Hockey Confidential

by Bob Mckenzie

  So Keefe and Cation moved back home, but for Keefe, it was only home in the figurative sense.

  “I started to spend a lot of time with [Frost] and his wife, Bridget, at their house in Brampton,” Keefe said of life during the 1997–98 season. “I was spending nights there; I was spending less and less time at home. [Frost] didn’t discourage it. We’d hang out there, it was a place to go, close to my high school. I thought it was cool. He was a young, successful guy who was fun to be around and Bridget was welcoming and took care of meals and things. Having been away from home at 16, I guess I liked the independence [of hanging at Frost’s house]. I thought my family life was still pretty good.”

  Keefe and Cation were making major strides on the ice with Caledon. Cation played well enough—15 goals, 36 points and 231 PIM in 46 games—to earn a scholarship the next season to Northern Michigan University. Keefe was planning on going the same route—until he started getting bigger and stronger in his 17-year-old season. He had a monster year, scoring 41 goals and 81 points with 117 PIM in 43 games.

  “I started to feel more comfortable with the idea of playing in the OHL,” Keefe said. “It was Frost’s suggestion I play [major junior]. I didn’t question that. I felt better about myself as a player.”

  That was merely the precursor to getting all the boys in the band back together again.

  With a keen eye for talent and a bright hockey mind, Mike Futa is considered an NHL general manager in waiting. In 2014, he was co-director of amateur scouting with the Los Angeles Kings, but he was interviewed for GM jobs around the league during the 2013–14 season, subsequently being promoted by the Kings to be vice-president of hockey operations and director of player personnel.

  In 1997–98, though, he was a 26-year-old assistant coach of the first-year St. Michael’s Majors, the OHL club affiliated with the prestigious Toronto Catholic high school that was returning to this level of junior hockey for the first time since 1962. Futa therefore had a ringside view of the master manipulator Frost, who was moving his boys around hockey like pawns on a chessboard.

  In his rookie OHL season, while Keefe and Cation were playing in Caledon, Jefferson had a falling out with his team in Sarnia. So Frost helped to orchestrate a midseason trade to the Majors.

  “I knew Frost from when he coached the Nats,” Futa said. “And that team in Quinte was maybe the most heavily scouted Tier II team ever. We’d all heard the stories about Frost and his boys, but we figured Jefferson could help us.”

  So the trade was made. Jefferson broke his leg after 18 games with the Majors and didn’t play the rest of the season.

  “He missed the last two months,” Futa said, “but there were no issues. He’d sit at all the home games in the stands and watch with Frost.”

  When that 1997–98 season ended—the Majors finished with a terrible 15–42–9 record—Frost approached the Majors’ brass (owner Reg Quinn, former NHL GM Gerry Meehan, head coach Mark Napier and assistant coach Futa) with a proposition.

  “Frost said to me, ‘If you’re prepared to give up some assets, you can get Sheldon Keefe’s rights from Plymouth,’” Futa recalled. “He told me [Keefe and Jefferson] wanted to play together.”

  The Majors called Plymouth GM Peter DeBoer, offered a third-round pick for Keefe’s rights and made the deal.

  “I told [Frost] we made the trade and asked if we needed to talk to Keefe [about reporting], and he was like, ‘Oh, no, he’s out in the parking lot.’ He wasn’t actually, but it wasn’t like there was any issue there. Frost knew Sheldon was coming.”

  At the start of that 1998–99 season, Jefferson was the Majors’ top centre, while Keefe was the team’s top right winger. The Majors got off to a slow start. Head coach Napier was replaced by Futa, a now 27-year-old rookie head coach.

  “Their chemistry was unbelievable,” Futa said. “Jefferson was just a beast on draws. Sheldon was the best player in the league. We sucked, but they were unbelievable.”

  Frost the puppet master was just getting warmed up, though.

  Cation was in his freshman season at Northern Michigan, but didn’t like it there. He wanted to come home. Frost told the Majors to get his rights from Oshawa. They did. Cation was reunited with Keefe and Jefferson. Then Frost told Futa that Ryan Barnes in Sudbury was available. The Majors traded for him, too, having the big, tough winger ride shotgun on a line with Keefe and Jefferson. Barnes had already been drafted into the NHL after his rookie OHL season, going 55th overall in the second round to Detroit in the 1998 draft.

