My uncle and I: Remembering an imperfect but decent man through hockey

By Case Keefer (contact)

Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020 | 2 a.m.

I drove to the top level of the New York-New York parking garage back when no one drove to the top level of the New York-New York parking garage.

This was back when only T-Mobile Arena’s skeleton was in place, back when it was known under a temporary name, Las Vegas Arena, and those who didn’t follow the progress closely would ask, “Where are they building that again?” This was before the Vegas Golden Knights, though it was already the worst-kept secret in town and the NHL that an expansion team would eventually play in the under-construction venue.

I wanted to show the most, if not only, diehard hockey fan I knew the space. My uncle was an avid Tampa Bay Lightning fan and Las Vegas enthusiast.

He even resided locally for a short time, which he cited as a reason for why I was wrong when I explained that, as much I wanted professional sports to arrive, I wasn’t sure if hockey was going to work.

“No,” he said adamantly. “It will do great here.”

That was the last time I saw my uncle. He passed away less than two years later, the latest in a long line of generational casualties to alcoholism.

Charles Kerry “Junior” Keefer — June 21, 1963, to June 12, 2017.

Junior had a number of demons, none of them he could ever couch. He was an old-school gambler, and, with all due respect, I don’t mean that in a complimentary way.

I imagine he probably mocks me from his grave for primarily betting on hockey when I think an injury negatively affects a team’s expected goal rate. He was more of the look-at-the-board-and-piece-together-a-parlay sort of bettor.

He almost always thought the Lightning were the best team. One year he came to visit early in the NHL season swearing by playing unders while the forwards found their legs to start the year. When that proved a loser, he switched the theory to overs a year later.

On one of his last visits to Las Vegas, he tagged along with me to the Treasure Island poker room, one of the few haunts where I’d consistently grind low-stakes games at the time. I had recently secured a couple relatively large payouts in online tournaments, and Junior kept telling me how he too was adept in no-limit hold’em.

He wasn’t — he lost $600 in less than two hours, a rather crippling blow to someone who had been unemployed for the past several years. But he was the most popular guy in that dark corner of the resort that night, and not only for his monetary contributions to the game.

Junior wore a somewhat-convincing replica 2008 Tampa Bay Rays American League championship ring and told everyone he was the pitching coach on the team that reached the World Series. Who knows how many actually believed him, but I like to think that a couple of people went back to their hometowns and told friends how they busted the guy responsible for James Shields' mechanics.

On other occasions, when the odds were stacked against Junior, they worked in his favor. The greatest moment of his life came at a Lightning game in 1995 at the ThunderDome — now known as Tropicana Field.

As a Lightning season-ticket holder, he was selected to compete in the intermission game challenging a fan to shoot a puck through a small wooden slot in front of the net. The prize was a new GMC truck.

Junior sunk it and, naturally, opted for $10,000 in cash over the vehicle. They gave him a video of the feat, and he showed it to everyone he knew until the VHS tape was worn out.

He remained a regular visitor when the Lightning moved to the Ice Palace — what any self-respecting Tampa resident continues to call what’s now known as Amalie Arena, at least in my mind — the next year. The last time I was in the building was solely because of him.

Accompanying my dad on a work trip to Tampa, my 14-year-old self was dying to get to a concert at the Ice Palace — the 2001 Family Values Tour, if you must know. There was no way my dad could take me — he was hosting a television broadcast of his brainchild, greyhound racing’s “Night of Stars” — and Junior volunteered.

This was a bigger deal than it sounds. The condo he shared with my grandmother in Tarpon Springs, Fla., was an hour away in traffic. While he got the nickname “Junior” for always trying to emulate my father, selflessness was one area where he would admittedly say he fell short.

Staying sober to make a pair of two-hour round-trip drives in the same night for his adolescent nephew was out of the ordinary. I remember my dad being shocked.

I know it meant a lot to him, and even more so looking back, it meant a lot to me too.

Junior taught me that we’re all flawed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference, even if it’s a minute one for our own family. We’re all often wrong, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sometimes be right.

He was right about Vegas as a hockey town, mostly even right about the Lightning being a perennial power. He’d love to see tonight’s game between the two franchises at the Ice Palace.

I’m happy I can be his eyes.

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.