By Scott Cruickshank May 25, 2018
Note: This article was originally published in the New York Times Athletics Section and is too good to not share!
The Las Vegas Wranglers have a home date in a matter of hours. There is one goalie on the premises – but only one.
Fortunately for Glen Gulutzan, this is an ordeal that comes with a solution. The coach speed-dials his favourite emergency backup, Jay White, who works five nights a week at the Riviera as a Neil Diamond impersonator.
“He said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem. Can you play tonight?’” recalls White. “And I said, ‘Give me a minute. Let me think about this.’”
He mulls things over, then rings his employers, fib at the ready.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m sick. I can’t come in tonight and do my show, so you’re going to have to give people their money back,’” White says, chortling. “Then I went down to the rink and put the pads on and got in the net.”
This type of save had been nothing new.
Responding to crease crises is something White has done many times – for Gulutzan and his bunch in the East Coast Hockey League and for Chris McSorley and the Las Vegas Thunder of the International Hockey League.
At a moment’s notice, with very little prompting, the middle-aged entertainer would drop everything to practise during the day with professional players. At night, he would serve as the backup, take warmup, sit on the bench, and, if nudged, sing the national anthem – while wearing his pads.
It’s the kind of hardcore dedication that made White, in many ways, the most famous goalie in Glitter Gulch, a mantle the hockey fanatic wore with pride for a couple of decades.
That run, as he well knows, is over.
These days, the spotlight is focused on Marc-André Fleury, the backbone of the Vegas Golden Knights and face of the expansion team battling for the Stanley Cup, springtime darling of the NHL.
“I’ve heard that he’s a real strong leader, off the ice as well,” says White. “Picking him up from Pittsburgh was a huge factor. Any goalie in his early 30s, who’s been in the league for 10 or more years, is really coming into his prime.
“I figure that someone half my age would still be in his prime. I’m in that 60s range, and I can still get down and kick them out.”
Yes, White continues to parry pucks three mornings a week in pick-up sessions. He plays rec games when his schedule permits. Originally from Kitchener, Ont., he’s lived and worked in Las Vegas for nearly 30 years, a performer through and through.
He appreciates, maybe more than most folks, the new show in town.
The Golden Knights are the hottest headliners.
“You know, I think the entire city is shocked,” says White. “At the beginning of the season, my thinking … was that maybe they’d make a run for the playoffs. Optimistically, you hope they’ll make it, but you don’t really expect it.
“Obviously, we now believe anything is possible. Certainly, the Cup is well within reach. I actually think the Golden Knights have the edge to take the Cup, as silly as that sounds at this point in time.”
Well-documented is the team’s march from nothing, literally nothing, to the league’s final bracket. White likes the fact that they refer to themselves as the Golden Misfits. It’s perfect.
“I feel like they had something to prove,” he says. “They’ve shown the world – and, certainly, the NHL – that they are for real and they’re here to stay.”
However, White, who attended 10 games this winter at T-Mobile Arena, has not been forgotten by local die-hards.
“People stop me in the concourse and say, ‘Are they going to need you for backup goalie one of these days?’” he says, laughing. “Especially at the beginning of the season – they used four goalies in the first month – people were saying to me, ‘I guess you’ll be No. 5.’”
White plans to reach out to Vegas headquarters in the summer, when the playoff frenzy subsides, and make the club aware that his services – for whatever, for whenever – are available. Still.
“I really feel that I’m part of the hockey family in town,” he says. “Not as much a part of the Golden Knights family yet, but I’m hoping I’ll get my foot in the door.”
If he sounds determined, it’s worth noting that this is a guy who grew up wanting to be the second coming of Terry Sawchuk, not the next Neil Diamond.
After his family moved to Detroit when he was six, he worked his way through minor hockey and up to junior. He earned a look from the IHL’s Kalamazoo Wings, playing a couple of pre-season games before being cut.
“I hated to give up the hockey thing,” he says, “(but) that’s as far as my career went.”
