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

  I thought I had made an emphatic point, but the Dayton guy wasn’t interested and told me to “shut up, bitch.”

  I said okay, jogged to the other end of the court so my teammates wouldn’t pass to me, and in doing so hung them out to dry because my absence in the backcourt made it harder for them to break the press. Sure it may have been selfish, but it also prevented me from having to dribble up the court while under heavy pressure. I regret nothing.

  Beating Dayton earned us the right to play Ole Miss in the NIT semifinals in New York City, which is coincidentally where our season essentially started. But unlike our last trip to the Big Apple, we won our first game of the trip by beating Ole Miss without too much trouble, which set up a game against UMass in the championship for all the NIT marbles. In the other semifinal game, UMass had beat Florida, and in doing so they killed the possibility of us playing the Gators in the NIT championship just one year after playing them in the National Championship, which would have been the first time such a thing had ever happened.

  UMass used the same up-tempo attack and high-pressure defense against us that they used to beat Florida, and in the first half we had just as much trouble with their frenetic pace as Florida did. We were out-rebounded, out-hustled, and most importantly, outscored, as UMass’s lead swelled to double digits with just four minutes left in the first half. We ultimately got the lead down to five at halftime, but even still, we were clearly the better team and should have been having our way with them.

  Throughout most of the NIT, our guys seemed disinterested on the court because the NIT was a pointless tournament. And they were able to get away with this because we were so much better than the other teams we played that we didn’t have to play 100 percent to beat them. Well, this time around, UMass wasn’t exactly a pushover like some of the other teams we played were. So to get through to my teammates and get them to play as well as they should have been playing, I decided to give them a pep talk in the locker room at halftime.

  “With the exception of genocide and pedophilia, do you guys know what’s worse than playing in the NIT? Losing in the NIT! So get your heads out of your asses, stop feeling sorry for yourselves, and go out there and play like you and I know you’re capable of!”

  I kind of expected all the guys to jump to their feet, burst into a mosh, tear down our locker room door on their way out to the court, and then proceed to figuratively set UMass on fire and rape all their virgins en route to the NIT Championship. Instead, Coach Matta turned to me and said, “Mark, sit your ass down and don’t ever interrupt me while I’m addressing the team again.” So yeah, not exactly the reaction I had anticipated.

  Even though my speech wasn’t well received by Coach Matta, my words apparently came in loud and clear to our players, because we went on a tear in the second half, took the lead within the first two and a half minutes, and never looked back. UMass actually tied the game with about six minutes left, but the game was never in doubt once I saw the fire in our players’ eyes right after my pep talk. Thanks to my uplifting words, when the final buzzer ultimately sounded, the scoreboard showed a seven-point advantage in our favor. We were National (Invitation Tournament) Champions.

  We spilled onto the court to celebrate, but most of the guys were confused about how excited they were supposed to be. I mean, sure we won the tournament, but at the end of the day it was the NIT and being the best team in the NIT is like being the most attractive Michigan cheerleader or being Canadian. (I really do love you, Canada.) This didn’t matter to me, though, because I could see the bigger picture. Beating UMass on that night allowed me to join the likes of George Mikan, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Ralph Sampson, and Reggie Miller on the list of guys who have won a National (Invitation Tournament) Championship. And that is what’s really important—being able to find ways to loosely associate myself with some of the game’s greats. No matter where I go or what I do with the rest of my life, I will always share that common bond with these guys, and I will always be a National (Invitation Tournament) Champion. And nobody will ever be able to take that from me.

  Well, nobody except the NCAA, who will most likely vacate all four of my years at Ohio State once they find out that I was on all sorts of illicit drugs during my entire career, ranging from anabolic steroids to Adonis DNA. But let’s keep that our little secret.

  PART FOUR

  I don’t even know what that is, nor do I care.

  —Coach Matta, when asked for his thoughts on my blog

  TWENTY-ONE

  A funny thing happened in between my sophomore and junior seasons at Ohio State, provided that you have a sick sense of humor and think that somebody realizing that their childhood dream is unattainable is a funny thing. Even though everything I’ve written up to this point would lead you to believe otherwise, the truth is that I actually did take basketball seriously during my first two years in college and I did want to play in the games. But I wanted to play on my terms, which is to say I wanted to play when the game was still in the balance instead of being the human victory cigar that capped off blowout wins.

  I screwed around a lot off the court, sure, but during practices I busted my ass and took it just as seriously as everyone else because I wanted to work my way into more playing time. (Okay, I’ll admit it was hard for me to write that sentence with a straight face—I really did work hard in practice, but saying I busted my ass and worked as hard as everyone else is probably a slight exaggeration.) Deep down on the inside, I wanted to be a part of the regular rotation of guys and actually play in the first half, but on the outside I masked everything by joking around in the locker room and being way too cool to play hard when I checked in for the final minute of games.

