If you asked those people they’d probably guess that Keith hasn’t faced the same level of adversity that they perceive I do. But it is in how far Keith has travelled that we can perhaps take inspiration. He has gone from struggling just to keep out of trouble as a youngster in Dewsbury Moor - to being told by one of the game’s biggest star names that he would not make it at the highest level of rugby league - to the NRL - to Saints and to a Challenge Cup winners’ medal in 2004. It’s been quite the journey and it is by no means at an end. Keith went on to appear in movies after meeting Mickey Rourke at a Challenge Cup Final and is now embarking on a new venture, launching what is thought to be the world’s first rugby league based comic ‘Rugby Blood’.
“There’s quite a lot of good players from Dewsbury Moor.” He begins.
“When I was about six years old my mum introduced me to rugby league. As soon as I picked a ball up it was just in me. Growing up on a council estate was tough. It was a tough start for me. I didn’t have any male mentors in my life. I didn’t really know my old man until I was about 15 or 16 years old. So I had a stint, as many young kids do that don’t have a father figure, where I got into a bit of trouble. I was a bit of a wild child.”
But in playing rugby league thanks to his persuasive mum Keith had an opportunity.
“Rugby League was always my way out.” He admits.
“I’d go over to the park, I’d score a couple of tries and then I’d end up getting in trouble with my mates. It took until I went to court and my mate who was with me got sent to prison. I got probation. I was very lucky. When I walked out of that courtroom I realised I had to change my life around. I’d seen what had happened to some of the older generation so from that day I just started training. I cut my mates off. They were getting into things I didn’t want to be getting into.”
That startling awakening meant that by the age of 16 Keith began to enjoy some success in his burgeoning rugby league career. He played for Dewsbury Moor alongside former Leeds, Bradford and Great Britain forward Matt Diskin. They won the under-16s national conference, pipping Leon Pryce’s Queensbury along the way.
“I then got picked for Yorkshire and we won a series against Lancashire. We had Leon Pryce and Danny Maguire and it was the first time Yorkshire had won the series in years. I then got picked for England schoolboys.”
Dedication was never a problem for Keith, even at that age. While many talented sportsmen find their development stalled by the multiple distractions that life throws at teenage boys, Keith remained focused and disciplined, in stark contrast to the self-confessed tearaway he had been before that court appearance;
“I used to even train on Christmas Day as a 15 or 16 year old.” He says;
“I just had this vision, this belief that I wanted to be a Super League player. After England schoolboys I went to Bradford for a trial. I remember Brian Noble was there. Everybody had been signed except me. Brian said ‘we’re not going to sign you, Keith, but we’ll pay for your bus fare.”
It was the first of a few setbacks that Keith would have to endure before finally making his Super League debut with Wakefield as a 17-year-old in 2000;
“I went to Castleford and played six or seven games there, but then they also decided they were not going to sign me. I then went on to Leeds Rhinos. Leeds had many star players who went on to win Grand Finals. Rob Burrow, Diskin, Maguire, Chev Walker. All of those players. I was 17. I played eight or nine games on trial until (then Leeds coach) Dean Bell took me aside one day after training and said ‘listen Keith, I don’t think you’ll ever play Super League.”
Receiving this verdict from one of the legends of the game was a potentially shattering blow. Yet Keith’s response was the same as it had ever been whenever he he had taken a knock to his confidence and ambition. Persistence;
“Many, many, many kids would have given up. But I knew what I had already overcome just to get this far. To this day that fire to prove Dean wrong has stayed with me. It took me about a week but I got a lot of positives and power out of that. I was thinking about giving up but someone asked me to give it one more shot because Wakefield wanted to sign me. So that’s what I did. I signed for Wakefield.”
Something tells me that if Keith had not been signed by Wakefield, then under the tutelage of John Harbin, he would have found the resolve to give it yet another last shot and would still be sitting here with a Challenge Cup winners medal, two other Challenge Cup final outings, 63 Saints appearances and two Welsh caps to his name. It’s impossible to imagine a scenario in which a young Keith gives up on his rugby league career and goes to work in an office or a factory. His will and his faith are unshakeable;
“Wakefield hadn’t won a game all year when I signed for them. After that we had a run of 11 games undefeated. I got the players’ player of the year award that year. So Dean Bell was wrong. I did play Super League about eight months after he said I wouldn’t. I then went on to play NRL. I was 19 years old. All of the drive and perseverance I have all comes from that, what I call my favourite failure when Dean Bell told me I wouldn’t play Super League.”
