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The Goalie Is a Hired Gun, and He’s Yours for $50 a Game

In Toronto, a surplus of amateur hockey teams has led to a thriving marketplace for that most sought-after of necessities: someone willing to play goalie.

Joe Vercillo is part of an army of rental goalies serving the needs of amateur hockey teams in Toronto.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

TORONTO — Keith Hamilton carried himself like an N.H.L. goaltender even before he made his first save in a pickup game at Moss Park Arena. Standing 6 feet tall — and looking much bigger in skates — he made the net behind him appear to shrink.

But this was hardly the N.H.L. Hamilton, 39, was guarding the cage against a team of middle-age men from an Ontario public utility. He wore a replica Colorado Avalanche jersey. Every other player was differentiated by tones more than colors, turning the sessions into light versus dark, a hockey version of shirts and skins.

After an hourlong scrimmage, Hamilton cut a lonely figure as he skated off the ice. There were no handshakes, no fist bumps. He collected the cash he was promised — the going rate is about 50 Canadian dollars per game — changed out of his gear and drove off to the next arena. This was his third game of the day. He had two to go.

Hamilton is a hockey mercenary, one of the estimated 150 to 200 hired guns in Toronto’s recreation leagues who are in demand as much for their position — goaltender — as for their skills. With 143 indoor publicly owned arenas in the Toronto metropolitan area, there are many more teams than there are available goalies.

Teams can do without one of their skaters. There are plenty of them. But if the goalie can’t make it, a game could be forfeited, which can feel like a puck to the mouth when ice time costs more than 400 dollars an hour.

“It’s not like soccer, where a player can just go in net,” said Niki Sawni, 27, who runs a goalie-rental service called Puck App.

By various estimates, there are as many as 8,000 rental-goalie orders every year in the Toronto area, which suggests there is a sizable marketplace for the kind of person willing to play the bull’s-eye in a game of target practice.

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Online and app-based rental goalie services offer teams willing and capable fill-ins, for a fee.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times
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Rental goalies like Vercillo typically cost a team 50 Canadian dollars a game. Vercillo gets to keep 40 dollars after paying an agency’s commission.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

“I’ve got a screw loose, sure,” said Mark Philipps, 46, who still tends goal but not so much as a rental goalie anymore. “It takes a special type of person to want to get a puck in the head.”

“You’ll run into some crazy ones,” said John McLeod, 55, a film actor who picks up work as a rental goalie in his off hours. “Very unusual characters, and I worry that I may be one of them, too.”

In Toronto, rental goalies — a cohort of mostly men and a few women — generally range in age from 18 to 65 and come from all walks of life: engineering, acting, education, policing, the trades.

Some even try to make itinerant goaltending their profession. Hamilton is one of those.

A musician who plays the vibraphone in a six-person folk band called Beams, Hamilton said he makes more money being a rental goalie than playing music in clubs.

He averages 10 games a week and keeps 40 Canadian dollars per game, paying 10 dollars in commission to a rental agency. His cut works out to about 1,600 Canadian dollars, or $1,220 in United States currency, a month. By his estimate, he has made well over 100,000 dollars in eight years as a rental goalie. And, yes, he said, he declares all of his income on his taxes.

“It’s not enough for a mortgage and kids’ education, but it’s just enough to get by,” he said. “There’s certainly more taxing ways to make a living. But I sweat and I come home with bruises.”

The rent-a-goalie concept has been around since at least 1985, when Doug Cardy, a former top junior goalie for the Toronto Marlboros, got tired of people “bugging me” to fill in on teams five or six times a week while he juggled a full-time job.

“I started telling them, ‘I want some money,’” said Cardy, a short-haul trucker. “And I started with a little cardboard sign in one of the arenas with my phone number.”

Cardy set up a business in which his goalies used pagers to check in for work. The money he scratched out wasn’t worth it, though, and Cardy, now 61, got out.

Goalies Unlimited was one of the first agencies to match games with goalies, in the mid-1990s. Since then, online competitors have proliferated, with names like Book a Goalie, MyPuck, Goalies to Go, Puck App, Rent a Goalie and Get a Goalie, which serves Buffalo and Chicago. Most of the agencies are run by current or former goaltenders.

