Tough Enough : Growing Up on the Farm in North Dakota Makes Becoming a Top Lineman Seem Easy

Fields of golden sunflowers, dense stands of corn, thousands of acres of waving wheat lie beneath the hot summer sun.

Fields of dreams, in North Dakota.

Straight, lightly traveled rural highways crisscross the endless flat farmland. The country road rolls through one farm town after another, past an occasional country cemetery, where tilted headstones mark the dreams of other times.

Hawks cruise lazily over freshly plowed fields awaiting the late hay crop, looking for mice and insects.

The Hansen farm lies eight miles south of Oakes, population 1,742, in southeastern North Dakota. Here, Allen Hansen, 50, raises corn, sunflowers, cattle, sheep, oats, millet and football players. The Hansens own 1,000 acres of farmland and lease another 3,000.

Hansen’s No. 2 son, Phil, is an All-American senior defensive tackle up at Fargo, 120 miles away, at North Dakota State University. His No. 3 son, Steve, is a promising freshman linebacker at North Dakota State, America’s best NCAA Division II football program. Oldest son John, who didn’t play football, works the family farm with his father.

Hansen is showing a reporter around his farm, explaining the economics of family farming and the necessary work ethic.

“All three of my boys spent every day of their summers in fields like this one,” he said, pointing to a 65-acre field, recently shorn of its wheat.

“And when I say days, I mean sunup to sundown,” he said. “Football is the perfect sport for my sons, because it requires a lot of work and preparation. Growing up here . . . heck, that’s all my boys know, hard work.”

THE PLAYER

Press day at North Dakota State. The players are in green and gold game uniforms, copies of the Green Bay Packers’ uniforms. Journalists from across North Dakota inspect, photograph and interview the players who hope to kick-start the 1990s with yet another Division II football championship, something the Bison achieved four times in the 1980s.

The North Dakota State Bison are the San Francisco 49ers of Division II football. In the 1980s, they were in the NCAA championship game six times and compiled an overall ‘80s record of 103-20-2.

The school might be small, but the players aren’t. One is 6 feet 7 and 310 pounds. So Phil Hansen, at 6-6 and 265, doesn’t necessarily stand out. Yet he is, by acclamation, the team’s best player. The coach, Rocky Hager, expects Hansen will be drafted by the NFL next spring.

Hansen, lean and flat-bellied, looks as if he could carry 300 pounds comfortably. He sat and talked about farm boys playing football.

“Until I got to Fargo,” he said, grinning, “I never heard the expression, nine to five.

“My brothers and I were in the fields at 6:30 a.m., and we didn’t come home until it was too dark to see. Planting, harvesting, cultivating, working with the cattle and sheep--I didn’t mind any of that. But the worst part was rock- picking--clearing a new field of rocks before cultivating. That is hard work.

“Football is hard work, too, I guess, but Steve and I never thought much about that. We just did what was necessary to get ready to play. All our lives, our dad taught us that if someone is offering you an opportunity to do something, you owe them an honest day’s work.

Hansen went to a big high school, by North Dakota standards. At Oakes High, there were 50 in his graduating class. After his senior football season, he says, the coach from the University of North Dakota, at Grand Forks, called to offer him a full scholarship.

“I turned him down, because I didn’t know what a full ride was,” Hansen said. “I had to go ask my coach.”

Hansen is an economics major and carries a B average. He doesn’t see himself returning to the family farm as his principal livelihood, even though he is the president of the family farm corporation.

“I’ve been an assistant manufacturer’s representative for a farm chemical company the past two summers, and I enjoy that,” he said. “I’ll always have something to do with the family farm, but not full time. I’d like to be involved in the business side of agriculture. I mean, I have 20 years of farm experience, it’s not like I have a lot to learn about farming.”

First, many in Fargo predict, will come pro football.

He dismisses it with a wave of the hand.

“That would be a bonus,” he said. “If it happens--great, but that’s the kind of thing that just happens. My only football goal now is to play as well as I can so that we can win another national championship.

“We all know we’re good enough to do it again, but we also know talking has nothing to do with it. We have to work very hard.”

Duke Babb, director of an NFL scouting combine, National Football Scouting of Tulsa, Okla., pegs Hansen as a draft pick.

