Don't Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey From the End of the Bench to the End of the Bench

by Mark Titus

  At a practice shortly after the Tennessee game, Coach Matta became fed up with Evan and gave him an ultimatum. He announced:

  “I’ve scheduled this practice for an hour and a half. That’s only 90 minutes. Today we’re going to see how long it takes before Evan loses his mind. I’ve got the countdown on my watch and if Evan lasts the entire 90 minutes without a meltdown, the team won’t run today. But if he freaks out, we’ll run a suicide for every minute left on the countdown. So, for example, if he loses it an hour into practice, everyone will run 30 suicides. Evan, the entire team’s fate lies in your hands. Don’t let your teammates down.”

  I scanned the group of guys in the huddle and noticed that Evan was the only one who looked even slightly confident that we weren’t going to have to run, which conveyed to me that he was the only one on the team who wasn’t aware that he had the propensity to suddenly turn batshit insane. But the rest of us must have sold Evan short, because the first hour of practice went by without a hitch. When something happened that would’ve normally led to Evan cursing at the top of his lungs or drop-kicking a ball across the gym, he would calmly collect himself and shrug it off. It was as if we were all watching Bizarro Evan for that first hour of practice. But these little annoyances started adding up, and things turned south real quick. Toward the end of practice he missed a few shots in a row and clenched his fists in anger. Then a pass to a teammate slipped through the teammate’s hands and went out of bounds, prompting Evan to quickly turn around, sprint back to the other end of the court for defense, and take a handful of deep breaths in an exaggerated way. It was obvious that Evan was getting dangerously close to blowing a gasket, but luckily, practice ended before the inevitable meltdown came.

  Knowing just how big a bullet we had dodged, the guys high-fived each other in celebration and huddled around Coach Matta for his post-practice speech. As Coach started to mockingly congratulate Evan, he looked at his watch and noticed we had finished practice a little early. There were still 10 minutes left on the Meltdown Countdown, so he told us all to spend the last moments of our apparent victory by working on our free throws. When we broke the huddle and headed for the various baskets in our practice gym, Coach Matta stopped me and told me to go to the basket Evan went to.

  It didn’t take long for me to put the pieces together. After all, Evan and I had a history of flat out disliking one another, and Coach had just explained how the day’s practice was going to test Evan’s mental strength. It only made sense that I was to be the final test. Sure Evan could withstand missing shots and teammates screwing up, but the only way to really prove that he could keep his composure was to see if he could tolerate me for 10 minutes. In other words, if this practice was Evan’s own little game of “Super Mario World,” everything that happened in the first 80 minutes could be thought of as just the Koopa Troopas or those bullets with faces on them, and the last 10 minutes with me were like going up against Bowser in that clown helicopter thing. And unfortunately for Evan (and in this case the rest of our team), so long as the game in question isn’t any of the Mario Karts, defeating Bowser is never an easy feat.

  When I walked over to Evan’s basket, he smacked his lips and said, “What are you doing over here, walk-on?” while in the middle of one of his free throws. (Yes, he called me “walk-on.”)

  I explained that Coach Matta had asked me to shoot with him and that we were supposed to shoot five free throws at a time before we switched. He seemed cool with this, shot his five free throws, and then stepped off the free throw line to switch spots with me without any trouble. And that’s when, to put it eloquently, shit went down.

  Before I go any further with this story, it should be noted that I faced up to 10 suicides if Evan lost his cool, so it’s not as if I was actively trying to piss him off. But as I soon found out, I didn’t have to try with Evan. As we switched spots, I handed him the ball and asked him to toss me a bounce pass once I got lined up, just like a referee would do if I were shooting free throws in a game. But he apparently interpreted this as “roll the ball on the ground before I even get set so it hits my feet, makes me bend over, and completely destroys my rhythm.” I picked the ball up and got situated at the free throw line before I gently tossed it back to Evan and again asked him to throw me a bounce pass. This time he fired a chest pass at me.

