If there is one old story someone from the Kincardine Bulldogs is guaranteed to tell about Jared Keeso, it is the one from that night against Hanover. There was a fight, but there was something more to it than that, and it has stuck with all the Junior C hockey teammates for almost two decades.
There might have been 1,000 fans in the arena, but the Bulldogs were still listless when Keeso lined up for a faceoff in the defensive zone. An opponent looked over.
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“We gonna go?”
“We’re not going here,” Keeso said. “We’re going at centre ice.”
So they skated to centre ice before throwing a punch. Nobody can remember precisely how it came off, but Keeso ended up without his jersey in the skirmish. And even after the fighters were separated, more pieces of equipment continued to fall off.
“Pulls off his shoulder pads, his elbow pads,” said Bulldogs teammate Steve Stepaniak. “Starts doing a little striptease.”
“I think he was completely undressed from the bottom up,” said teammate Dustin Catto.
“Dropped to one knee and did a flex,” said fellow Bulldog Corey McCrae.
“Flexing for the crowd,” said Catto.
“The girls loved it,” said Stepaniak.
So did his teammates.
“We’re laughing, laughing, laughing,” said Stepaniak. “But that’s who he was, right?”
“He’s a performer,” said McCrae.
Jared Keeso could not be reached for comment.
He deleted his Twitter account this year. A publicity manager from Bell Media, which owns Crave, where Keeso and his show “Letterkenny” have become stars, said the promotional strategy for his show aimed to help elevate the profile of his supporting cast, rather than the star himself.
The show, and its universe of uniquely profane characters set in rural Ontario, will reach a remarkable milestone this month. Not only will it launch its 10th season, on Christmas Day, it will soon deliver its own series spinoff, built around Keeso’s most heroically foul-mouthed character, “Shoresy.”
With the series now streaming on Hulu, Canadian actors are being recognized across the United States, as well as earning recognition and awards back home. Keeso, the junior hockey player who created the empire, is still flexing his muscles, but now mostly in a metaphorical sense.
“He does that for the crowd, he does that for the show,” said his friend, beer league teammate and co-star Dylan Playfair. “But he’s also a very respectful, down-home country kid at heart. I mean, him and his wife live in the backwoods of Quebec — that’s where he’s happy.”
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“He’s very thankful and grateful for everything he’s been able to achieve,” said Jordan Beirnes, one of Keeso’s childhood friends, “but I think that type of attention is not necessarily what fills his cup.”
“He could be on Instagram, and probably drawing some big sponsorships,” said Keeso’s older brother, Alan. “Or he could be on Twitter or Facebook, and doing the red carpet stuff. But truly, it’s the last place he wants to be.”
You can watch Letterkenny Season 10 December 25th on @CraveCanada and December 26th on @hulu if you want to. pic.twitter.com/ikNteLNflk
— Letterkenny Problems (@LetterkennyProb) November 17, 2021
The place where it all began is a two-hour drive west of Toronto, in Listowel, Ont., a town with around 7,500 residents. Keeso, along with Alan and their sister, Abigail, grew up in hockey, but also in the family sawmill, which had been their birthright since 1872.
Their father, Richard, coached them in hockey and put them to work in elementary school. Alan said he might have been seven years old when he bagged his first load of firewood. They worked in the winter, when the only heaters were like the small ones found in local hockey rinks. And they also worked there through the summer, filling containers with wood bound for campsites.
“We would sweat buckets,” said Alan. “You’d get covered in sawdust. If it got in your boots, that was the worst thing, of course. But we laughed a lot, as well, with the guys.”
Richard, their father and their boss, never wanted to show favouritism. There was a sawdust pit in the back that sometimes doubled as a clandestine latrine. Workers knew the rule against it, but some would still sneak out for some quick relief. When the pit had to get cleaned — filled as it was with crusts of dried urine — Alan said the kids would be sent out with shovels.
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J. H. Keeso and Sons Ltd., which was based at 8474 Highway 23 North, burned to the ground late on a Sunday night three years ago. It took firefighters more than 12 hours to extinguish the flames, and even more time to stamp out the final embers.
“Like watching a fallen hero,” said Alan. “Representative of shared histories, toughness, stewardship and respect.”
Alan went on to join the Canadian Forces, attend the University of Oxford, and run for office with the Conservative Party of Canada in 2019. (He earned 33 per cent support in the riding of Kitchener South-Hespeler, but fell to the Liberal incumbent by 3,500 votes.)