  After playing AAU with Greg, Mike, and Daequan for so many years and being regularly called upon to make significant contributions (did I mention that I led the team in scoring a few times? I did? Oh, well this is just another reminder then), I figured that once I walked-on at Ohio State, I would bust my ass and eventually get to play at least a handful of minutes in each game after a few years. My lifelong goal had always been to actually play for a Big Ten basketball team, not to just sit on the bench, so I owed it to myself to give it a legitimate chance. What I failed to consider, though, was that I never actually had any semblance of a chance, no matter how hard or how well I would’ve played in practice. This was confirmed when Coach Matta admitted to me after I graduated that he would never play a walk-on over a scholarship player under any circumstances ever. (This would’ve been great information to have when I originally walked-on instead of a month after I was done playing.)

  Still, I didn’t need to hear him actually admit that he’d never play me because within my first two years it was already obvious that Coach Matta had told my childhood dream and lifelong goal to lick his butthole. In my first two seasons, my status on the team remained entirely unchanged. Actually it got worse, since we had more guys on the team my sophomore season and thus I dropped from 11th man to 12th man on the hypothetical depth chart. And so, when two years of giving it my all and playing the best basketball I had ever and will ever play in my life didn’t get me anywhere, I decided to change my focus, just have fun, and stop giving anything that could even remotely be interpreted as a shit.

  Close your eyes for a second as you read this and think back to a time when you were in your junior high or high school guidance counselor’s office. If the time you are thinking about is when you were bawling your eyes out and whining to your counselor because Jessica Wood called you a loser for having a bunch of Lisa Frank folders and notebooks, first of all, let me take a second to also laugh at you. Secondly, that’s not what I’m talking about, so disregard that thought and instead think about the time that you were talking to your counselor about what you wanted to be when you grew up.

  Now think of the time in your life when you realized that what you had always wanted to be was an impossibility. Maybe it was when you figured out that you’d almost certainly never get t
o be the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire because it sadly doesn’t exist anymore. Or maybe it was when you decided that being a doctor involved way too much school for your liking and/or you weren’t smart enough. Or, more likely, you realized that you couldn’t be a carnie because you didn’t smell like a combination of meth and stale cotton candy, you didn’t have a balding mullet, and you weren’t missing over half of your teeth. (It’s such a shame too, ’cause I would’ve made an awesome carnie.)

  After my sophomore year at Ohio State, I had my realization. No matter how much I had wanted to be a Big Ten basketball star, it was never going to happen. Some would say this made me a failure, but that’s an incorrect assessment because before my career was over and my window of opportunity closed, I changed my goal so I wouldn’t technically fail. (It’s a very popular strategy among us underachievers.) Out was my dream of being a star college basketball player and in its place was my new dream of simply making the most of the cards I was dealt and having as much fun as I possibly could for my last two years of college. In was my dream of embracing everything about my role as a walk-on/benchwarmer for one of college basketball’s best programs. In other words, in was the founding of Club Trillion.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I like to think that the founding of my blog was a lot like the founding of Facebook, or at least how the founding of Facebook was portrayed in The Social Network. It wasn’t, of course, but I like to think it nonetheless. (I also like to think that my basketball career was a lot like Jesus Shuttlesworth’s, my academic career was a lot like Will Hunting’s, and my ass-kicking career was a lot like John McClane’s—it’s more fun that way.) In truth, the only real similarity between the origin of Facebook and the origin of my blog is that they both can be traced back to getting dumped by a girl. I was newly single, living alone in my one-bedroom apartment, and absolutely bored out of my mind because my social skills were terrible and I wasn’t much of a partier. One random night in October, I was browsing Facebook (what a coincidence!) and noticed one of my so-called friends posting a bunch of stuff about why everyone should check out his blog.

  Since I had nothing better to do, I decided I’d oblige, if for no other reason than he seemed passionate and I felt that I should at least humor him. I clicked on the link he provided and concluded pretty quickly that his blog was awful. The writing was terrible, the topics were uninteresting, and his tone made him sound like a real poopdick. Based on this, you’re probably thinking, Hey, just like your blog! That must be where you got your inspiration!, and even though you’re obviously joking and just trying to be an ass (you don’t really mean it, do you?!), you’re actually kinda right.

  After reading this guy’s garbage, I realized that nobody in their right mind would let him write for their site, which meant that he had to have started his blog on his own and had to have been in sole control over everything. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit now, but at the time I had no idea what a blog was. Once I read his blog and learned about the concept, though, I figured there was no reason I couldn’t do the same thing. And so, since I was bored not only on that night but with life in general, I Googled “create a blog,” clicked on the first link provided (which was obviously Google’s blogging service, Blogger), and just started writing.

  It was entirely my idea to start the blog, but in the beginning it was a three-man operation with Danny and Kyle. Toward the end of the previous season, the three of us formed a bond while sitting on the end of the bench for most of the games. Kyle was a scholarship player and certainly played more than Danny and me, but it wasn’t uncommon for him to also sit out entire games and join the two of us in our benchwarmer fun (which primarily just consisted of finding both the most and the least attractive female in the stands). Anyway, the three of us made a concentrated effort to embrace our benchwarming roles and thus decided to reflect our mind-set with the name we gave our group—Club Trillion.