  Now, I admit that I probably should’ve taken the high road at this point and just shot the free throws, but my pride kicked in and wouldn’t let Evan get the best of me, so I threw the ball back and once again asked him to simply throw me a bounce pass. As soon as the ball hit his hands, he rocketed it right back and yelled, “Just shoot the fucking ball!” so loudly that he got the attention of everyone in the gym, including Coach Matta. But instead of blowing his whistle and making us run, Coach decided to sit back and watch everything unfold.

  I shot my free throws and switched spots with Evan, who had been standing underneath the basket rebounding for me (and throwing passes back to me as hard as he could). As we walked past each other, Evan called me a bitch under his breath and threw his shoulder at my face, connecting square with my chin. Coach Matta instantly blew his whistle and yelled, “There it is! Everyone on the line!”

  And with that, Evan had finally had his meltdown.

  Once we got situated to start our sprints, Coach Matta said, “Evan, you were so close to making it 90 minutes without losing your mind, but you came up a little short. According to my watch, you made it 87 minutes, which means the whole team has three suicides.”

  I glanced over at Evan and noticed he was visibly angrier than I’ve ever seen any human being in my life (he was so mad he had tears welling in his eyes), and even though I was about to run some excruciating sprints, I couldn’t help but sport a huge smile across my face.

  After the sprints and Coach Matta’s second post-practice speech, Evan approached me for what I thought was going to be a conversation to bury the hatchet. But before he said a word, he presented his peace offering in the form of a punch directed at my face. I quickly ducked, gave him a little shove, and walked back down to the locker room, laughing at him. To give you an idea of just how crazy Evan was, consider this: back in the locker room, my teammates scolded me for Evan’s outburst. That’s right—I was being blamed for Evan’s inability to keep his cool, because I should’ve known better and done everything in my power to make sure Evan maintained at least a tiny bit of sanity, since it was obvious he couldn’t do it on his own.

  Evan and I had had a handful of altercations throughout the year up to that point, but this incident marked the moment that I realized there was a good chance that he and I would never really get along for the rest of our careers as teammates. About a year later, I nicknamed Evan “The Villain” because of constant instances like this and because—let’s be honest—it fit him perfectly since he seemed to embrace being the bad guy and being “misunderstood.” But while that nickname wouldn’t come until later, this altercation definitively marked the moment when he stopped being Evan Turner to me and instead became The Villain.

  EIGHTEEN

  Despite all evidence to the contrary, The Villain’s mental meltdown disguised as a practice somehow actually seemed to help our team, because we went on a three-game win streak and improved our record to 15–6. Of those three wins, the last game at Penn State was undoubtedly the most memorable because—you’re never going to believe this—I made another one of my teammates so infuriated on the plane ride back home that I honestly thought he was about to murder me and eat my corpse.

  The day before the game, a huge snowstorm was set to hit both Ohio and Pennsylvania, so we pushed our flight out of Columbus up a few hours to avoid any problems getting to Happy Valley. We landed in Pennsylvania without any trouble, but what we weren’t prepared for was the follow-up snowstorm on the day of the game that made our return flight a real challenge.

  Even though it was customary for us to fly back to Columbus immediately after a game no matter how late it mig
ht have been (I once crawled into my apartment bed at 4:00 a.m. after a road game), we initially considered spending the night in Happy Valley. But in the end, the flight control people thought that all we needed was a quick plow of the runway and some de-icer on the plane and we’d be good to go. Since I’m not real fond of telling people how to do their jobs, I figured that if the conditions were good enough for the pilots, they were good enough for me too. (This is the same reason why porn doesn’t do it for me. I find it extremely condescending for the girl in porn scenes to repeatedly tell the guy, “Oh yeah, just like that,” or, “Give it to me harder,” or whatever. The dude is a professional at having sex. I think he knows what he’s doing.) Othello Hunter, on the other hand, didn’t feel the same way.

  After being teammates with Othello for a year and a half, I thought that I had a pretty good idea of just how terrified he was of flying, but apparently I completely underestimated his fear. Following a shaky takeoff, the pilot announced that there was heavy turbulence ahead and we needed to return to our seats and put on our seat belts.

