One of the few radio broadcasters to call professional hockey games in the US in Spanish embarked on his career after fleeing death threats from a notorious drug cartel in his native Mexico, he revealed in a new interview.
In a compelling conversation with the Nevada news station KSNV that was published Saturday, Jesus Lopez said the danger he endured before becoming the play-by-play narrator of Las Vegas Golden Knights games on the radio made calling the team’s Stanley Cup championship in 2023 one of the most memorable moments of his life.
“I cried, to tell you the truth,” Lopez told the outlet, adding that the Golden Knights gave him one of the championship rings that members of their organization received in celebration of the club’s first National Hockey League title. “I wasn’t expecting this.
“For me being able to do this after what I’ve been through, it’s very nice.”
Lopez previously recounted to NHL.com that he had been living in Ocotlán, Jalisco, near the Michoacán state line, and running several pizza restaurants when a regional drug cartel demanded that he pay its leaders for them to let him continue running his businesses. They threatened his life and the lives of his family members if he refused, so he sold his possessions and moved to Las Vegas to start over.
“In 2011, I was forced to leave in order to not lose my life,” Lopez said to KSNV.
Lopez told the NHL’s website that, as he understood it, La Familia Michoacana was the cartel responsible for displacing him from Mexico.
The group made news headlines in December for allegedly kidnapping 14 people – including four children – in apparent retaliation for the killings of 10 La Familia Michoacana gunmen at the hands of angry farmers who banded together and took up arms over the cartel’s extortions. In 2022, ex-members of La Familia Michoacana who splintered off and formed their own cartel killed the mayor of a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, the politician’s father and 18 other men.
Lopez landed his gig with the Golden Knights in 2017. He is among three broadcasters to call NHL games in Spanish – and he and the Golden Knights are the only ones on air throughout the entire season.
He told KSNV it had been challenging at first to make a sport that is synonymous with Canada, the northern US and certain parts of Europe appealing to members of Las Vegas’s Latino community, who are crazed about soccer, American football and boxing.
But he said that he feels supported by the Golden Knights, who defeated the Florida Panthers at the end of the 2022-2023 campaign to lift the Stanley Cup for the first time.
More recently, the Golden Knights visited Mexico City and Monterrey – the capital of the north-eastern Mexico state of Nuevo León – and held instructional clinics in an attempt to draw in even more Latino fans.
“It came at the right time because we went through a lot of things in Mexico,” Lopez said to KSNV of his run as the Golden Knights’ Spanish-language radio broadcaster. With “this team … it’s always: ‘What do you need, Jesus? What do you need, Jesus?’ he said.
“So, I love that.”