  The four Quinte Hawks were back together on the ice, but Frost was pulling the strings off it, too.

  Futa was alternately awestruck and unnerved by what he was witnessing each and every day.

  “They were the hardest-working hockey players I’d ever seen, and I had no control over them,” Futa said. “Sheldon’s tank would never empty. He was a machine. Jefferson was relentless. All four were inseparable on and off the ice. They were driven like I’ve never seen anyone driven in hockey. No one on the team wanted to do practice drills against them because it was game conditions, it was stick in your face. I would look at some of the really talented players on our team and I would think, ‘If only some of these guys had just a little bit [of the drive] these four guys had.’ They wanted to be players so badly. Nobody wanted it as badly as they did. I feel guilty even complimenting them, because I know where it was coming from, but their drive was unbelievable.”

  Futa would recall that when NHL Central Scouting was coming in to take players’ official height and weight measurements, Keefe and Jefferson were rigging their shoes with lifts to gain an extra half-inch and loading up on peanut butter sandwiches to pack on the pounds before a weigh-in. It was excessive, it was crazy, but this was their life.

  “All of them, including me, were just chess pieces being moved around the board,” Futa said. Frost controlled everything for the four players, on and off the ice.

  Futa said he would put all four on the power play, and every move the players made on the ice was scripted by Frost, not the coach. The players would look up during the game to get hand signals from Frost. They had their own faceoff alignments and set plays off the draw. As a young first-time head coach, Futa was overwhelmed. He had no control.

  During one game at Maple Leaf Gardens, Futa benched Jefferson because Jefferson was only interested in fighting Kingston opponent Sean Avery, a hated foe. During a stoppage in play, Jefferson left the bench without a word and skated the length of the ice to the Zamboni door at the north end of the rink and went to the dressing room to take off his equipment.

  “He’d obviously gotten his signal from up top,” Futa said.

  If any opponent dared lay a hand on Keefe, Barnes would come flying in, gloves off, to Keefe’s defence.

  They were a four-man team within a team. They might occasionally interact with another teammate or two, but it was cursory and superficial.

  Frost would regularly hound Futa with suggestions or orders on how he should be coaching. In those pre–cell phone days, Futa recalled he had a pager set to vibrate. It would be sitting on his desk, where it would faithfully go off between periods of games.

  “The number would come up and I’d recognize it [as Frost’s],” Futa said. “It would be vibrating, flying across my desk like a little Zamboni. I think that number is burned into my memory still, like that movie: [He whispers] ‘Check the children.’ If [Frost] didn’t get his message [to the boys] through me, he’d try to get it to them some other way. They were checking phone messages between periods. It was crazy.”

  It only got worse, especially after a game one night at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga. The power play hadn’t gone well that night. When the game was over, the four players walked down the hall past Futa in their full equipment, minus their skates, their hockey bags slung over their shoulders.

  “I said, ‘Where the f--- are you
guys going?’ and they just kept walking,” Futa said. “Frost had ordered to them a nearby arena to work on the power play after the game. I can laugh about it now, because the fifth guy on the power play—it was either Gerald Moriarity or Mark Popovic—said to me, ‘Coach, do I have to go with [the four of] them?’ That was one of the final straws for me.”

  Futa said none of Frost’s boys was causing any problems away from the rink—they were good students, there were no problems with carousing or drinking—but he also wasn’t aware of the full scope of what was going on.

  Initially, the players were living close to St. Mike’s in the apartment of an acquaintance of Frost: goaltending-school guru and instructor Jon Elkin. But Elkin, a single guy who worked a lot, wasn’t around that much, so this largely unsupervised “billeting” wasn’t working. In the span of less than a month, it was decided they would go “home.” Except “home” in this case was back to Frost’s house in Brampton.

  All four spent more time there than at their actual homes. Barnes was from out of town, the only non-Brampton boy of the group, but according to Keefe, Barnes initially liked being part of the so-called “Quinte cult,” a term Keefe didn’t like or use then and finds even more cringeworthy now. Keefe maintained he still had a functioning family life, but cracks were starting to develop.

  “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 u
s 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.