In Mine

I've always loved sports. I can remember my older brothers huddled around the TV watching Monday Night Football, BYU football games, Lakers vs Celtics, and the World Series. We had what was probably a 19 inch TV that sat in an unlikely spot in the dining room, next to the cookbooks and piles of sheet music. Watching TV was a crime next to domestic violence in our house, so it was never watched. The few programs that were legal included sports, General Conference, Anne o' Green Goblins, and Sesame Street. Over the years, boundaries were pushed and walls were torn down, leading to the Freedom of TV Act in 1996, which was quickly repealed by Dictator Gary, but that's a whole other post.

The main problem with sports at the Hansens in the 80's and 90's is that there just wasn't near enough of it. If I got to see one game a week, it was a good week. The MLB Playoffs were great because I could watch TV every night, at least until my 8 PM bedtime. However, there was just too much time to kill inside my house, so I started creating my own leagues. At first, I did what the other kids my age did: play a pretend basketball with the nerf ball and hoop in my room where I was the star, winning the championship game. But that was over in like an hour. I needed MORE. So I started to create leagues of my own.

The first league I remember creating was based off of this old, monstrous, large-print Quadruple
Combo that had pictures of every temple in the world and all the prophets, too. It must've been from the 70's, and this Bible/BoM/DC/PoGP was probably 5 inches think and weighed about 20 pounds. It was my book of choice for early morning scriptures, because I could look at the pictures of the temples and prophets when it wasn't my turn to read.

So how did I create a league out of this Quad? Well, one day I looking at Brigham Young's picture and wondered why he had a university named after him but Joseph Smith, or any of the others, didn't. So I decided to create a league with universities from each of the prophets: JSU, BYU, WWU, JFSU, ETBU, SWKU, to name just a few. I also decided that each university should have a home field, based on a temple in the book. BYU's was the Provo Temple, of course, and JSU's was the SLC temple. I can't remember the rest of them, but I'm sure one of them played in Hawaii, and one of them was even at the Swiss temple. Don't worry, I took the distance into account for the home-field advantage.

My favorite part about creating a league was making the composite schedule. Every year, in the BYU Football Media Guide there would be a composite schedule at the back. I loved studying it and found it so fascinating how it all worked. Also, the greatest thing about making schedules is that I could do them during sacrament meetings, holding open the humongous Quad, making it look like I was reading the scriptures. Church and Sundays in general were a great time to work on the admin of my leagues.

Once the composite schedule was made, I played out the games in the backyard by myself. Now, you may ask to yourself, "Doesn't Kent have, like, 100 brothers? Why didn't he just play with them?" Well, I say to you, that playing by myself was always infinitely more fun than playing with my brothers. When you play by yourself, you have complete control of the outcome. If I played with my brothers, do you think I would've thrown for 500 yards a game and also somehow managed to have 200 rushing yards and even 200 receiving yards?

Now, the sports that were hardest to play by yourself were in the following order, from hardest to easiest:
1. Baseball
2. Football
3. Soccer
4. Tennis
5. Basketball

Baseball was hard because I just had to toss it up to myself, hit it, and then go shag it. That never really worked out.

Football was hard because I would go back to pass, throw the ball to an imaginary receiver, and then, depending on the quality of the throw, I would make an amazing catch approximately where the ball landed by tossing it up to a point and running to catch it. That actually got pretty fun, but also looked the most embarrassing. I always made sure that no older brothers or neighbors were around when I was playing football by myself.

Soccer was pretty easy, but there wasn't a whole lot of passing going on. Plus, it wasn't really that fun since I played so much real soccer.

Tennis was at a later age, around 10-13 years. It was easy because we had a cement patio with a brick wall that was just about net size that I could hit it against. I would design these elaborate tennis tournaments. I always loved the concept of double-elimination tourneys, but I felt they were lacking. So I designed these quadruple-elimination tournaments. During church, of course.

Basketball was the best sport to play by myself because I could play it in my room with the Nerf hoop or later downstairs on the Little Tykes hoop that my parents bought for my 3 year old brother, Ralph. That hoop was perfect because you could raise it to about 6 feet high and the ball was easy to dribble, unlike those Nerf hoops where you couldn't dribble at all, so you had to do the fake dribble where you held onto the ball but you motioned a dribble.

