EDITOR’S NOTE: After Patrick Marleau signed a contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs ending his 19-year career with the San Jose Sharks, here is our story from June 18, 1997, just before the Sharks selected the 17-year-old in the NHL draft.

TO HERE FROM OBSCURITY:

Dying town comes alive talking about Sharks’ likely draft pick

ANEROID, Saskatchewan — Everything moves slowly in the farming community of Aneroid. Its people. Its tractors and plows. Even its own death.

Aneroid’s school closes Friday after 84 years, the latest blow to a town that once supported two lumberyards, three grocery stores, a pool hall, barbershop, bookstore, meat market and bank. Only one store, and 75 people, remain.

“The town will still be here in 10 years’ time, ” Mayor Jack McMillan said. “Don’t ask me about 20, though.”

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Sharks’ Thornton, Marleau set to enter uncharted waters Amid this decay, a 17-year-old hockey player named Patrick Marleau has jolted Aneroid to life. If everything goes as planned – as it always has in Marleau’s life – Sharks fans will never forget him or his nearly deserted hometown.

Barring a trade, the Sharks are expected to select Marleau as the No. 2 pick in the NHL draft Saturday. Many hockey scouts and coaches think he would have been the No. 1 pick in recent drafts; only bad timing put him in the same draft with Joe Thornton, another slam-dunk prospect who will be taken first by the Boston Bruins.

Still, Marleau would be the most promising draft pick in Sharks history. He is a 6-foot-2 center who can score goals, create chances and turn upside down a city so unassuming it doesn’t even have stop signs, much less stoplights.

“He was born in Swift Current (there’s no hospital in Aneroid), went to school there later and played midget hockey there, ” McMillan said. “But when you ask him where he’s from, there’s no mention of Swift Current or anyplace else but here.

“He’s from here. And I think we’re all pretty pleased about that.”

So much so that they plan to make a sign at the town’s entrance that says “Home of Patrick Marleau.” The current sign celebrates the city’s 75th birthday. That was in 1988. Not much has happened since then.

And two weeks from Saturday will be “Patrick Marleau Day” in Aneroid. They would have a parade, but after getting all the participants in place, nobody would be left to watch. Instead, a slow-pitch softball game and town dinner is planned.

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‘Nothing like the city’

Marleau was reared on 1,600-acre farm. “It’s nothing like the city, that’s for sure, ” said Marleau, who spent the past two seasons in junior hockey scoring 83 goals for the Seattle Thunderbirds of the Western Hockey League. “You’re by yourself. It’s quiet. You can’t see your neighbors. I don’t think I’d trade it for growing up in the city. . . . But I don’t know if I could live out here all my life.”

He won’t have to. Once he signs his rookie contract, which will probably be for the maximum $925,000 per year, Marleau can live anywhere.

“I told him, ‘Just think, you’re going to make more money than I ever have,’ ” said Patrick’s father, Denis. “It’s going to be quite an eye-opener. But I’ve taken him aside and told him, ‘Don’t ever forget where you came from.’ ”

It’s not easy to find.

“He’s just an ordinary boy who feels you work for what you get.”

Aneroid is almost a three-hour drive from the closest airport, in Regina. But finding the town is just half the battle in the search for the Sharks’ potential star. Four miles of gravel road lie between the town and the Marleau’s 1,600-acre farm, and the proper lefts and rights must be gauged by distance from the last turn.

“We’re kind of lacking in signs, ” Denis said.

The Marleaus live in a small home dwarfed by their adjacent barns. Just a short walk past the clothes drying on a line is a pockmarked gray fence that shows the wear and tear of thousands of Patrick’s slap shots. The goal he shot on is still there. What remains of the tattered net dangles from the crossbar.

“Just about every day he’d have a hockey stick in his hand, and if he couldn’t use a puck he’d have a golf ball or some other kind of ball, ” said Denis, who grows wheat and raises cattle. Denis played hockey and, like everybody else, recognized Patrick’s talent early.

“He would just take the puck and go from one end to the other, and everybody else would still be at the one end, ” said his brother Richard, 19. They played nearly every day, on the ice in the winter, in the barn during the summer. During “Hockey Night in Canada” intermissions they would play in the kitchen.

“We used to get heck from Mom because we’d wind up taking the shine off the floor, ” Richard said. “Looking back now, I can see that all the stuff we did as kids, it always focused on hockey. When I think of Patrick, I think of hockey.”

Stanley Cup on the mind

He talks very little, but has big dreams. And when Patrick thinks of hockey, he dreams big-time.

