NEWS FILE PHOTO EMMA BENNETT - Matt Keetley rushes up-ice having thrown his stick high in the air May 14, 2007 after Brennan Bosch scored the double-overtime winner over the Vancouver Giants in Game 7 of the WHL's finals at the Medicine Hat Arena.
srooney@medicinehatnews.com@MHNRooney
As the Medicine Hat Tigers enter their 50th anniversary season, the Medicine Hat News talked to five players – one from each decade of the team’s existence. There are differences in their stories to be sure, but read between the lines and we hope you’ll see some similarities, too.
He was the hometown hero, the unlikely, undrafted star at the top of the wave of some of Medicine Hat’s best-ever hockey teams.
But as Matt Keetley’s two kids enter their playing years, few people around town recognize their dad. They’re only just learning about what it was like, way back in 2004, when the Tigers called up the chubby kid from midget AAA to play backup goaltender.
“My kid’s six now, he played hockey last year and I’ve got a four-year-old too, he’s involved in soccer and stuff like that,” said Keetley, now 33 and a salesman for an oilfield supply company. “I stay pretty far under the radar, I’m pretty quiet around Medicine Hat. I don’t really go too far from home, raising boys and stuff so I don’t get out in the public much. I haven’t gone to many Tigers games, I don’t go to the mall very often.”
But when people do recognize him, oh, the memories that come flooding in.
Tigers flags were in windows, hanging off people’s cars, and the fire department had to step in and limit attendance at the old arena to 4,006. On the heels of the dreadful ’90s, the team had won a memorable round over Swift Current the year before and taken Red Deer to the limit, indicating they had flipped the switch from cellar-dweller to title contender.
Keetley remembers going to the old smartie box – thus named for the varying colours of seats in the arena – with friends such as Stefan Meyer and having the run of the place. Attendance was awful, and so was the team’s record at the turn of the millennium.
“The Tigers weren’t very good, that was the string where I got to watch good players come through, (Jay) Bouwmeester, Rocky Thompson,” said Keetley. “I remember talking to Rocky in the stands and he had a black eye, that guy was a killer.”
When he was 14, Keetley remembers watching a 16-year-old goalie prospect by the name of Kevin Nastiuk. The Edmonton native was something to aspire to, and sure enough two years later, that’s exactly what happened.
Keetley grew up in Richmound, Sask., playing minor hockey with Meyer, and they both wound up on the Tigers’ roster in 2004, then again for brief stints in the NHL with the Calgary Flames years later.
While co-workers love to ask about the guys he played with in the big leagues, it’s the memories from major-junior that really resonate. Those 2004 Tigers won the WHL title, a four-game sweep over Everett, with Nastiuk the main man in net.
Keetley played all of 86 minutes after being called up mid-way through the campaign. He’ll never forget his debut, at what fans know as the Crushed Can in Moose Jaw, with its unique concave roof.
“Seventeen years old, Nasty got pulled and they put me in the first period. We ended up coming back, scoring three so we were tied 3-3 going into the third period.
“Halfway through the third period, Dan Idema passed this puck to a guy right in our slot. I don’t know what he was doing, and I just remember it was a one-timer, the guy goes top shelf.”
They lost, 6-3. Keetley made 21 saves and was named second star.
He knew he’d get his turn. Nastiuk played one more season, then the torch was passed. Coach Willie Desjardins largely left his goalies to themselves, with the No. 1 guy getting almost all of the ice time.
“I was pretty fortunate to get the opportunity,” said Keetley. “You’re sometimes in the right place at the right time. I was… no other goalie had interest in backing up. After that, you work hard and Willie gave me the opportunity to play.
“It’s cool, it’s an honour and something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.”
It’s easy to admit now that it wasn’t necessarily goaltending that made those teams so dangerous.
“At that time we were good,” said Keetley, a second-team all-star in 2006 and first-teamer in 2007. “I laugh and say I was fortunate enough to win awards, but it wasn’t just me, look at that one year me and Nasty had a total of 13 shutouts. It just wasn’t heard of.
“Everything was to the outside. You look at my shots per game, I was averaging sometimes 20 shots per game. You make one or two big saves per game and the rest was pretty routine. Steve Marr and Cody Blanshan blocked more shots, Kris Russell is a prime example, still in the NHL blocking shots. And offensively, I knew (Chris) St. Jacques and (Ryan) Hollweg, if the other team got a penalty, 90 per cent of the time… we had so much confidence they were potentially going to score every single time.”
There were new offensive cogs by 2007, namely Darren Helm and a young Tyler Ennis. Russell, Keetley and Daine Todd were the only holdovers from the 2004 team. They were poised to take the next step.
Game 7. Double overtime. Nobody who was there will forget the fog setting in on a warm May night in 2007 as Brennan Bosch scored the WHL championship-winning goal past the Vancouver Giants’ Tyson Sexsmith.
The Giants got the Memorial Cup title a couple weeks later on their own home ice, a narrow 3-1 win over the Tigers in the final. So on that measure, the 2000’s-era Tigers can’t claim they were better than the back-to-back national champions of the late ’80s.
But the hundreds of sellouts in a row certainly indicate what they meant to the community.
“It was crazy, for being so bad for so long,” said Keetley of what it was like to be a player in those resurgent days. “I was a hometown kid so for me… as playoffs were going on I went out to the auto wreckers, needed some seats out of a vehicle. We’re in the playoff run, they knew who I was, I said my name, this is what I’m looking for. I had the owner say to me ‘these seats are $350, but if you get a win tonight, you come back and I’ll sell you those seats for 100 bucks.’
“So we won and I came back and I said ‘OK, here’s your $100 cash.’
“To them that meant nothing but for me it was the world. It solidified, everyone was behind us.”
As his kids get to know more about his hockey past, Keetley plans to revisit some of the old rinks he played in. Some, like the Medicine Hat Arena or Civic Centre in Moose Jaw, are either gone or mothballed. Others have seen vast improvements. And of course he’ll take them to Canalta Centre to see today’s Tigers, and probably get recognized as a hometown hero once more.
