Russia's little hero: Ex-Cougar is invited to join Russia's Olympic camp

Hansen said that was an honor because it had nothing to do with him as a basketball player. It was because of Little Heroes, which was formed after LaRee began looking into adopting a child during her husband's first season with Dynamo Moscow. She knew Russia's reputation for having an arduous adoption process. She didn't know about the grim conditions faced by more than 250,000 orphans living in institutions.

LaRee said the surroundings in the understaffed hospitals where the youngest orphans stayed were especially disturbing.

"The conditions were just really bad and it made my heart just ache. I wanted to see if we could do something," she said. "Here, the buildings would probably be condemned or closed."

Travis said nothing he saw as a Mormon missionary in Chile compared to what he saw at the baby hospital in Lyubertsy, about 45 minutes outside of Moscow. Cracked or broken windows let the cold air flow freely, so sometimes the cribs were moved out of the bedrooms to the hallway. He said electrical wiring hung from the walls, the plumbing in the bathrooms didn't work and the hospital lacked medical equipment that is standard in the West.

LaRee said the ratio of children to nurses is overwhelming, leaving only time to change diapers, dispense bottles and maybe give a bath or two before the cycle starts all over again. The children are confined to their cribs most of the time and when they are picked up, the reaction is quite different from what the couple saw when son Ryder, born Travis' senior season at BYU, was that age.

"When you go to hold them, they have this glazed look over their eyes and it just makes you so sad," Travis said. "I mean, you have to do something."

It was LaRee's idea to start a foundation and she saw right off the marketing power of her husband's name.

Hansen was an automatic story as an American playing for Dynamo Moscow, the powerhouse Russian sports club. He was the subject of a nice spread in a Russian sports magazine, which featured Russia native and Utah Jazz forward Andrei Kirilenko on the cover.

Hansen didn't get that kind of star treatment when he was an all-Mountain West player at BYU. Several pictures accompanied the story, including one of Hansen in a borrowed fur coat leaning against a Lotus sports car, which also wasn't his, though he's a car nut and would take it.

Hansen said he mentioned the foundation and the writer was touched that an American was making that much of an effort to help in Russia. The headline was "Missionary," spelled in Cyrillic.