Golden Pipes Sings Anthem At NBA Summer League Day 1, Looking To Parlay New Recognition Into Musicals’ Starting Lineup
By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
NBA Summer League organizer and agent Warren LeGarie thanked Carnell Johnson for performing the national anthem moments before the first summer league game at Thomas & Mack Center. Fans gave Johnson the thumbs up, too, as the Las Vegan known as “Golden Pipes” strolled off the hardwood. And after the Toronto Raptors and New Orleans Pelican tipped off the second of 82 summer league games, the honor guard members wanted a photo with Johnson in a back Thomas & Mack hallway.
Johnson, a classically-trained opera singer with a music education degree from UNLV, gets noticed all over Las Vegas because he was the T-Mobile Arena voice for the national anthem during the Vegas Golden Knights’ captivating postseason run to the Stanley Cup Finals. LVSportsBiz.com first caught up with Johnson in late March and suggested Johnson could be the Golden Knights’ go-to home playoff game singer.
Johnson may have drawn local praise and lots of media attention thanks to the Golden Knights, but the gondola singer at the Venetian and usher supervisor and audio descriptive technician at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts is still trying to realize his career goal of cracking the big leagues of performing in a Broadway musical.
Johnson said he was approached for a potential gig as the English-speaking voice for a Turkish cartoon. Not quite “Hamilton.”
Johnson is aspiring to be a big-time musical singer, with the anthem performer carving out a niche singing the Star-Spangled Banner at local sporting events from boxing matches to hockey games knows it’s a tough barrier to break through to reach the musicals such as “Hamilton.”
“A lot of that is about who you know,” Johnson said, chatting after the anthem at the Raptors-Pelicans game Friday.
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The Golden Pipes has his fans in Las Vegas, where admirers of his singing ability have used Twitter to lobby Lin-Manuel Miranda and his “Hamilton” musical to enlist Johnson for a part.
“The fans have been putting my name out there,” Johnson said.
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