  Why Club Trillion, you ask? Well, the “club” part is derived from the fact that there were three of us in the group and we thought of ourselves as a private club, with the only way to gain membership being that you had to be glued to the bench like we were. And the “trillion” part comes from the notion that when we would actually check into the games, we usually played for only one minute and didn’t record any statistics—thus our box score showed one minute played followed by 12 zeros, or what we referred to as “a trillion.”

  (Note: I feel obligated to acknowledge that I didn’t come up with the trillion concept. A friend of mine read about it somewhere and told me about it, I loved the idea and shared it with Kyle and Danny, and the three of us decided to fully embrace it. From what I’ve been told, legendary Philadelphia 76ers statistician Harvey Pollack is credited with coming up with the concept and is therefore kind of the godfather of Club Trillion. Or if I’m the godfather, I guess he could be thought of as the godfather’s godfather? I don’t know. Point is, I didn’t invent the concept, I just made it popular. I just wanted to clear that up.)

  Getting a trillion was considered to be a bad thing because it meant you were entirely irrelevant to the game. But we made it a point of pride. Getting a trillion—not recording a single statistic—became our goal whenever we played at the end of games and we actually competed against each other to see who could get the most trillions. Simply put, Club Trillion was out to revolutionize benchwarming, and like Wu-Tang Clan and a broken condom, we wanted to make it crystal clear that we also weren’t anything to fuck with.

  During the first week of the blog’s existence, each member of Club Trillion contributed an introductory post to get the ball rolling, but sometime during the second week Kyle and Danny both decided that blogging about benchwarming was taking things a little too far. After all, Kyle was a scholarship player who had aspirations of actually getting solid playing time (which he eventually did), and writing about how much fun he had on the bench wouldn’t exactly send a good message to the fans or, more importantly, the coaches. Danny, on the other hand, had no such aspirations for more playing time. No, he was more concerned with life after playing basketball, as it had always been a lifelong dream of his to get into coaching. He thought that if he was involved with the blog, future potential employers would think he didn’t take basketball seriously, which would have been a problem since coaching college basketball kinda requires that he do just that.

  And so, they both asked me to delete their posts and eventually to stop acknowledging that they were associated with Club Trillion at all, which I’m sure still haunts them both to this day. Meanwhile, because I had no aspirations for more playing time, no aspirations to coach, and no aspirations to do much of anything, I saw no reason why I should have to stop writing about being a benchwarmer. So Club Trillion marched on, only now it wasn’t much of a club since I was the only member.

  When Kyle and Danny cut ties with the blog, I was actually kind of happy because it gave me the opportunity to make the blog my own personal thing instead of making it about all three of us. Now I could just write about my experiences at Ohio State (as opposed to our group’s collective experiences), and my family and friends back in Indiana could read it to see what I was up to, which was my only real intent with the blog in the first place. Never did I think that anyone outside of my circle of family and friends would care about it, and I certainly had no plan to use the blog as a platform to eventually write a book.

  But things changed when I called out the Columbus Dispatch in one of my earlier posts for keeping me out of a team picture they were taking for their college basketball preview. They specifically told Danny and me that they didn’t want us in the picture (we were the only two guys not in it), so I took to my blog and put them on blast for disrespecting the walk-ons. Again, I was only expecting my family and friends to read it, so I guess you could say it was a bit of a surprise to see Bob Baptist, the OSU basketball beat writer for the Dispatch, write about my blog post and playfully defend the Dispatch on his own blog. Through his post, all of hi
s followers found out about my blog, came and checked it out, and apparently liked the concept of a benchwarmer giving them inside access to their beloved Buckeyes.

  And just like that I had a legitimate audience and suddenly had to shift the focus of everything. No longer was I catering to just my family and friends. Now I had to write less about me specifically and more about both the role of a walk-on for a big-time college basketball team and what some of my superstar teammates were like off the court. Specifically, I had to write about my less than amicable relationship with Evan “The Villain” Turner.

  Not long after that initial wave of people found out about my blog from Baptist, I wrote on my blog about how ridiculous it was that The Villain had suddenly started referring to himself as “The Kid” around the locker room and somehow managed to get most of my teammates to call him that within a week or two also. Maybe he and I were raised differently, but where I come from, people have to earn their nicknames and trying to give yourself a nickname just because it sounds cool is not only pathetic but it’s borderline offensive. So when he somehow successfully nicknamed himself The Kid, I decided to show him just how immoral his actions were.

  I figured the best way to accomplish this was to try to give myself a nickname too, so that way when The Villain noticed how lame and pathetic I was, he would realize that that was exactly the same way he was being perceived. I went with “The Shark,” solely because it rhymes with “Mark” and because everyone named Mark has been called “Mark the Shark” at least once in his life. The way I saw it, The Shark was the most uncreative nickname possible and would surely be perfect in showing how stupid self-assigned nicknames are.