The next stage, in fact, was the stage – doing theatre and musicals, singing with a top-40 band. One day, he was asked to try out for a tribute show, Salute to the Superstars, at Mr. F’s Supper Club in Detroit.
“People had been telling me I sounded like Neil when I sang,” he says, “so I shaved off the moustache and styled the hair and went and auditioned. They hired me. Six months later, I quit my day job selling life insurance.”
Five years after that, 1989, Sin City came calling. A club owner, hearing about his Neil Diamond routine, invited him to the desert.
“I’d never been west of Chicago,” says White. “All the bright lights of The Strip, it’s pretty overwhelming when you come into Vegas for the first time.”
But he loved it. For nine years – working 50 weeks annually – he was part of the Legends in Concert at the Imperial Palace. Then he went solo, doing an eight-year run – 2,000 shows – at the Riviera.
All the while, he kept playing hockey, blocking pucks for the city’s minor-league squads (and practising with Curtis Joseph, a Thunder goalie during his holdout with the Edmonton Oilers). One night, White got to suit up for the visiting (and roster-depleted) ECHL Florida Everblades.
So trust White when he says the experiences were meaningful to him – heck, he even made sure his pads and gloves were Wranglers colours – and not worth jeopardizing.
“It’s funny – I never told Glen Gulutzan how old I was,” says White. “At one point, when I had to dress, he said, ‘I have to put your birth date down here on the lineup sheet.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s Feb. 3. Put whatever year you want.’ I figured if he knew how old I was, he would’ve thought, ‘This guy’s too old to be playing with us,’ because I was in my early 50s.”
His last backup stint may have been nine years ago, but those cups of coffee remain unforgettable – even for someone who’s performed live thousands of times for millions of people.
“I remember standing in the tunnel – with the music playing and the crowd cheering – then skating out onto the ice,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Here I am, 50-some years old and I’m playing pro hockey. This is just phenomenal.’”
Keenly involved in the NHL alumni scene around Las Vegas, he’s rubbed shoulders the likes of Rick Vaive, Doug Gilmour, Luc Robitaille, Rod Buskas, Marty McSorley, Pokey Reddick over the years.
When emergency netminder Scott Foster made headlines in March by getting into game action with the Chicago Blackhawks, Las Vegas sportscasters had an easy time localizing the story. They simply tracked down White.
“Hockey has been such a huge part of my life,” he says. “I still have as much passion for it now at my advanced age as I had when I was 15 or 20 years old.
“It’s been a nice long hockey career – a lot longer than I expected, to be honest.”
A born performer, he’s not afraid to blend his passions, whether it’s singing the national anthem at rinks or incorporating hockey into his act.
Take, for instance, his show last week at the Suncoast Hotel and Casino.
Costume changes are expected, a couple per night. No surprise, his wardrobe is a ringer for Diamond’s, including a concert-worn jacket the Jazz Singer himself offered as a birthday present.
However, on this particular evening, White capped his performance with a gold-grey-and-red twist.
“I sing Sweet Caroline, then I go off-stage,” he says. “I throw on my Golden Knights jersey and come back on stage to do America, and the crowd just roars.”
Roaring crowds are commonplace these days. A year ago there was no NHL hockey in these parts. Now the Golden Knights, favoured by many of the bookies, are four wins away from becoming Stanley Cup champs.
Who could have foreseen that? Certainly not White, who long ago committed to a series of shows in Canada, which will pull him away from hockey’s unlikeliest hotbed until June 2.
“Personally, it’s been great,” White says of the Golden Knights’ emergence. “I’ve been itching and waiting and hoping for an NHL franchise for the last 25 years. Finally, when it happened, I was outside T-Mobile Arena. There was a couple thousand people there the night they made the announcement, and I wanted to be a part of that.
“I felt like hockey’s been a part of my life since I was seven years old – it’s a game that I love, a game that I would never give up on – and I’m always going to wave the hockey flag. And it’s the Golden Knights all the way from now on.”
Photos by David Weinstein