Ian Peters, 44, started his operation in New York after growing tired of paying a $35 Uber fare each way to play goal in pickup games. He made a proposal three years ago to Ron Bursey, 37, who runs the Canadian operation Book a Goalie, and a New York tab was added to the Toronto-based website.

“It started like wildfire and the business blew up,” said Peters, who has about 70 goalies serving New Jersey, Connecticut and New York. “I do it all from my phone. There was resistance in the beginning, because New Yorkers weren’t used to paying for this service.”

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Rental goalies can be an eccentric sort. “It takes a special type of person to want to get a puck in the head,” one said.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

Peters charges clients $70 a game, and a goalie gets $25 for his first five bookings and $30 for his next five. A goalie’s pay maxes out at $35.

In Canada, rental agencies tend to take about 15 dollars in commission from the typical rate of $50 a game. Goalies like Hamilton, with eight years experience, can negotiate a lower commission. Sometimes, the business keeps it all.

Daniel Smith, 57, a former high-level hockey player who became a jockey, runs Goalies Unlimited. He likes to play four times a week, and as a rental goalie, he collects the full $50 fee each time.

Puck App, which Sawni founded three years ago, markets itself as the Uber of the goalie-rental business. With a smartphone app, it can undercut other services by charging a top rate of 45 dollars in Toronto, and even less in other cities.

Sawni has a database of 8,000 users across Canada, both goalies looking for paid work (about 5,000 so far) and clients looking for help in net.

On Puck App, a team can specify the site, the game’s starting time and the level of play. The offer is sent to all of the goalies in the database who match the criteria.

Patrick Herman, the owner of the MyPuck agency, has a roster of over 300 goaltenders and fills orders for 15 to 20 games a day. The business can be cutthroat, he said, and he has little time for teams who try to play one service off another to get a better deal.

“If you want a pizza tonight, it’s not like you call Pizza Hut and Domino’s and tell them, ‘The first delivery driver that gets to my door gets my money,’” Herman said.

Some teams try to make side deals with players they like, but the agencies discourage goalies from disclosing their personal contact information to clients.

Occasionally, the client is a fascinating character.

Joe Vercillo, 37, once got a late request to work for a certain Canadian superstar in the music industry.

“I got a call around 12:30 at night,” said Vercillo, who is in charge of acquisitions for a small publishing company. “It woke me up. My agent said: ‘Drake has rented the ice. Can you get over in 10 minutes?’”

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Vercillo once got a late-night call from his agency to play goal in a pickup game involving the rapper Drake. He thought it was a prank, until Drake showed up.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

Vercillo thought it was a prank because no one was inside the arena when he turned up. But soon Drake and his associates arrived, and Vercillo suited up for about 45 minutes of work.

“They gave me 80 or 100 bucks for that,” Vercillo said.

A representative for another well-known singer-songwriter called Bursey’s agency in December 2017, requesting two goalies. Justin Bieber wanted to put together a game with some friends at a Toronto arena.

“Bieber had his own entire dressing room,” Bursey said, adding that one of the goalies had told him that by the end of the game, “Teenage girls were all over the rink watching.”

As at every level of the sport, some goaltenders are better than others.

Daniel Altshuller, 24, a third-round draft pick of the N.H.L.’s Carolina Hurricanes in 2012, became a rental goalie last year to stay sharp after taking a season off.

“I had moved to Toronto and I didn’t know anybody,” Altshuller said. “I was just doing it mostly to find somewhere to play hockey.”

Others enter the marketplace for decidedly less professional reasons. Dan Madeiros, a commercial airline pilot, advertises his services at $40 an hour in the online classified forum Kijiji because, he said, he just likes to play.

“I have a job that pays me well,” said Madeiros, 42. “So I look at it that it’s paid exercise.”

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In Toronto, the marketplace for rental goalies is served by websites and apps with names like Book a Goalie, Goalies to Go and Puck App.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times
A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rent ’n’ Save: A Goaltender For Just $50!. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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