There are a lot of people out there who believe that since the Winnipeg Jets have returned, the Voice of the Jets should return with them.
It’s impossible to avoid the groundswell of support for Keilback, the one time big voiced play-by-play caller of Winnipeg’s “old” professional hockey side. It’s everywhere. So many Winnipeggers are convinced that Keilback is the best and he should be the team’s play-by-play voice once again.
A week or so ago Keilback told me that there was no interest from any of the radio stations in Winnipeg that were preparing to bid on the broadcasting rights to Jets games. Those rights will be expensive so one would think those stations would want to have the best available play-by-play man in the country calling the games. Not so, we’re told.
Still it’s quite likely Keilback will be on the air in Winnipeg this winter, calling the play-by-play of junior hockey games. It ain’t the Jets, but it’s still Curt keilback calling hockey and that’s pretty special.
Not long ago, Curt and I sat down and talked about the past – and a broadcasting future that is still uncertain.
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For more than 30 years, Curt Keilback has been known to his close friends as “Sod.” But even though he’s from Yorkton, Sask., the former Voice of the Winnipeg Jets doesn’t look much like a “Sod.” Unless, of course, you know the story, a story that will be even more intriguing if, by some strange aligning of the planets, Keilback becomes the NEXT voice of the NHL in Winnipeg.
It was a lovely day in Atlanta (How’s that for a coincidence?), a November morning in 1980, when the Winnipeg Jets were about to return home after playing the old Atlanta Flames at the Omni in Atlanta, Ga. As the players were boarding the airplane, someone mentioned that the team’s newly hired play-by-play announcer, Curt Keilback, was no where to be found. The late Friar Nicholson, Keilback’s boss at the time, asked the team if it would request that the pilots to hold the plane for just a moment. Nicholson had seen Keilback in the airport and wondered what happened to him.
After a brief search, Nicholson found his 31-year-old charge and got him onto the flight amid laughter and derision from the Jets players, the team’s management and other members of the media.
“For a boy from Yorkton, Atlanta had an awful big airport,” Keilback recalled with a laugh. “I got lost. Simple as that. When they found me and got me on the plane, I took a real beating from the players and the other media guys. Patty Doyle – who has since had a sex change and become Patti Dawn Swanson – called me ‘Just a big sodbuster from Saskatchewan.’ The name was shortened to Sod and it stuck. Everybody started calling me Sod.”
“I have so many great memories as a broadcaster it’s hard to put my finger on just one of the them,” said Keilback, a recent inductee into Manitoba’s Hockey Hall of Fame. “It was great to be part of Teemu Selanne’s rookie season when he scored 76 goals. It was great to be part of that 1984-85 Jets team that really had a chance to go a long way, but just couldn’t get past the Edmonton Oilers. I guess maybe my best memory was that day in 1979 when I got a call from Friar (Nicholson) asking me if I’d like to leave Yorkton and come and call the Jets’ games in Winnipeg.
“Of course, it was pretty nice getting that call last week telling me I was going into the Hall of Fame. That’s a nice memory, too.” Curt Keilback, who was born in Brandon and raised in Yorkton, followed his father into broadcasting. His dad, Jim, gave him his first radio show on CJGX in Yorkton, called “Minor Sports Corner,” back in the days when local radio was really local.
“I started doing my first play-by-play of a hockey game when I was 12,” Keilback remembered. “My dad was calling the senior games in Yorkton and on Minor Hockey Day in Canada, I got to call the second period. I fell in love with it and did that every year as I was growing up. When I was 20, I was hired full-time at CJGX and along with my other sports casting duties, I did hockey, baseball and curling play-by-play. Then, in my early 30s, I was doing TV in Yorkton and I got the call from Friar in Winnipeg. The Jets had just joined the NHL and I jumped at the chance.”
Keilback was wonderful as the Jets play-by-play man, but a contract dispute in 1994, signaled the end of his career in Winnipeg. But when the Jets moved to Phoenix in 1996, he caught on with the Coyotes and did radio and TV play-by-play in Phoenix until 2008. This past winter, he was the play-by-play voice of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League on NCI FM, right across the province of Manitoba.
He also picked up a part on the movie “Goon,” as, what else(?), a hockey broadcaster. Filmed in Portage la Prairie, it’s scheduled to be released this fall. “I absolutely enjoyed calling the junior games on NCI and hope to be able to do more next year,” Keilback said. “But if somebody gives me the chance to do NHL games again, I’d be behind the microphone in less than a heartbeat.” Keilback has had an amazing career in Winnipeg and he’s still one of the most copied hockey broadcasters in Canadian history. In fact, so many of his signature lines (Hawerchuk, with the wr-a-a-a-p-around!) have been stolen by so many broadcasters that it’s as if he was the first and only hockey play-by-play man.
However, he’ll be the first to tell you he had a couple of iconic broadcasting heroes himself.
“My dad, of course, because he was the first broadcaster I ever heard,” Keilback said. “And Danny Gallivan the long-time play-by-play guy with the Montreal Canadiens. I always thought Gallivan was the best and I could listen to him all night long.”
I’m one of those people who could listen to Curt Keilback all night long. It’s too bad we won’t hear him calling the new Winnipeg Jets.