I found that playing the entire schedule of the Prophets League got a little tedious, especially because I couldn't be on every team, and where's the fun in that? So then I started thinking that I could make a league with all of these cities I found in the atlas that didn't have professional teams of any kind, but were still kind of big. This league featured about 60 teams from Canada, US, and Mexico, with a conference for each country and it was divided into like 12 divisions. The main reason I created this league was just for the fun of making an elaborate composite schedule during church--I had no intention of playing out these games. I think I killed a good 10 Sundays with that league.

One year, one of my brothers got a Sports Alamanac for Christmas, I think it was the 1988 edition. This was the BEST PRESENT EVER. This Almanac was like having ESPN.com in book form. Of course, this was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so we pretty much lived in that Almanac, studying all the stats and records from that year and years past. The greatest part about it was now I didn't have to rely on the newspaper to get a listing of all the obscure colleges and conferences, which worked wonders. This is when my leagues got so realistic, they almost mirrored the real leagues.

I decided that I wanted to have a whole career, where I worked my way up through the high school basketball ranks and signed on with the crappiest team ever and led them to an NCAA championship. So I looked through the Almanac, and narrowed down the crappy teams. The team I first decided to put myself on was Iowa State. Their 1988 basketball record was something like 1-29, and was one of the worst in Division 1 that year. So I put myself on their team, as a Freshman named Spike Hansen (I thought Spike was the coolest name of all time). I started as a no-name walk-on, who barely made the team that season as the 12th man. Finally, after losing the first 7 games by 30 points a game, Coach finally put me in during garbage time. We were down by 30 with 10 minutes left, but I hit 12 3's and had at least 4 dunks in traffic, scoring around 50 points and leading the team to its first victory in 36 games.

Of course, despite all of that, Coach refused to start me the next few games, not wanting to shake things up with his starting 5. This meant that we were always down 20 to 30 points when Coach would finally put me in, and I would come in and score 40-50 points each game to lead the team to victory. Finally, he swallowed his pride and started me, and our team never looked back, winning every single game for the rest of my college career.

Of course, I would always doctor most of the games to either be close games that went down to the wire, or a ridiculously obscene blowout, like 165-23 or something. I think I ended up averaging around 70 points a game by the end of the season, and we ended up winning it all for each of the 4 years I was there.

By the time I entered the NBA, I was the 1st round draft pick and played on the worst team, which I believe was the Clippers (still are). I probably averaged 70-80 points a game and broke every record (including assists and rebounds). I'm sure we won the title every year until I was retired. The only reason we ever lost a game is if I was injured or something. It was the greatest ever!

One day, I was telling my brothers, Kurt and Brian, that Iowa State had come back from a 30-point deficit to win the game. They were amazed, and wondered how I saw/heard about that game. When I realized that they thought it happened in real life, I had to clarify that it was in "my own league", which was shortened to "in mine." Only then did I discover that Kurt and Brian also had their own leagues going, each with a different plot line, albeit very similar to mine (averaging 70ish points a game, for example). I'm not sure theirs were ever as elaborate as mine, as they spent a lot of time playing Lakers vs. Celtics on the computer. So from then on, we had to differentiate amazing sports stories from real life from the ones "in mine".

For example:

"UConn was down by 16 points with 45 seconds to Clemson, but amazingly got a bunch of steals and hit 6 3-pointers and won the game! In Mine."

"In Mine, I scored 102 points in my best-ever game, as the Clippers beat the Knicks, 182-93."

Most of the "in mine" leagues happened in basketball, as the basketball season started in October (once it got dark after dinner) and went all the way until June. Then I would play Tennis for a few months in the summer, and football would start in August. The tennis In Mine and football In Mine weren't nearly as elaborate or ridiculous as the basketball In Mine.

The funniest thing about In Mine was that I continued to have make-believe leagues and tournaments all the way until I was a Senior in college. I just wouldn't tell anybody about it, but I've still got a pretty vivid imagination.

The riskiest part about playing basketball outside in the driveway was my arch-nemesis and next-door neighbor, Chris Goodwin. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his front driveway belching and doing who-knows-what. He was a pretty big kid, and also 4 years older than me, and delighted in making fun of younger kids, so therefore I hated him and was deathly afraid of him. When I went out to play, I couldn't make too many loud announcer or crowd noises, else he might hear and mock me to no end. The worst was when I thought I was safe outside, got wrapped up in a particularly exciting game, and then turned around to see Chris mocking me. I hated it!

I'm pretty sure that when we get a basketball hoop in our driveway, In Mine will resume. Maybe I'll buy a Little Tykes hoop for my kid and pretend that I got it for him. Mel will know where to find me in the winter: Downstairs, averaging 70 a game, dominating my opponents. In Mine.