“I envision the kind of career I’d like to have; the player I’d like to be, ” said Marleau, who has been interviewed at his home by scouts from the Sharks, Los Angeles Kings, New York Islanders, Calgary Flames and others. “I want to be the go-to guy. I want to help a team win a Stanley Cup.

“It’s going to be interesting being on a team lower in the standings and helping to build it up. It would make winning the Stanley Cup even more special.”

This is tantamount to a speech from Marleau, who is friendly but very quiet.

When told about the post-draft news conference with North American media that awaits Marleau in Pittsburgh on Saturday, McMillan said: “That’ll be a rough deal. Probably his answers will be ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ I would be petrified.”

But what Marleau lacks in charisma he makes up for in maturity.

“When he first moved in he was real quiet; (teammate) Jeremy Reich did the talking for both of them,” said Charlotte Jones, who boards the two players during the Thunderbirds’ season. “There was some culture shock. But soon he blended in and started talking more. He’s just an ordinary boy who feels you work for what you get.”

Bay Area dreaming

Son: Nice weather, eh? Father: Quakes, eh?

And a week before the draft he looked ready for San Jose, dressed in a Levi’s T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts, barefoot, unshaven.

Asked what he knows about the Bay Area, he said: “It’s hot. Nice weather there, eh?”

His father has one reservation.

“I think about that terrible earthquake you guys had,” Denis said. “I saw all the destruction and that highway that collapsed. And they say the big one’s yet to hit? That’s going to take some adjustment for me.”

No matter who takes Marleau on Saturday, chances are he will spend another season in junior, like most of the other draft picks. But he will attend training camp in September and could convince the Sharks he’s ready at 18, just like Jeff Friesen, another small-town Saskatchewan kid.

“Physically maybe he’s ready to be up there, but mentally it would be quite a change, ” Denis said. “But I’ve been watching him all these years thinking he was taking things a little too fast, and he’s always made me eat my words.”

Saturday night live

Judy’s Place is jumping with talk of San Jose. If it takes another year for its hero to reach the NHL, Aneroid can wait. The previous most famous person from Aneroid was a baseball player who spent some time with a semipro club.

“I think we have as good a bunch of people as you’d find anywhere, ” McMillan said above the din at Judy’s Place restaurant Saturday night. “If anyone’s in trouble, everybody stands up and helps out. It’s always been that way.”

Every table is filled and the laughter is loud and long at the restaurant, one of two places to eat out in Aneroid.

Grab your soft drink at the refrigerator by the front door. No reservations are required.

The place only has five tables, and there were just 17 customers this night. But taken as a percentage of the population it was equivalent to 185,000 San Jose residents sharing Sprites and smokes on First Street.

In its heyday, if you can call it that, 450 people called Aneroid home. Now the population couldn’t fill half a section of seats at San Jose Arena.

“Back in the ’40s and ’50s there’d be a movie on tonight and the streets would be lined solid with parties, ” said McMillan, 69, mayor since 1979.

“Hard to believe, now.”

These days, two people conversing in separate cars on the town’s main street constitutes a traffic jam. “The town is really hopping tonight!” Denis said upon the sighting. He meant it as a joke. But he was correct, too.

Above one table at Judy’s Place is a corkboard tacked with stories about Patrick Marleau. In between cribbage hands the customers ask about Marleau’s future and San Jose. How many people watch Sharks games? What’s the traffic like? Will the sweater given to him at the draft have his name on the back? Do they really skate out of a shark’s head before games?

They talk about trying to come down sometime and watch Marleau play in person and see San Francisco. “Fisherman’s Wharf, and Chinatown, right?” McMillan said. “Yes. I’d like to see those places before I die. Very much.”

Denis said Patrick “has taken us places we probably wouldn’t have gone to, or ever dreamt of traveling.” The next stop is Pittsburgh on Saturday, when 15 of Marleau’s family and friends will watch him step on the podium and don an NHL jersey, probably with a Sharks logo on the front. But to Aneroid’s citizens it really doesn’t matter where he goes or to which team.

“I don’t think we’ll be any prouder on Saturday than we are right now, ” McMillan said.

They’re trying to get a satellite dish into town so they can watch the draft – no cable in Aneroid, either. They’re ready to add to the newspaper clippings in the restaurant. Then they have to prepare the town’s new sign. And plan the party. And try to get a big Sharks logo to hang on a banner.

Aneroid is slowly dying. But one week before the draft, with Judy’s Place bursting with chatter of their own Patrick Marleau and the Sharks and the NHL, it’s hard to imagine a town more alive.