Abigail went on to become a nurse at the Hospital for Sick Children, in Toronto, and also launched a business. Jared took a different route, but took part of the mill and the town with him.
“I’ve talked to so many people about this show, and they say, ‘The one thing I don’t get about it is why there’s fights in it so often,’” said Beirnes, the childhood friend. “That was just part of small-town Listowel. There’s just fights for no reason, all the time.”
Beirnes, who works in Toronto, has a small role on the show. He plays Boots, an imposing, mute friend who strikes fear in the hearts of the townsfolk because of a rumour that became a running gag. (It is too coarse to describe here, but it allegedly involved a potentially sick ostrich.)
As Jared Keeso told Vice in 2016: “Dad always said the three areas where you have to fight: Someone insults your girl, your family, or runs your goalie, you have to fight. That’s how we were raised.”
In a quiet moment earlier this year, Jake Grimes sat down to calculate how many of the players he has coached have gone on to dress for at least a game in the National Hockey League. He went through the names and biographies and landed on a number: 80.
Jared Keeso was not one of those names.
“I think it’s his selflessness that almost kept him from doing it,” said Grimes. “If you want to sit there and trade in all the extra defensive efforts and shot-blocks, then he could have had better stats.
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“Who knows: Would better stats have given him that opportunity?”
Grimes, who resigned in November as coach of the Cape Breton Eagles, in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, was still early in his career when Keeso was on his roster. They were in Strathroy, in Junior B. Jared was a gritty forward, and a young Jeff Carter also appeared on the roster, on his way to two Stanley Cup victories with the Los Angeles Kings.
“He just did whatever the team needed at that time,” said Grimes. “Unfortunately, sometimes those guys don’t get noticed, and it’s wrong.”
Martin Kuske was a drama teacher at Listowel District Secondary School. He had Keeso in Grade 11, and again in Grade 13, and it was in that final year he remembered Keeso approaching him and saying he did not think his career was going to be in hockey. He asked about acting.
The teacher said he believed in his potential.
“The only thing I can fault Jared with — and I know he had a busy life even then, with hockey and whatnot — he skipped class a number of times,” said Kuske.
In Grade 13, the class was held just before lunch. Kuske would see Keeso and three or four friends all huddled around the entrance to the class, playing an unusual game. It was rock-paper-scissors, but with consequences.
The losing party would have to stand there while the victor flicked them in the forehead. They called it a bee sting.
“They would sit around and try to give each other red welts on their foreheads,” said Kuske. “I just let it happen because it was so stupidly funny.”
In the major project that year, students were required to create an audition monologue to deliver for the class. Keeso chose to harvest a series of lines from a recently-released film, cobbling them together for a dramatic reading. He picked “Fight Club.”
When it was his turn, Keeso prowled the stage. He delivered his lines and ripped of his shirt, revealing a network of temporary tattoos underneath. Kuske was impressed with the passion and commitment.
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“I think some of the kids thought it was ridiculous that he ripped his shirt off,” he said. “Some kids felt maybe he’d gone over the top with it. But my comment back to them was: ‘Sometimes, you go for it; sometimes, you take a risk.’”
Stefanie Webster and her husband, Justin, used to own a theatre in Listowel. It was inside an old baptist church, with a soaring ceiling, a lobby and even a little room off to the side for a bar. Kuske sent Keeso to the Websters, and they put him on stage.
In 2003, it would have cost $15 to sit in a padded theatre seat and watch Keeso — then a student at the University of Waterloo — play an obese police officer in “Sinners,” a comedic murder-mystery. There was one particular show, close to the holidays, that would have been a little different from the rest.
Stefanie Webster also acted in the play, but her character was dead when Keeso got on stage and waded into a nightmare. He started to forget his lines, she said, “to the point where the stuff coming out of his mouth was completely re-writing the end of the play.”
Another actor leaned back, subtly, and made eye contact with Webster off-stage, confused. Eventually, the play reached its conclusion — though not necessarily the one written in the script.
“He was mortified,” Webster said with a chuckle. “So every night after that, he came in an hour early and drilled his scenes with every single one of us.”
Webster and her husband are both teachers, and they sold the theatre in 2012 because it had become too much of a burden. She kept in touch with Keeso, and he has returned many times to meet her students and field questions.
More than that, he invited Webster and her class to Sudbury, Ont., to watch “Letterkenny” film live on location. She made two trips. One group of students was invited to serve as extras in a hockey scene, and another group was actually given minor speaking roles.
