by Mark Titus
Over the course of the next few weeks, I referred to myself as The Shark in the locker room, on my blog, and in public. But instead of showing The Villain how stupid he looked, nicknaming myself had the exact opposite effect. Everyone who followed my blog started calling me “Mark the Shark,” or just “Shark.” This in turn made me start liking the nickname, and before long my plan had completely backfired. I had not only managed to make everyone call me The Shark, but I had also managed to convince myself that giving myself a nickname wasn’t such a bad idea after all. In other words, I had become exactly what I hated.
Since I felt like The Villain had somehow gotten the better of me after my plan didn’t exactly work out how I had hoped, I decided that I should at least give him a new nickname, since “The Kid” made no sense whatsoever. My nickname rhymed with my real name and was kind of badass. His nickname, on the other hand, had no story behind it and no relevant meaning whatsoever, so I decided to do something about it. I came up with “The Villain,” not only because he was very much a villain in my own personal life, but also because he had a chip on his shoulder and seemed to embrace being the bad guy as some sort of motivational tactic. Also, since my blog celebrated riding the bench, and since The Villain was morphing into one of the best players in college basketball, the nickname made sense from the standpoint that if walk-ons were going to be thought of as heroes, then superstar players like The Villain had to be the villains.
Now that both of us had pretty sweet nicknames and a bit of mutual disdain for one another, I made our tumultuous relationship the focal point of my blog. In reality, our relationship wasn’t nearly as bad as I portrayed it, but we did have real animosity toward one another, so I took it and ran with it.
The people who followed my blog seemed to eat it up, and before long I had ceased being an obscure and unknown walk-on named Mark Titus and had undergone a complete identity change that turned me into The Shark. I welcomed this change with open arms because after being an anonymous walk-on buried on the end of the bench for two years, it was nice to finally get a little respect and attention. Little did I know, though, that this initial attention was nothing compared to the storm that would hit me less than two months later in the form of ESPN’s Bill Simmons and his audience of millions. But we’ll save that for later.
TWENTY-THREE
As my blog became more and more popular, the concept of the trillion did too. Benchwarmers at all levels around the country emailed me (and still do), either to tell me they planned on getting trillions for their teams or to brag about trillions they had already racked up. Not only were the players on board, but basketball fans in general also loved the idea of the trillion and would rummage through box score after box score to notify me of the guys in NBA and college who were the best at being entirely irrelevant on the basketball court.
With all of this popularity for the trillion came differing interpretations of what exactly a trillion is. After all, some box scores only include points, rebounds, assists, and fouls to go along with minutes played. In these cases, would a steal, blocked shot, turnover, or missed shot ruin the trillion? And what about the guys who play less than a minute and their box score actually reads zero minutes played? Since their box score would just have a bunch of zeroes, they’d technically be putting up a “zero” instead of a “trillion,” right?
Well, since I’m kind of the designated authority on all things trillion, I figured that I’d take it upon myself to settle these disputes once and for all. That way, when discrepancies arise in the future, you can just refer to this book for a judgment instead of having to organize a cockfight or a round of jousting to determine a winner like you probably do now. (By the way, that last sentence was a test. If you read “cockfight” and “jousting” and didn’t think of chickens and either guys riding horses or the American Gladiators, there’s a good chance you’re gay—not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
With all of that being said, here is my one rule and my three points of emphasis concerning the trillion:
THE RULE: OTHER THAN “MINUTES PLAYED,” NO STATS WHATSOEVER
This is the one and only rule that applies to getting the trillion, yet somehow so many people can’t quite figure it out. It’s simple—if you do anything that would be recorded in any basketball scorebook as a statistic, you’ve ruined your trillion. This means points, rebounds, assists, shots, blocked shots, fouls, technical fouls, steals, turnovers, and anything else I forgot about. The idea of the trillion is that while you played in the game, you might as well have stayed on the bench because you essentially did nothing while you were on the court (good or bad). It celebrates irrelevance, and once you do anything that could be recorded as a statistic, you’ve had an effect on the game and therefore are no longer irrelevant.
In other words, if a basketball game could be thought of as a movie, then the statistics each player puts up are like lines for each character. In that regard, recording even one statistic is significant because it could take you from being an extra who never has any dialogue (coincidentally, these actors are also referred to as walk-ons) to Rob Schneider making his “You can do it!” cameos in all those Adam Sandler movies. So basically, recording a single statistic makes you the guy responsible for atrocious movies like The Animal and The Hot Chick (although, to be fair, he was the focal point of what was quite possibly my favorite South Park bit ever and was pretty solid in Home Alone 2). Now try telling me that a foul or steal isn’t really that big of a deal.
As far as the “Is playing less than a minute and getting a ‘0+’ in the ‘minutes played’ column still a trillion?” debate goes, this is also pretty simple—if your ass is on the court when even a single second ticks off the clock, you are eligible for the trillion. You could play the entire 40 minutes of the game or just play for a few seconds. Doesn’t matter. As long as your box score doesn’t have a DNP (which stands for “did not play”), you have the opportunity to register a trillion.