  Othello looked concerned and strapped himself into his seat as tightly as he could. The turbulence was initially nothing more than some mild shaking of the plane, but after a couple minutes things got serious and the plane went into a free fall for at least one full second. Now, the only time I like free falling is when I’m singing along with Tom Petty and I’ve got a few Bud diesels running through my system, so it’s not like I was entirely calm in the face of disaster like the Titanic band or anything. But the fact of the matter was that I was a huge fan of Lost, so I didn’t completely panic. That’s because even though we were flying over Pennsylvania, I thought there was still a chance we would crash on a strange remote island in the Pacific Ocean, which would’ve finally given me the chance to murder Jack for being such a douche and a terrible leader, party with Sawyer and Hurley ’cause they’re awesome, and try to bang Juliet because her boobs were so godlike I honestly thought that they were Jacob for most of the series. Anyway, my point is that the free fall certainly concerned me and made me wish we weren’t 25,000 feet in the air, but I wasn’t in a complete state of hysteria like Othello was. And by that I mean that I didn’t have an intense scowl on my face, I wasn’t pouring sweat, I hadn’t inexplicably ripped my shirt off, and I wasn’t squeezing the armrests like they were my husband’s testicles and I was a housewife who had just caught him cheating with his secretary.

  Looking back, the intensity on Othello’s face effectively portrayed both how terrified he was and how serious the situation was, which should have made him off-limits for any jokes, but I just couldn’t resist and convinced myself that it was just another one of those times when things seemed really serious but we’d all just look back on it and laugh someday. This was mistake number one. Mistake number two was forgetting that Othello wasn’t exactly a big fan of mine at the time. That’s because after witnessing Matt Terwilliger jokingly call Othello “Simba” or “Mufasa” for a few weeks, due to Othello’s African heritage (his parents were both born in Africa), I decided to get in on the action and yell that “Naaaaaaaants ingonyaaaaaaa ma baghiti baba!” intro from the “Circle of Life” song whenever Othello walked into a room. (Sure it was racially insensitive, but it was also funny so that makes it okay.) Apparently Othello was cool with Matt making fun of him (maybe because his real first name was Tegba, so Simba and Mufasa weren’t really that far off), but I took it too far with my butchered Zulu. Anyway, in the midst of a terrifying bout of turbulence on a plane back from Penn State, I disregarded both of these warning signs and said:

  “Hey, Othello. Just think—if we crash, there’s a good chance they’ll make a movie about us. We could be the sequel to We Are Marshall.”

  Yes, I know it wasn’t even that funny and was a little offensive, but the point wasn’t to make light of a tragedy. The point was to try to get Othello to freak out even more, which I thought would be the funny payoff. But, boy, was I wrong. Othello looked at me to acknowledge the comment, turned his head back toward the front of the plane, and sat in silence for the rest of the flight with the same look of terror on his face that he had already had.

  I can’t begin to explain how frightened this made me. It’s like in high school when you stole your dad’s car after he went to bed so you could go to a kegger on the outskirts of town and you got arrested at three in the morning for having an open bottle of SoCo on the dashboard and a bag of weed in the cup-holder. You could’ve sworn your dad was going to kill you, but instead he just said, “Son, I’m not mad at you. I’m just disappointed in you,” and that somehow hurt so much worse. That’s kinda how this felt for me. Only now my “dad” was 6′9″, 230 pounds, and possessed the anger of a thousand Mel Gibsons.

  I kept my head on a swivel the entire rest of the flight (spoiler alert: we landed safely) and genuinely thought Othello was going to try to punch me in the back of the head when I wasn’t looking. To make matters worse, I forgot to consider that Othello always sat one seat behind me on our team bus, so the trip from the airport back to campus was one that consisted of me completely turned around in my seat to keep an eye on him. But he didn’t say a word. In fact, he didn’t speak to me for almost two weeks after the incident, which made things really awkward in the locker room considering he and I had lockers right next to each other.