“We consider him a prospect, based on what we saw of his junior year and assuming he plays well this season,” Babb said. “We feel he’ll be drafted.”

Hager, the coach and a former North Dakota farm boy himself, said Hansen is pure winner.

“When I recruit kids, I always ask them the same question,” he said. “I ask them which is more important, winning a North Dakota high school Class A or Class B state championship? When I asked Phil this several years ago, he looked at me kind of funny and said: ‘Coach, winning is winning.’ That was exactly the answer I wanted to hear.”

Last season, during an 8-3-1 North Dakota State season--the Bison won their most recent national title in 1988--Hansen had 99 tackles, 30 of them unassisted, and broke up 17 pass plays, most of them blocks. He was the NCAA Division II player of the week twice, the first time after he had nine tackles, two sacks and a fumble recovery that set up a touchdown against Northern Colorado.

Murray Warmath, the former Minnesota coach who scouts for the Minnesota Vikings, said last year that Hansen was North Dakota State’s best pro prospect since it sent linebacker Steve Nelson to the New England Patriots in 1974.

Hager said: “Phil is his own biggest critic. He’s a very sharp student of himself in the film room. If he sees his first step off the line was six inches instead of eight inches, he’ll play it over and over. He’ll get angry with himself.

“I have a conference with every one of our players in the summer and when I talked with him, he said he wasn’t happy with how he’s played, in spite of all the honors he’s earned here.

“He said, ‘Coach, I just haven’t got it yet, but I’m going to get it this year.’ I asked him what it was, and he couldn’t explain it, other than to say he doesn’t believe he’s approached his potential yet.”

THE COACH

Hager’s toughest decision was leaving the ranch to become a coach.

Rocky Hager, 38, grew up on a horse ranch in Harvey, N.D., 200 miles from Fargo.

“We raised primarily American saddle horses, but also thoroughbreds and American quarter horses,” he said.

“After my dad and grandfather had died, we had to sell everything. There was no one left in the family to run the ranch. I loved those horses. On the day (in 1987) when we watched all our horses get loaded into trucks and watched them go down the road, well, that was a tough day. There were a lot of tears.”

But Hager found solace in football.

“Football is the most perfect team sport,” he said. “You have 11 men out there, each of whom has a deep understanding of how important he is to his teammates, and how much their teammates depend on him.

“And when you have what we have, a whole team of men who are totally committed to repeating things time after time until they do it to perfection . . . it’s hard to explain to a non-football person how fulfilling an experience that is to a coach.”

This season will be Hager’s fourth as head coach at North Dakota State. He was the defensive coordinator before replacing Earle Solomonson, who left in 1986 for Montana State.

North Dakota State established itself as a Division II power in the early 1960s, when Darrell Mudra went 24-6 over three seasons. Then Ron Erhardt, over seven seasons, went 61-7-1. Since 1965, the Bison have had seven unbeaten seasons and three times lost only once.

In the last 25 seasons, there has been one losing season. During that period, 58 Bison players have signed NFL or Canadian Football League contracts.

Many who sport “Run With the Herd” decals on their cars expect that this might be NDSU’s best team ever.

But Hager worries first about surviving in the North Central Conference, made up of North Dakota State, North Dakota, South Dakota, South Dakota State, Augustana of South Dakota, Morningside of Iowa, Nebraska Omaha, Northern Colorado, and Mankato State and St. Cloud State of Minnesota.

“Morningside had an 0-10 season last year, yet we barely got out of there with a 26-20 win,” Hager said. “It’s a very well-balanced conference.”

Balanced, other coaches would say, beneath North Dakota State.

Said Nebraska Omaha Coach Sandy Buda a year ago: “North Dakota State could compete with every team in the Big Eight except Oklahoma and Nebraska.”

Life in Division II football means dealing with roughly half the resources of a Division I program.

“The majors have 80 scholarships, we have 40,” Hager said. “That pretty much sums it up. We have good athletes, but not nearly as many as a good Division I program.

“That means our better athletes have to play more than one position when we need them to. When injuries catch up to us, we do a lot of position rotation.”

By necessity, Hager says he doesn’t overlook any top North Dakota prep players.