The thing to keep in mind is that “trillion” shouldn’t be taken literally, and by that I mean that you don’t have to play exactly one minute and have exactly 12 zeroes in your box score. No, getting a trillion just means you officially played in the game, but you didn’t do anything while you were out there. It doesn’t matter how much you played. It just matters how much—or more accurately, how little—you did with your time on the court. If you played 40 minutes and didn’t do anything, you’ve just recorded a 40 trillion. And if you played three seconds and didn’t do anything, you’ve just recorded a 0+ trillion. Both are considered trillions, and both are really difficult to pull off for different reasons. (The 40 is tough because the more you play, the greater your chances of recording at least one statistic, and the 0+ is tough because coaches rarely play guys for less than a minute.)
The best possible trillion you can get is a 4 trillion (play four minutes, no stats)
I’ve written about this in my blog before, but my guess is that most of you who are reading this are just as familiar with what I’ve written in my blog as your grandma is with the 2 Girls 1 Cup video, so I’ll explain it again. (By the way, if you weren’t thinking about your grandma watching 2 Girls 1 Cup as you read that, you are now. You’re welcome.) Basically the reason the 4 trillion is the most desirable is because anything less isn’t as difficult to achieve and anything more means you’re a non-benchwarmer who sucks.
In an earlier chapter, I mentioned the concept of a “four-minute war,” which is derived from the fact that college basketball games are split into four-minute segments for media purposes. Well, because of these media time-outs in four-minute intervals, it’s customary for coaches to wait until after the final media time-out to sub in their scrubs. My theory is that they wait until after the final time-out because it guarantees that they won’t have to talk to the scrubs in the huddle and consequently treat them like regular players, which is something coaches clearly want no part of.
Since walk-ons typically only play when ther
e are less than four minutes left, anyone who plays more than four minutes, by implication, is a good enough player to contribute to the team. But if that player records a trillion, he’s obviously not contributing anything and is instead just wasting everyone’s time. Simply put, the trillion is supposed to celebrate irrelevance, but getting a 5 trillion or higher doesn’t make you irrelevant because if you’ve played five minutes and contributed nothing, you have negatively impacted your team. So you’re worse than irrelevant. Big difference.
The ultimate goal is a perfect game
Much as a baseball pitcher can take his no-hitter to another level by not letting anyone on base at all, basketball players can also take their trillions to another level by getting a perfect game of their own. A couple of years ago, I defined a perfect game as a game in which a player not only records a trillion, but does it without even touching the ball. And if you think about it, this really is the epitome of irrelevance, since it means that the player literally did nothing more than run up and down the court a few times and most likely just did his best to stay out of the way. But I’ve given it some more thought since then and have decided that there needs to be one more stipulation added to the perfect game—a plus-minus of 0.
For those who don’t know, a player’s “plus-minus” is a relatively new fad of a basketball statistic that tracks his team’s success while he is on the court. So, for example, if you have a plus-minus of +4, then your team scored four more points than your opponent in the time you were on the court.
If you play for a minute or two, record no statistics, don’t even touch the ball, and have a plus-minus of 0, who is to say you even played at all? Your time on the court could be completely stricken from any sort of record of the game and it wouldn’t change a single thing. Without a plus-minus of 0, there’s a chance that maybe you did something to affect the margin of victory (such as set a screen to free up a teammate, who then hit a shot). But with a plus-minus of 0, even if you did do something to affect the final score, everything eventually balanced itself out because you gave up just as many points as you helped score.
If irrelevance is the goal—and we’ve clearly established that it is—then there is absolutely no way to play in the game and be more irrelevant than to record no stats, never touch the ball, and have a plus-minus of 0. There just isn’t. And that’s why this new definition of the perfect game should be the crowning achievement that all walk-ons strive for. It truly is irrelevance personified.
Blatantly avoiding stats is simply not cool
This is my last point of emphasis but the most important one because it focuses on maintaining the integrity of the game. Obviously, getting a trillion is easy to do if you put zero effort toward actually playing basketball the way it was intended to be played, but that defeats the purpose and strips away the sense of accomplishment. Personally, I’m of the opinion that the only way to really feel good about your trillion is to play as if the game is tied and there’s only a minute left. I have always been a firm believer in blocking out on defense, crashing the boards on offense, and even diving on the floor from time to time if necessary. (All right, so I might be lying with that last one, but whatever.) Sure this belief put me in a lot of unfavorable situations, but it also gave me the peace of mind that comes with knowing that I was playing the game the right way.
The fact of the matter is that not everyone who tries to get trillions does so in an honorable manner. Some people give minimal effort to the actual basketball game and instead focus on going out of their way to avoid recording statistics and preserve their trillion. I’ve heard of guys purposely dodging rebounds that bounce their way, turning down wide-open layups, and even immediately calling time-out to avoid a potential turnover after they picked up their dribble. While I think it’s awesome that the trillion has become so popular that some people value it over scoring points or grabbing rebounds, it’s unfortunate that they cheapen the trillion by not playing hard.
