Dave Keon - Retirement

Retirement

Following his retirement from hockey, Keon moved to Florida and worked in real estate for several years.

Bitter over his treatment by Ballard and the Leafs, Keon refused for many years to have any relationship with the Leafs organization, even after Ballard's death and after the club changed ownership several times. Other Leaf players who clashed with Ballard's management did reconcile, most notably Keon's successor as club captain, Darryl Sittler, who accepted an invitation from GM Cliff Fletcher to return as a consultant.

Keon turned down several offers of reconciliation from the team, including an invitation to the closing ceremony for Maple Leaf Gardens in 1999 and a proposed ceremony to honour his number. Despite growing public pleas from fans who asked Keon to mend fences with the club, he refused saying that he would not have anything to do with the club unless it changes its policy of only "honouring" numbers of former star players instead of retiring them. The current policy of the Leafs is to only retire the numbers of players who suffered a career-ending accident while a member of the team.

On March 22, 1991, with the Leafs under new management after Ballard's death, Keon played on a team of Leaf all-stars against their counterparts from the Montreal Canadiens in an old-timers game at Maple Leaf Gardens called Legends' Night in Canada. "After that, I figured out the new ownership was no different than Ballard, and I had no use for it," Keon later said. In 2005, he told the Toronto Sun that the new owners (majority equity owned by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, chaired by Larry Tanenbaum) "would like to say they are different, but they are all the same."

In January 2007, the Toronto Maple Leafs announced that Keon would attend a pre-game ceremony to honour its 1967 Stanley Cup winning team. Keon was one of several members of the 1967 team to appear on-ice at the Air Canada Centre before the Leafs' game on February 17, 2007 — the 80th anniversary of first game played by the Toronto franchise after being renamed the Maple Leafs in 1927. Keon was introduced to the crowd second last, just prior to 1967 captain George Armstrong, and received a long standing ovation.

His granddaughter, Kaitlyn Keon joined the Brown Bears women's ice hockey program in 2011.