Hockey Culture in Canada: Same Old same Old

This is a prelude written for the Play the Game readers as an introduction to the news article Girl Unprotected

What we heard became nearly theatre of the absurd in a tale that involved Danton’s former coach of many years, David Frost, who became his agent when he was successfully drafted into the NHL.

It is important to note that even though Frost had been convicted of assault against a boy, when he punched his own player in the face when the boy came off the ice during a game, and had been banned from the Toronto area because he had forged a signature on a league document, he was granted a NHL agent license. At that time the executive director of the NHL Player’s Association was Bob Goodenow, whose son played on the Brampton, Ontario team Frost coached. Goodenow and Frost were frequently seen together and acted as a “team” in terms of games and practices for the boys who were eleven and twelve.

After Frost was banned from coaching in the Toronto area, he took his five best players, who were by this time between fourteen and twenty, to Deseronto, a small Eastern Ontario town whose Junior A team, the Quinte Hawks, was not very successful. In the 1996-97 season Frost somehow rose from assistant coach to head coach, and though no one at his recent trial could remember how he officially became head coach, all agree the team started to win. He shared a suite at the Bay View Inn in Deseronto with some of the Brampton players who came with him while others billeted with area families. But where players actually lived did not matter: many activities, many parties and a great deal of group sex took place in Room #22 at the Bay View Inn.

The reason the legal system and the media have had a microscope on Frost and the activities in Room #22 since 2004 has to do with the fact that, according to Mike Danton’s parents—Susan and Mike Jefferson (their son changed his last name to Danton and disowned his parents on his coach’s advice), David Frost turned his five-boy group into a cult, with himself as the unquestioned, unchallenged leader. The arrest of Danton, who pled guilty though to this day continues to deny he tried to have Frost killed, was the beginning of two years of police investigations into Frost. In 2006, he was charged with many counts of sexual exploitation and one count of assault.

These charges involved his sexual relationship, not only with his players, but the girls they players coerced into coming to the hotel room where, the girls say, sex with their “boyfriend” meant sex with Frost. The players, who testified, not for the Prosecution (called the Crown in Canada), but for the Defense during the trial, say there was lots of group sex—in fact that’s the way hockey players like sex—but none of it involved Frost. One other player, Ian LaRoque, who was a teammate and good friend of the two players with whom Frost is accused of touching sexually, confirmed under oath in court that Frost regularly had group sex with these two players and girls, and that he spoke openly about it on the team bus and in the locker room.

Certainly testimony and evidence from this recent trial, where he was up on only four counts of sexual exploitation, after the Crown dropped all charges that had to do with the sexual assault of the girls, saying there wasn’t enough evidence, showed not a “cult-like” culture, but a true cult. With contradictions flying left and right from those under oath and outside of the courtroom, it becomes a difficult story to follow.

Those close to this story believe that Frost victimized certain players for years, both sexually and physically. There is no argument about the mental and emotional abuse he spewed out as his wrath against players who did not perform to his expectations was legendary. The players, and the girls who imagined themselves as girlfriends, even though a great deal of evidence at the trial showed that their “boyfriends” spoke in very sexually derogatory language about them regularly on the team bus and the change room, appeared to be under his complete control. His physical and psychological punishments, and his humiliation of people for the slightest infraction, according to the testimony from the two girls who are now women and two players who did not participate in the group sex, but did see his manipulative behaviour on the team-all witnesses in the case--kept everyone silent and obedient.

While there are many questions unanswered and many questions Canadians need to ask themselves in terms of their blind religious faith in hockey, the decision of the Crown to drop the charges pertaining to Frost’s assault of the girls is most at issue in my mind. The following opinion editorial published in the Winnipeg Free Press, the Ottawa Citizen and the Victoria Times Colonist in Canada, questions Canada’s legal system and whether it properly protects girls and women. At times it seems that the same blindness that affects so many Canadians when it comes to our national sport affects legal decision-makers too.