Super Sakic
By LARRY TUCKER -- CALGARY SUN May 19, 1996 

   There's no `S' on the front of Joe Sakic's T-shirt. And he wouldn't wear a cape on a bet.  Doesn't matter in Denver. Far as hockey fans in the Mile High City are concerned, Sakic's Superman.  
   Joe's Our Hero, it says on a big sign in the McNichols Sports Arena that the Colorado Avalanche call home. But it's nothing new. That's what they've been calling Sakic since his junior hockey days, when they first caught onto his Clark Kent act.  
  "I can't remember when somebody first hung that Superman nickname on him.  But it sure fit," says Graham James, Sakic's friend, former coach with the Swift Current Broncos and now business partner, both owning a piece of the WHL Calgary Hitmen's action.
TRANSFORMATION
   "If you were to see Joe in street clothes, just standing around, the last thing in the world you might expect would be to find he is a professional athlete.  "But then, when he puts on a hockey uniform and steps onto the ice ...something just happens."  James only needed one look at the aspiring 14-year-old to realize the kid had the makings of a very special player. And for all the dozens of trades that went on as he went about setting up shop in Swift Current, James made sure that Joe's name remained an untouchable on the Broncos' list 
of protected prospects.
   "You couldn't help but see it," James said. "Just watching him skate, the way he handled himself on the ice ... you knew that if he had all the intangibles that you need to go with it -- the desire and determination -- then he could play this game at its highest level."  
   Mind you, while James the coach might have been excited at the prospect of having a young Joe Sakic play hockey for him, the player wasn't initially enthralled at the ice of moving to Swift Current.  If you'd been born and raised in Vancouver, would you?  
   "I remember talking to Graham," Sakic recalls with a chuckle. "I told Graham I'd rather play somewhere closer to home, like Seattle.  "But they flew me out there. I enjoyed myself. I thought it was a great little city and it'd be a great place for me to play hockey."  
   Could the fact that the daughter of the family with which James arranged to billet Sakic happened to be a Miss Teen-Age Canada contestant have swayed the decision? Who knows?
   "Another kid was supposed to get that billet," James laughs. "We had to bump him."
   Regardless, the move was the best one Sakic could have made. His hockey improved leaps and bounds, capped by a fabulous 78-goal, 160-point season as a 19-year old. Far more important, he was to meet his future bride, Debbie, during his years in Swift Current.  And as the coach-player relationship between James and Sakic turned to that of friendship, a casual comment on a team bus one night planted a seed that was to become a part of Calgary's sports scene.  Years later, they were to be joined by Theoren Fleury, another of James' alumni, as 
part of the Calgary Hitmen ownership team.
   "It was Joe who really got me thinking about it years ago when he said it'd be nice if we could own a team together some day," James recalls. "I knew I'd never have the money myself, but thought maybe if we could get Joe and Theoren, then put a group together, we could do it.
KERNAL OF AN IDEA
   "I didn't want to put anybody's money at risk. Hockey like any sport is a tough proposition and these guys are my friends. I wanted to spread out any risk as much as I could. But it was Joe who really got me thinking about it in the first place."  
   The Hitmen recently completed their inaugural Western Hockey League season and perhaps the best thing to be said about it is, there will be many better. At least, a certain hockey player's father from B.C. says there'd better be.  
   "Hey, how's that Hitmen team doing? When they gonna win the Memorial Cup?" Mario Sakic asks over the long distance line from the family home in Surrey, just a brief drive away from Joe and Debbie's summer home in White Rock.  
   "They could use a couple more Joe Sakics," a reporter tells Joe's dad.  "Then you tell Joe and Fleury they should go buy some," Mario says.  "They've got lotsa money."