There are a dozen or so English players currently playing their trade in the NRL now, but when Keith made the move to Melbourne Storm in 2002 they were rare. Only Adrian Morley had cracked Australia having moved to Sydney Roosters from Leeds in 2001;
“We’d been to Australia with Wakefield and I was told there was interest from North Queensland Cowboys. There was a few of us in that team they were looking at. We also had Bennie Westwood, Gareth Ellis and Danny Brough as well as me. We had quite a good team. I was due to go back over there and that’s when I got the call about playing for Wales. I had to get a letter from (then RFL Director Of Rugby) Greg McCallum to say it wouldn’t affect my chances of playing for England before I would play.”
He played twice for Wales, where one of his international team-mates was Saints legend Kieron Cunningham.
“I had a poster of Kieron Cunningham on my wall when I was younger. Then I was in the dressing room with Wales and I remember we were beating England 26-10 at half-time. They had Paul Sculthorpe, Paul Wellens and Andy Farrell in their side. I could hear someone barfing up in the toilets. It was Kieron. I couldn’t believe that he seemed more nervous than me.”
It was through that involvement with Wales that the Melbourne opportunity really came to fruition;
“I remember Willie Poching who was at Wakefield at the time came up to me and said ‘listen Keith, the Storm want to sign you’. I said ‘who?’ and he said ‘the Storm. Melbourne Storm.’. So I did the deal with (former Melbourne administrator) Chris Johns. The ironic thing was I got a call from Leeds Rhinos asking me not to sign for Storm! This is where you get to get a bit of your own back and people have to eat a bit of their own you know what. Humble pie. It was tempting to join Leeds. They offered me a four-year deal but I knew that if I went to Australia as the youngest English player ever to go there and play it would make me a better player and a better person. I also knew that if I did decide to come back to England there would be clubs I could go toA. I went there as an ok player, a rising star, to being a good player when I came back. You can’t bottle that. I lived with Cameron Smith and we had Billy Slater and Dallas Johnson coming through too.”
On Keith’s return home one of those interested clubs was St.Helens in 2003, and a year later he ticked off another childhood dream by walking out for a Challenge Cup Final at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. Mason started at prop for Ian Millward’s side who could count the likes Cunningham, Scunthorpe, Wellens and Sean Long in their number. That the opposition that day was Wigan merely ramped up the sense of occasion, with Mason playing his full part in a glorious 32-16 win. This once young and impetuous fan remembers being so happy about the result that he decided to forego the coach journey home that evening and instead shell out for a hotel and a train fare the next day in order to continue the festivities. There had been other cup final wins but this was the first I had experienced in which Wigan were the vanquished. The scars of 1989 and 1991 remain, but they sting that bit less thanks to the efforts of Keith and his team-mates in 2004.
“The greatest game ever.” is how Keith remembers it;
“You can ask Sculthorpe, Cunningham, Longy, they’d all tell you the same. Chris Joynt said to me that the Challenge Cup is bigger than the Grand Final. I kind of understand him now. It’s been around for about 120 years or whatever it is. It’s a beautiful trophy. All I ever saw when I was a kid was Ellery Hanley, Brett Kenny, Wigan and Widnes and all these great players playing at Wembley. You look up to these players. We won our final at the Principality (Millennium) Stadium in Wales but to be honest with you it didn’t matter because the atmosphere was absolutely electrifying. Winning that trophy was very sweet. After what I’d been through. My mum was up in the crowd crying her eyes out. A week later I saw Dean Bell at Red Hall. I was in trouble for knocking out one of the Warrington players. It was accidental. Anyway Dean told me he thought I was the best forward on the pitch in the Challenge Cup Final.”
Keith went back to the Challenge Cup Final in 2006, this time unfortunately ending up on the losing side as his Huddersfield Giants team went down 42-12 to a Saints side starting a run of three cup wins in a row. It was there that he met film star Mickey Rourke and began a friendship which would take his life in a whole new direction;
“After the game we were all disappointed. We had a couple of tries disallowed that I thought should have been tries and they scored a couple that I thought weren’t tries. So anyway we all got together. We were staying at Park Lane. We’d been invited to this club. So we went there, about eight or nine of the boys, and I remember I’d seen this film called The Wrestler. I thought it was a brilliant film. Mickey Rourke had starred in the film. So at this bar I just saw him walk past me. And I thought ‘that’s Mickey Rourke’!