  He ultimately never did anything to get me back, but in a way his lack of retaliation was more effective than anything he could’ve possibly done because the anticipation haunted me for the rest of the season. And while he’s since forgiven me and we’re now pretty friendly toward each other, my prediction of “we’re all going to look back on this and laugh someday” couldn’t be further from the truth. The last time I reminded him of the incident, he almost got as upset as if it were happening again and stressed to me that it wasn’t funny then and wasn’t funny now. So, if you ever see Othello, do me a favor and refrain from asking him about this story. It’s probably best for his sake—and definitely best for my sake—that he not be reminded of it.

  In staying true to the roller-coaster season we had been having, we lost on the road in our next game to the same Iowa team that we had beaten by 31 less than a month earlier. Most NCAA Tournament projections had had us solidly in the tournament, but after that loss we found ourselves in the middle of the bubble discussion, which felt foreign considering the season we had had the year before. Nonetheless, we got back on the right track with a win over Michigan, and while it didn’t do much to help our chances at making the tournament, losing would’ve been devastating because Michigan kinda blew. Plus, it was a big game because it was Michigan and it’s common knowledge among Ohio State athletes and fans that no opportunity to donkey-punch the Wolverines should ever be taken for granted.

  After Michigan gargled our balls, we lost at 13th-ranked Indiana before getting back on track by beating the piss out of Northwestern to set up a rematch with Michigan in Ann Arbor. But thanks to terrible defense in the second half, we blew our opportunity to sweep Michigan and lost by 10. This was doubly bad considering it was the first time Ohio State lost to Michigan in basketball since Coach Matta took over in 2004, and the loss almost certainly put us on the outside looking in as far as the NCAA Tournament was concerned.

  With a 17–9 record and only five regular-season games left, it was now officially time to start panicking. Luckily for us, though, the 10th-ranked Wisconsin Buzzcuts were coming into our place, we had a week to prepare, and a win against them would put us right back in the thick of things. But unluckily for us, in the days leading up to that game our team captain and best player cursed out an assistant coach and quit the team in what was undoubtedly my single favorite memory from that season.

  NINETEEN

  In the brief time we were teammates, the one constant with Jamar Butler was that he was never submissive to authority and pretty much just did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Simply put, I’ve never met anyone in my life who has either thought to the
mselves or actually said the phrase “I don’t give a shit” more than Jamar. This often made him entertaining, such as when I met him for the first time at a house party on campus during my freshman year and while we were walking from one party to another he whipped his dong out on a crowded sidewalk, pointed it to the side, and took a leak without breaking stride or even making any attempt whatsoever to conceal what he was doing. Another time he got confrontational with our director of basketball operations, Dave Egelhoff, and yelled, “Don’t come at me with that bullshit, Dave,” during a practice because Dave had apparently come at him with bullshit in the form of a report that Jamar had skipped one of his classes and thus, as a team rule, now had to run disciplinary sprints with our strength coach.

  But other times I hated his defiance of authority because it directly affected me in a negative way, such as when, after the National Championship game in 2007, he came into my hotel room, took all the alcohol from our minibar, and consequently racked up a $150 charge on our room that Danny and I had to deal with the next morning. (We didn’t have to pay for it, but we still had to convince our coaches that we weren’t the ones who were responsible for all the missing liquor, which was surprisingly more difficult than it should’ve been.) And then there was the practice leading up to the game against the Buzzcuts, when Jamar’s defiance reached unprecedented heights.

  Before I get to the good part of the story, let me first set the stage. During my time at Ohio State, we typically ended practices with a mini-intrasquad scrimmage that lasted four minutes, since four minutes was theoretically the longest we’d ever have to be on the court at one time during actual games, because the built-in media timeouts occurred at four-minute intervals. Coach Matta was obsessed with getting us to play as hard and as well as we possibly could for four minutes at a time, and he approached every game with the mind-set that we were actually playing 10 four-minute games, or “four-minute wars,” as he liked to call them. (It always bugged me that he didn’t call them “four-minute battles,” since the analogy would work much better if you treated the entire game as a war and each of the 10 segments as battles, but whatever.)