Kenny Mayne has come a long ways since rolling through the halls at Thomas Jefferson High School.
After graduating from TJ in 1977, Mayne played quarterback at UNLV and even got a free-agent tryout with the Seahawks. Cut by his hometown team, he segued into sports broadcasting in his 20s, working at KSTW/11 before hooking on with ESPN in 1994.
You can now add another accomplishment to Mayne’s resume — author.
Mayne released “An Incomplete & Inaccurate History of Sports” on May 6. The book is described by Mayne as being “painstakingly faithful to it title.” The 256-page book is currently available at most major bookstores ($24.95) and is published by Random House, Inc.
Mayne grew up in Kent, near Star Lake, and has become very well known during his 15 years at ESPN while working as a SportsCenter anchor, features reporter and horse-racing analyst.
“To begin with, the book isn’t really complete,” Mayne writes in the book’s forward. “Lots of sports aren’t mentioned at all…in addition to not being complete, the book is not completely accurate. If this were a history book, then Ken Burns would have been involved and it would have taken four of five years to produce. I wrote this thing in four or five hours, and that time would have been reduced a great deal had my daughters not kept interrupting me to play indoor tackle football.”
The book does center around Mayne’s opinions on several sports, including eight chapters on football, “the greatest sport in the world, and everyone knows it.”
There are also four to five chapters on horse racing, Mayne’s second sporting love, which started at the old Longacres in Tukwila, as well as a chapter on Wiffle ball and one on badminton.
“In badminton, your father takes about three hours to set up a net because there are rocks under the grass where he is trying to jam the posts in,” Mayne writes in the book. “In the meantime, you and your friends kill each other with jokes about how the thing you are supposed to hit over the net, if your dad ever gets it set up, is called a ‘shuttlecock.’
“You keep repeating ‘shuttlecock’ over and over. Eventually, one of your friends laughs so hard he pees his pants and has to go home to change clothes. Shuttlecock.”
Although several sports stories are front and center in the book, Mayne also offers tidbits on being a father and husband. Mayne and his wife, Laura, have two daughters, Riley (8) and Anna (6), but the pair also lost twin boys, Creighton and Connor, in 1996. Creighton died at birth and Connor lived for six months. Mayne discusses the deaths of his two sons in the book.
Sports editor Casey Olson: 925-5565, sports@fedwaymirror.com
