abusive ways in minor hockey, he didn't let on, citing a burgeoning and largely positive relationship between Frost and the boys from Brampton . . . at that time, anyway.

“We all looked up to him,” Keefe said of Frost. “He was a young guy, a passionate coach, much different than we were used to. He was a [Junior A] coach. We all started to attend or work at his hockey school in the summer. There was a lot more interaction away from hockey. The relationship became more involved to the point where I looked at him as the guy who knew what he was doing, who would point us in the right direction and tell us what we should be doing.”

And Frost didn't just forge a relationship with his players. He befriended their parents, too.

“Steve Jefferson, initially, really took to Dave,” Keefe said. “Dave spent a lot of time at the Jeffersons'. My dad spent a lot of time there, too. It was a hangout for them. They would drink there. We thought the relationship was good. Both my family and the Jefferson family recognized and looked at it as a positive for our hockey [at the time]. We were happy.”

For all the talk of verbal and possibly physical abuse with
the Nats, it was ironic that Frost ran afoul of the GTHL for something relatively innocuous: forging a parent's signature on a form. He was ultimately suspended and lost his ability to coach sanctioned minor or junior hockey. But that didn't stop him.

There was an “outlaw” Junior A league in Ontario. Frost, along with the Abrams brothers, Marty and Kevin, got involved with a team, the infamous Quinte Hawks, based in Deseronto, Ontario, just east of Belleville.

The Abrams brothers assembled a big, strong team, not just taking some core players from the Nats—Keefe, Jefferson and Cation—but also recruiting talented players from all over Ontario. Ryan Barnes, from Dunnville, Ontario, joined the group, as did big defenceman John Erskine, the future NHLer who had been playing minor hockey in Ajax, Ontario. In addition to Keefe, Jefferson and Cation, Frost placed two older players he knew from junior A, Larry Barron and Darryl Tiveron, in Quinte.

Frost didn't have any official role with Quinte to start the season, other than to supply his five players to the Abrams brothers. Greg Royce was the head coach. Jefferson and Keefe were actually cut in training camp, which prompted Frost to also pull Cation, Barron and Tiveron out of Quinte. All five, briefly, went home to Brampton and played for Lindsay Hofford's Bramalea Blues Junior A team in the Ontario Provincial Junior Hockey League. But it wasn't going well for them in Bramalea, and it wasn't going well for Quinte, either. With the Hawks off to a slow start, the five returned to Quinte along with Frost, who at that point was named an assistant coach to Royce. But the truth was, Frost was effectively calling all the shots.

From a purely hockey perspective, Quinte was a good move for Keefe and Jefferson. Keefe, a skilled, cerebral player, scored 21 goals and 44 points in 44 games. Jefferson racked up 281 penalty minutes to go with 28 points in 35 games.