Happy 21st birthday little brother. It's pretty amazing how quickly you've grown up, and now to think you're almost out of college? Wow. Here is the ode to Mr. Brian Shin Hwan! (i don't think anyone will fully appreciate it other than you)

Brian and I grew up sports nuts, and that is a complete understatement. Every morning we would wake up before school and make a race to the LA Times for Section C, Sports. Whoever got it first would take their jolly good time reading it while the other one would just stare and read the back page in agony. I won most of the time, but it's ok, I was doing it to make Brian stronger. Between the both of us I think we knew everything about sports, and all we would do was talk about sports day and night.

We also played a bunch of sports as well. Soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, golf, hockey, etc. We tried anything we could get our hands on. Remember how I broke my toe playing barefoot soccer? That was during halftime at my brother's game. Heck, my brother even hit me with a golf ball while hitting with a putter on the 5th hole at DeBell. We also tried emulating everything on TV too. Remember the Olympics where Korea did well in short track? Guess who was practicing 30 minutes later in the garage in roller blades? We practiced playing hockey goalie with a baseball glove, and practiced pitching like Bob Ojeda (who was a lefty, even though we're both righties) in the living room. Yeah, we were nerds, but who cares? We actually thought we could make it to some professional league someday.

We collected cards too, of course. Every week we would take our allowance down to Kings and put our money down to buy a pack of cards. They were definitely a waste of money, but it was a way for us to get closer to our favorite sports players; for me it was Nick Van Exel and Frank Thomas, for Brian it was Orel Hershiser, Dikembe Mutombo, and Darryl Strawberry. We even had baseball card folders where we would keep some of our cards. Again, being the good brother that I am, I charged Brian 25 cents to write the sports names across the tabs, in cursive.

Brian and I used to play every single sports game that was out there as well. Tecmo Bowl, Bases Loaded, Madden 94-2006, NHL '94, that ghetto World Cup soccer game where all the guys look the same and where it makes that tsktsk sound when you dribbled, FIFA, Super Tennis, NBA Live, World Series Baseball, Triple Play, Fuji Golf, Tiger Woods, you name it, and we probably walked over to Goodtime Video to face the mean Korean guy to rent that game. We even rented freaking a rugby game once. We didn't even know how to play the game because there was no instruction booklet so we just mashed buttons for a little while. The name "Brian Hwan" also comes from video games too, because you couldn't spell out his full name on the records page for Madden. Being the good older brother that I am, if Brian ever got close to beating me I would turn off the Nintendo right before the end of the game so that he couldn't bask in his glory.

Just from reading this post you probably think that I was the worst brother ever, and I don't think you'd be far off. I was selfish and for some reason always wanted the upper hand, because as I started getting older I realized that my brother was actually better than me in most things. Now I think it's safe to say that I'm really proud of how great my brother turned out. He's the fastest Korean I know, very nice, smart, funny, and most importantly, can beat me at most video games. So this post is for you Brian, in hopes that the pain I've inflicted on you so far in life won't keep us from getting closer.