Remembering Terrace's 1983 Air Canada Cup Team

This is Terry Zaporzan. He was an undersized dynamo of a hockey player, scoring at will in his minor hockey days here in Terrace. He graduated to the WHL where he scored 155 goals, 212 assists and 367 points. He very nearly made Canada's 1985 World Junior hockey team.

His size scared away NHL scouts, and he was never drafted. Yet in Terrace he is still a legend, right along the likes of the players who did make it to the NHL like Wade Flaherty, Jeff Sharples, Dale Kushner and Rudy Poeschek.

In this photo Zaporzan is wearing the jersey worn to represent western Canada at the 1983 Air Canada Cup. Now called the Telus Cup, the tournament is Canada's national midget hockey tournament. In 1983 the Terrace Totem Ford reps unthinkably represented western Canada at the tourney, although they would come up short in their bid to become national champions.

The jersey Zaporzan is wearing in this photo now hangs in the Terrace SportsPlex arena.

I created another online scrapbook of digitized newspaper archive clippings for the 1983 Air Canada Cup team.