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“There is the swearing and some of the explicit sex talk, but that show has heart, and everybody is included,” said Webster. “It sort of speaks to all the values that schools are trying to instill in our students — everyone’s included, everybody has your back, even if we’re different.”
Kuske also kept in touch. He retired from teaching five years ago but struggled with the transition. He missed the school and the students and the work. He mentioned it to Keeso in a text message.
Keeso quickly invited him to Sudbury.
“We’ll feed you,” he said. “We’ll put you up.”
Kuske visited the set in the summer.
Kelly Lamb was 19 years old when she landed a small part in the debut episode of “Letterkenny,” as a devout member of a local church’s youth group. Margaret, her character, meets Keeso’s character at an event and invites him to hold out his index finger.
She then puts a lighter underneath his hand.
“Now imagine,” Margaret says behind the flame, “your soul engulfed in that for all of eternity.”
She then pulls the toasted finger slowly into her mouth.
“God is good,” she says, nodding.
Lamb, who lives in Sudbury, now owns That Creative Loft, which helps train local artists.
“As soon as I met him, he introduced himself, he gave me a hug and he said, ‘We loved your audition tape,’” she said. “When that’s your first encounter with someone, you’re off to a great start.”
Keeso, she said, was also sensitive to the unusual demands of the scene and “washed his hands in between each take.”
“He made it fun,” said Lamb.
“I think one of the great things about Jared is that he celebrates a scene gone well, you know what I mean?” said Lisa Codrington, the Winnipeg-born actor who plays Gail, the bartender. “Even when he’s not acting, when he’s on set, he’s always laughing and celebrating and enjoying the play of the scenes, and the play of the characters.”
FWIW: ‘Letterkenny’ has been my best mood elevation lately. the funniest damn show I’ve seen since original UK ‘Office’. It’s that order of brilliant. @jaredkeeso writing, vocal genius & physical comedy is Simpson’s / Peter Sellers / Charlie Chaplin level great. Whole cast A++
— Edward Norton (@EdwardNorton) September 18, 2020
The characters and the scenes began forming together in an anonymous Twitter account Keeso ran with a friend. He had moved to Vancouver and Beirnes, his childhood friend, was in Halifax. They started an account — which is still active — called Listowel Problems to poke gentle fun at small-town life.
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Keeso eventually asked Beirnes for permission to turn the idea into a series of short YouTube videos. In a matter of days, the short videos had drawn enormous audiences. A six-episode series was soon in the works with Crave, the Canadian streaming service.
There were rumours the service wanted to hold auditions for the roles of the two main hockey players, who had been played in the YouTube series by two of Keeso’s beer league teammates in Vancouver. (A handful of “Letterkenny” regulars played for the Trappers, out of the University of British Columbia.)
Dylan Playfair and Andrew Herr were former hockey players trying to break into the field. Keeso made sure they landed the roles when the series shifted to Crave. They have been part of the show — in their signature flip-flops and tank tops — since the start.
Rather than stay in hotel rooms or apartments, Playfair said the cast would rent a six-bedroom house in Sudbury. Many, he said, felt the two-month shoot was a summer camp as much as it was a work trip.
“There are people who turn down six months of work to come and shoot for two months on ‘Letterkenny’ because of the feeling that exists on that set,” said Playfair. “Jared is the one who creates that. He creates that environment — he knows every single person’s name, he makes sure every single person understands how crucial they are to the production on the show.”
Stepaniak, the former teammate from Kincardine, said Keeso still keeps in touch with many of the old Bulldogs. The family has a cottage in the area, and Keeso has been back to help out the team, speaking at the team’s award banquet just a few years ago.
“You watch him skate around in ‘Letterkenny,’ and he still skates the same,” said Catto. “Maybe this is a fib, but I think he’s still got the same skates on from 18, 19 years ago. Seriously. I would put money on it that he’s still wearing those same Graf skates.”
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Catto laughed when he thought about how many times Keeso would leave him shaking his head. There were some shifts, Catto said, where Keeso would tuck his elbow pads under the bench and hop over the boards looking for a fight without the cumbersome equipment that would only slow him down.
“He wasn’t some top-line superstar who doesn’t get touched,” said McCrae, the other teammate from Kincardine. “He was the second-, third-line grinder. But he would go to bat for anybody on his team, and he could score goals. He was the player you wanted on your team.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of Bell Media)