I don’t necessarily expect players to go balls to the wall, but a general rule of thumb is to play hard enough that the coaches and fans can’t tell you have an ulterior motive. If someone watching can tell that something is a little off (you run away from rebounds, don’t shoot wide-open shots, etc.), you should be ashamed of yourself for not giving the trillion the respect it deserves. But again, this isn’t a rule and is merely a suggestion. At the end of the day, it’s possible to get a trillion without playing hard. But as far as I’m concerned there’s a special place in hell for people who routinely do this. The way I see it, it’s kind of like using Oddjob when playing “GoldenEye” on N64—it’s not technically against the rules, but there’s no denying that you’re morally cheating and you’re kind of a dick for taking the easy way out.
PART FIVE
I do not think I like you very much.
—Zisis Sarikopoulos, my teammate from 2008 to 2010, 10 minutes after we first met
TWENTY-FOUR
By the time the first practice of the 2008–2009 season rolled around, I could already tell that our team that year would be the most ragtag group of misfits I would ever play with. Sure the year before we lacked any sort of leadership whatsoever, underachieved all season, and missed out on the NCAA Tournament, but that wasn’t because we were “misfits” per se. No, that was more because our locker room was split right down the middle, with one group consisting of a bunch of jaded assholes with no patience and the other group consisting of know-it-all freshmen who refused to listen.
But the 2008–2009 team was different. I had no doubt in my mind that we would have some measure of success because we actually got along. (Relatively speaking anyway. The only times we didn’t were when a couple of guys wanted to fight me, which is something that I probably shouldn’t be as proud about as I am.) No, I don’t say that we were misfits because we struggled to develop into a cohesive unit. I say we were misfits because our team consisted of what could only be described as “a bunch of characters.”
The most prominent of these characters was The Villain, who I’m not sure can even be adequately described with just words. But words are all I’ve got right now, so I’ll give it a try anyway: The Villain was an insecure, socially feebleminded, possibly bipolar, and often callous perfectionist who had all the talent in the world, who lacked self-confidence and the ability to trust in anybody around him, who was actually one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet when he wanted to be, and who would frequently walk around our locker room with his dick flopped over the waistband of his pants. That really is the best description I can possibly give. It should be noted that in his sophomore season he wasn’t quite as big of a hothead as he was the season before, but he still consistently made things entertaining.
The incoming freshman class that season, which consisted of BJ Mullens, Will Buford, Anthony “Noopy” Crater, and Walter Offutt, were characters in their own right and were my favorite group of freshmen in my four years at OSU (this includes my own freshman class). Walter was like everyone’s little brother and wanted to fit in so badly that he was an easy target to pick on. But it was always just in good fun, as everyone fully respected him and knew that he’d do anything for any one of us. Noopy was exactly like you think a guy named “Noopy” would be and ended up transferring halfway through the season after he tried to fight me in our locker room one day (more on this later). BJ, who now plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder, was the best player of the class and was essentially just a 12-year-old trapped inside an 18-year-old’s body, as evidenced by the fact that he thought it was just as funny as everyone else did that his name was “BJ” and he would occasionally make fart noises with his mouth during film sessions just because he could. And like BJ, Will was a McDonald’s All-American who was a completely different person on the inside than he appeared to be on the outside.
At first glance, Will might come across as a thug/gangster/whatever-other-words-white-people-use-to-describe-black-people-they-don’t-trust, which is something I’m sure he loves becaus
e he prides himself on being from the mean streets of Toledo. But in reality, he’s a smart guy who has his head on straight and is as much of a gangster or thug as Kirk Herbstreit’s frosted tips. Truth be told, Will is my favorite teammate in any sport at any level for a variety of reasons, with the biggest reason being that he is the only black guy I’ve ever met in my life who gave me permission to use the N-word whenever I wanted.
Note: As a token of my appreciation for you making it this far in the book, I’ve decided to take you back to your childhood and make this next part of the book a “choose your own adventure.” Only instead of a “choose your own adventure,” it’s going to be more of a “let the author randomly choose your adventure for you.” So, with that being said, I just rolled some dice, flipped a few coins, and ran a crazy and complicated algorithm, and the 100-percent-completely-random-and-therefore-in-no-way-should-be-interpreted-as-racist results that came back said that black people should skip over everything until they get to the bold text at the end of the chapter, and everyone else should start reading the next paragraph like they normally would, but stop reading once they get to the bold text. From there, we’ll all meet up as a big group again after the bold text ends and the normal text starts again. Ready, go.
Since it’s common knowledge that the one thing all nonblack people have in common is that “get permission from a black guy to drop the N-bomb in his presence” is at or near the top of every one of our bucket lists, I’m guessing you all are dying to know how I was lucky enough to win this coveted golden ticket. Well, believe it or not, it all started when I accidentally let it slip and had no idea what had happened until it was too late. (Funny story: that’s also how I lost my virginity.)
I was a bit of an anomaly at Ohio State in that I was one of the few college basketball players in history who preferred country to rap music. And by “country” I mean the countriest of country (George Strait, Tracy Lawrence, Alan Jackson, etc.), not that pop-country stuff that’s popular today (like Taylor Swift, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, etc.). In other words, I don’t think my taste in music could’ve been any more opposite than the rest of my teammates.
