Hockey Confidential (29 page)

The Hawks under Frost were a huge, physically intimidating team.

“It was a monster team,” said Keefe, who estimated he played that season at 145 pounds. “So many of the 16-year-olds were huge, so much bigger than me.”

Barnes was over 6 feet tall and had 245 penalty minutes; Erskine was six foot four and collected 241 PIM.

The Hawks finished the season with a 34–13–3 record, and more than half the team—12 players, to be exact—got drafted into the OHL (one scout called it the most heavily scouted Junior A team ever). Erskine went No. 2 overall to the London Knights; Barnes 40th to Sudbury; Jefferson 85th to Sarnia; Keefe 101st to Plymouth; Cation 143rd to Oshawa.

But no one remembers the hockey side of things in Quinte; it was the off-ice issues that have been well documented and chronicled by major media outlets, including the CBC's
The Fifth Estate
, amongst others. The stories are now almost too well known to many Canadians.

In a Quinte playoff game in April 1997, Frost punched Tiveron in the face on the bench. It was witnessed by off-duty police officers. Frost was subsequently arrested, charged and suspended. He would later plead guilty but receive a conditional discharge.

But the biggest headlines to emerge from the Quinte year were the salacious ones, involving sex and drinking and partying. Frost lived in a motel room, the infamous two-bedroom suite, Room 22 at the Bayview Inn, with three of his players—Barron (who was then 20), 21-year-old Tiveron and 16-year-old Keefe. Jefferson and Cation, also both 16, were reported to be regular visitors, as were teenage girls from the town. What went on there later led to Frost being charged with 12 counts of sexual exploitation involving teenage boys and girls, none of which ever resulted in a conviction. Not that the lack of a guilty verdict made the conduct acceptable, because it wasn't.

How accurate, Keefe was asked, were the published reports of the goings on in Room 22?

“Pretty accurate,” he said, “in the sense that it was accurate but exaggerated. The thing that was exaggerated was that it was portrayed as nonstop, Monday-to-Sunday partying. It was the opposite, actually. We had one day a week when guys would get together and party. If you think we were up to all hours of the night on a regular basis, you don't know David Frost very well. It was very regimented.”

It was, Keefe added, also totally inappropriate.

“Frost was our adult supervision and also the coach of our team,” Keefe said, “and he was present for some of these parties. Clearly, now that I'm a coach myself, I'm aware of how totally unacceptable that is.”

Through that entire season in Deseronto, Keefe believed he maintained a solid relationship with his family, who would regularly make the drive from Brampton to see his games.

“They were there quite a bit,” Keefe said. “I thought the relationship was good. But we were away from home at age 16. Like a lot of kids, you become more independent. The influence of Frost was much greater than it had been. We started to feel less and less reliant on our parents. I don't recall any friction with my parents, but looking back on it now, that was probably the beginning of something. I never really [lived at home] after that.”

If anything, Frost's influence over Keefe, Jefferson and Cation only gained momentum after the 1996–97 season in Quinte, though the members of what some had taken to calling the “Quinte cult” were going their separate ways. Briefly, anyway.

Barnes, whose association with Frost at that time was limited to one season in Quinte, went off to the Sudbury Wolves. Jefferson joined the Sarnia Sting. But Keefe, drafted by Plymouth, and Cation, drafted by Oshawa, had other ideas. They were leaning towards the NCAA route.

“Plymouth pursued me, they were trying to recruit me as a 17-year-old, and the decision was made to not go,” Keefe said. “Frost was calling the shots, telling us what he thought we should do. I was really small, 145 pounds. I wasn't the same type of player as Jefferson—he was rugged, totally fearless. I had a lot of apprehension I couldn't play there. I remember feeling very insecure about my ability to play in the OHL. I wasn't ready. Frost saw that and I agreed.”

Frost placed Keefe and Cation with the Caledon Canadians Junior A team coached by Greg Ireland, who Keefe said was an acquaintance of Frost's—they had coached against each other in Junior A. Keefe started to become much closer friends with Cation, whom he first got to know in those summer hockey days back in Brampton. But Cation's parents and Shawn—not back then, anyway—weren't hanging with the Jeffersons, Keefes and Frost at Jefferson's house.

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.