Keith’s not shy. So he took the initiative almost at once. Just another example of how he grasps opportunity when it presents itself;
“I asked his bodyguard if I could go up and talk to him. I had a black suit on, white shirt and tie and I went over and I said ‘Hi Mickey my name is Keith’. He looked at me and he said ‘what are you, Man? Are you a gangster?’ So I said ‘no I play rugby. I’ve played in a final today at Wembley. He said he had watched the game. He said he loved rugby!”
It was the start of a fruitful friendship between the pair;
“Later on he started arm-wrestling the boys. He whupped Scottie Moore. He then tried to take on Darrell Griffin but Darrell snapped Mickey’s bicep off the bone. He’d had so many tequilas he couldn’t feel it. It wasn’t until I challenged him to a match that I saw it. He showed me it. I couldn’t believe it. He just said ‘it’s alright’.”
Keith was soon on his travels with his famous new friend;
“He flew me out to New York. I stayed with him in Hollywood which was just bizarre. And then when he was back in London he invited me down to the Jonathan Ross Show. It was the last one. David Beckham and Jackie Chan were on that show.”
All pretty random you’d think. But it turns out that Rourke saw something in Keith that couldn’t have been immediately obvious to him when they met;
“I remember one time he’d got upset. Started crying. So I said to the bodyguard ‘what’s wrong? Is he alright?’ And he said ‘yeah, he’s fine. It’s just you remind him of his brother’. I asked where his brother was and he just pointed upwards. You know? To Heaven. So sometimes I wonder whether he took me under his wing because I resembled his brother. But he looked after me. We spent a lot of time together.”
It wasn’t long before Keith followed Rourke into the film business, playing a part in Skin Traffic;
“He phoned me up and said ‘do you want to be in a film? We’re going to cast you. As my henchman. So I did. And when I did my scenes with him it felt just....natural. Because we were friends. When I see him again I will thank him. I’ll repay him. Some actors work in the business for years and never get an opportunity like that.”
And so to the present. Keith is open about a difficult period in his life after his retirement from rugby league. He lost that discipline that had served him so well. He turned back to alcohol and he even suspects he might have been suffering from a depression. Like any retired athlete he needs to have something else to focus on. He sets himself goals. Eighty miles road running in a week. A thousand push-ups a day. Whatever it is. He says you have to decide what you want to do to be a better human being and then ‘get after it’.
Rugby Blood, Keith’s new graphic novel series, isvanother example of that drive. It features characters based on Super League stars of the past and present such as Cunningham, Hull FC’s Jake Connor and Jermainevp McGillvary of Huddersfield Giants. It may even spawn a new Netflix series which Keith says is in the pipeline;
“Rugby Blood comes from all those struggles that I’ve had. I still have a lot of rugby league in me. So what I’ve tried to do is channel all that aggression into something new and something positive. David King (the story’s lead character) is about perseverance and overcoming obstacles so it’s a bit autobiographical. But as it goes on the story is going to open up and feature all kinds of stars from rugby league. And it will hopefully promote them and the sport too.”
Saints fans will approve of some of the attire worn by the protagonists. Saving the world through rugby league is one thing, but are you really saving the world through rugby league if you haven’t got a red vee on your shirt”
“I put him in the red vee. It’s the best kit.” Says Keith of our now iconic shirt design;
“It hasn’t got a St Helens emblem on it but I wanted to use the red vee because that was my favourite kit. What I want to do is market it not just here but in Russia, China, America. Places where it isn’t well known. If you can do that you’re showing rugby league to an audience that wouldn’t normally see it. You’re marketing the game not to rugby league fans but to comic book fans. I’ve also written a film script which I’ve been down to Pinewood to discuss it with a group of producers. But it takes a lot to get a film made.”
If you meet Keith Mason, just the once, you wouldn’t bet a penny on it happening....
Keith Mason was Talking to That Saints Blog You Quite Like via the WA12 Rugby League Show. The full interview is still available to listen to on wa12radio.net and to download via Mixcloud.
Rugby Blood is available on Amazon, priced £7.99 with the kindle edition at £4.99
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