Charlotte Checkers have a championship vibe, and Greazy Keyz is a big part why
You don’t have to search too hard for him.
He’s just beneath section 128 of Bojangles Coliseum. Ice level. He sits in a padded stool behind a Hammond C3 Organ, a 450-pound wooden relic that has been associated with the Charlotte Checkers since the 1950s and is adorned with notes and pictures and merchandise.
He’s wearing a headset that’s taming his long hair — and, presumably, to communicate with Checkers in-game experience staff — as well as a customized jersey and red sunglasses and a big smile.
This office, this stage, is the Greaz Pit.
The man — the organist and keytarist and vibes master — is Greazy Keyz.
And for the uninitiated:
This is one of the life sources of the Charlotte Checkers fan experience, the Charlotte Checkers’ championship vibe. And Greazy in many ways is the public face of the feverish fan experience the Checkers are known for — a lore that has only grown as the team has sprinted through the playoffs and into the Calder Cup finals and now, after Game 2’s 3-2 overtime win, is three wins away from its second American Hockey League Championship in franchise history.
Also for the uninitiated:
“Most people know me as Greazy and are kind of surprised to learn I have an actual name,” Greazy Keyz, whose given name is Jason Atkins, told The Charlotte Observer on Friday evening, a few hours before the Calder Cup finals began but only a few minutes before he had to get to work.
He then smiled: “And that’s fine with me!”
It’s tough to overstate the atmosphere on Friday and Sunday. The numbers: On Friday, the team played in front of a then-record-breaking crowd of 8,677. On Sunday, thanks to some creative maneuvering of platforms in the crowd and the freeing up of more seats, the team played in front of 8,689 — immediately setting another record. There were white towels waving, phone lights flashing, cowbells ringing (including the first-period ceremonial bell rung by Hornets legend Kemba Walker) and mid-match dance parties. On the ice, there were an unbelievable amount of scuffles and changes in momentum.
And Greazy was there to capture all of it.
He played songs on his keytar after TV timeouts. He led chants with the organ — “Let’s go Check-ers!” and “Charge!” — after scuffles quieted down to get the crowd back and riled up. He interacted with little kids and other fans in-between breaks in the action, a steady flow of people coming up to him as if he were a politician. He was featured on the Kiss Cam with his wife. He even sang — for the Calder Cup, the Greaz Pit featured a three-man band with drums and a guitarist — a cover of Garth Brooks’s “Friends In Low Places” after the first period.
In a strange moment, as fan-least-favorite Abbotsford Canucks left winger Sammy Blais skated off the ice and into the locker room to tend to an injury, Greazy was already mid-tune, and his music was the backdrop to a pretty intense exchange between Blais and the red-wearing crowd, hopped up on the Gladiator physicality of hockey.
The company line on Greazy Keyz: We love him.
“Over time, he just became more and more a part of our show and our experience as people gravitated toward him,” said Paul Branacky, the vice president of marketing and communications of the Charlotte Checkers, where he has been since 2011. “We’re showing him on the video board more. We’re building him into the skits. We’re doing videos on off days, and he’s doing stuff that’s not part of the game.
“And it’s just grown from there. He’s an integral part of what we do now.”
Being the soundtrack to a sports franchise is never what Greazy, 46, thought he’d be doing.
But ask him about the honor now, and he’ll flash another smile.
“It is the best,” he said. “It is the absolute best. Something I would’ve never imagined, but something I would never change.”
How Greazy Keyz came to be
How Greazy Keyz and the Charlotte Checkers united is a two-pronged story.
First, Keyz:
Jason Atkins grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, in a family where his cousins spawned his love for music. He grew up on the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and later fell in love with Jimmy Smith and Booker T & the M.G.’s. Southern rock. Jam band. He moved to Charlotte right after high school, made friends with some musicians in town, and for more than 25 years has been hustling as an independent musician: playing for cover bands and original bands; booking weddings and live-band karaoke; giving music lessons; working in music retail.
Oh, and the name?
It was an email handle, the one he’d use when trying to book gigs. He doesn’t know why he landed on the moniker. But soon, as word got around about his work, the music community called him Greazy Keyz more than Jason Atkins.
Fast forward to 2015. The Checkers were returning to Bojangles Coliseum after a 10-year hiatus at Time Warner Cable Arena, now called Spectrum Center. In the uptown venue, they had a DJ, but no live music. They wanted that to return when they came back to Bojangles — the organ and the live sporting event, after all, are forever intertwined — and they even had the original organ from 1950s, which was played by Doris Morgan from 1957 to 2003.
But they needed someone to play.
So they found Greazy through a friend of a friend, brought him in, and Greazy’s persona only has grown over the past decade. Some memories stick out more than others.
That includes the longest game in AHL history, played in Bojangles Coliseum, where he “debuted” his keytar. That includes the last Calder Cup, where he was the music to sellout after sellout, similar to this year. Branacky remembers one Halloween night one year, where the organization brought out literal ghost hunters to scan the Coliseum during the game, only for the ghost hunters to report some paranormal activity near his organ.
Another story:
The Checkers had “player songs” for a while. Think of it like a walk-up song in baseball, but instead it’s the song that’s played after a player scores. Around 2016, a 6-foot-4 massive human in Julien Gauthier insisted that his song be “It’s Raining Men.” Gold. Gauthier ended up getting traded away from the Checkers in 2020, and upon his departure, Branacky had an idea.
It involved Greazy Keyz.
“We were trying to put together a tribute video. And we’re like, ‘Do you think Greazy could put together a sad version of ‘It’s Raining Men’?’”
He could.
And within an hour, he did.
‘Five minutes? You got it’
Get Greazy talking about his craft — about music in any form, really — and he sounds like he’s transported to another time and place. A simple question before the hoopla on Friday about the differences between playing the organ and piano spawns a (welcomed) lesson on the history of the two instruments.
“So the piano is a stringed instrument,” Keyz begins. “Which is to say the sound can only last so long. Whereas the organ is an electronic instrument and can sustain tones. The Hammond organ...”
He’s then off explaining how the Hammond organ is a modern evolution from the wind-based pipe organ, and how the Hammond organ played roles in many of America’s most enduring music, its most enduring sounds. He’s almost floating when he hears a buzz in his back pocket.
He excuses himself and answers.
“Five minutes?” he says to the other end of the line. “You got it.”
He turns to his bandmates, Jay Mathey and Jesse Lee, and tells them that with 55 minutes on the clock, it’s go-time. He then straps the keytar over his torso, and readies to inject life in an arena that, in a few minutes, will be bursting with it.
This story was originally published June 16, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Charlotte Checkers have a championship vibe, and Greazy Keyz is a big part why."