“We see everybody in North Dakota,” he said. “If we recruit a kid who is also a major college prospect, we continue talking to him until he tells us he’s going to a major school. We also recruit everything between here and Minneapolis.”

Roughly half of Hager’s 1990 roster is composed of North Dakota players, the rest from Minnesota and Wisconsin.

This season, there’s a major college prospect at South High in Fargo, Chris Berg, a tall, dropback quarterback who can throw a football 75 yards. Hager runs an option offense and he was asked how a dropback passer would fit into his offense.

“He’d fit in just fine because if we get him, we will go to a dropback offense,” he said with a smile.

And since he is one of them, Hager has a soft spot in his heart for North Dakota farm boys. He estimates that slightly fewer than half of his players grew up on farms.

“I can see a subtle difference between our farm boys and the others,” he said. “There is a carry-over from the farm work ethic. They’re quiet kids, basically, but if they have something to say, if they think the coaches are doing something wrong, they’re not afraid to speak up.

“And I see it in their willingness to commit themselves to doing things right. They learn early on the farm that there are no short cuts, no easy ways to do something that’s difficult. So in practice when we ask them to do something over and over until they get it right, they understand that.”

Hager has occasionally had players from warmer climes, but many never make it through their first North Dakota winter. Bison followers call this phenomenon “winter kill.” Hager can’t understand someone who balks at northern Midwest winters.

“That’s what jacket hoods and underwear with handles are for,” he says with a shrug.

Some of Hager’s most important recruits are members of Team Makers, the NDSU intercollegiate sports support group. It’s a statewide organization of 1,500 members, each of whom contributes $50 to $2,500 to the program.

Team Makers has been a prime mover in a new stadium project for the university. The school plays at 16,500-seat Dacotah Field, but construction has started next door on a domed, 20,000-seat facility being built by the city of Fargo, to be leased to the university. The $37-million project is being financed by a half-cent city sales tax on purchases under $19.

Actually, outdoor football has been played in December here in clear, 60-degree weather. But it has also been played in blizzards so intense that first-row spectators at Dacotah Field couldn’t see the team bench.

Hager was asked how he likes the Division II football playoff format, in which 16 teams participate in a postseason playoff.

“We were 14-0 in ’88 and that made for a long season,” he said. “The teams who do well late in the playoffs tend to be the ones who are healthiest. I’d like the present format a little better if we could have a two-week break between the last regular-season game and the first playoff game.”

THE FARM

Allen Hansen’s farm backs up to a national wildlife refuge across the James River, which flows through the Hansen property.

He pointed across the river, to the refuge.

“We build some blinds here, and hunt the snow and Canada geese that fly across the river in the fall,” he said. “That’s the one thing about my boys that’s different from me. I love to hunt. Now, they’ll hunt, but they don’t love it like I do.”

He showed a visitor the water pump he uses to bring irrigation water out of the river.

“We’ve had dry years lately, so water’s been a big expense for us,” he said. “When we use river water in a wet year, it costs us about $20 per acre in a year. This year, since it’s dry, the bill is up to $30 to $35 an acre. And this field (oats) alone here is 65 acres.”

He drove his pickup truck by a cornfield.

“I hope we’ll get 150 bushels per acre off of this field, and with corn right now going for $2.43 a bushel, that’s pretty fair. You always come out OK anyhow with corn, since the cows eat the stalks in the winter.

“We grew about 500 acres of bread wheat this year,” he said. “You go further north in North Dakota and you’ll see durum wheat--that’s pasta wheat.”

Allen Hansen and his sons have gone through hard times on the farm--much tougher times than Phil or Steve will encounter on a football field.

“We went broke in 1981,” Hansen said, driving past a field of towering sunflowers. “Lost everything. In those days, we had thousands of cattle. Now we have hundreds. It was my own fault. Prices were good in the late 1970s, they were rising every year, and I was borrowing to get more land, more livestock and more equipment.

“So when prices fell, the interest on our borrowed money was soon eating us alive. It was tough, to be in a situation where all the hard work in the world had nothing to do with solving a problem. But once I admitted to myself that I was broke and had to start over, that made it easier to deal with.

“So we sold everything, and started over. We’re about half the size we used to be, but we’ve paid everyone off. We’re in charge of our lives again.”