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

  Walter starts yelling at the top of his lungs. I am laughing hysterically and have the camera focused on Walter. I decide to join the fun and start bobbing my body a little bit (although it should be noted that my bobbing is nowhere near the intensity of Danny’s jumping). Vince also gets in on the action and bobs up and down even less than I am. Not long after Vince starts bobbing, Danny lands from one of his ill-advised jumps and the elevator starts shaking. The elevator then stops on what appears to be the ninth floor. The doors do not open. We are stuck.

  6:17 p.m.—To say that Walter is pissed when he realizes that we are stuck on the elevator and one of his biggest fears is suddenly a reality would be a bigger understatement than saying that the Indian kid with the “heart” ring on Captain Planet got an unfair deal when those magical rings were distributed. He is now so insane that it honestly wouldn’t have been much of a surprise to me if he started dancing around in his grandma’s panties and rubbed himself in peanut butter.

  Luckily, he yells mostly at Danny, but he also directs a little bit of his hatred toward me. Even though Walter’s anger has me genuinely fearing for my life, I can’t help but laugh because this particular outburst is by far the most intense (and therefore the most comical) of all of his outbursts from throughout the year. Making it that much better is the fact that I’m documenting the entire ordeal with my video camera.

  6:18 p.m.—I realize I forgot to hit the Record button on the camera. I am now almost as upset as Walter. I hit Record and hope to at least get some solid post-freak-out footage.

  6:20 p.m.—Walter is cooling down a little bit, but is still very upset. At this point he’s going with the silent angry approach, just like Othello did when we were on the plane coming back from Penn State and we hit that patch of turbulence. Danny is trying to justify the fact that he basically did a series of cannonballs in an elevator and suggests that it was the elevator’s fault for not being sturdy enough. He also tries to place equal parts of the blame on Vince and me.

  Meanwhile, Vince is sitting down in one of the corners of the elevator and is surprisingly taking the situation well. To further screw with Walter, I decide to turn the camera on myself and do a Blair Witch Project parody by tilting my head back, zooming in on my nostrils, and pretending to be seriously concerned that we might not make it out of the elevator alive even though we’ve been trapped for four minutes. Walter isn’t amused.

  6:22 p.m.—We decide it would be a good idea to utilize the emergency phone in the elevator. Danny calls the front desk to the hotel and explains the situation. Danny leaves out the part about him doing a swanton bomb onto the floor of the elevator. Probably a wise decision on his part.

  6:25 p.m.—I bring up the idea of cannibalism and ask for a volunteer to be the first to be eaten. No takers. Vince then declares that he has nutrition bars in his trainer bag. I think about the consequences of turning to cannibalism within 10 minutes of getting stuck in the elevator and decide it’s probably best to just eat a nutrition bar.

  6:29 p.m.—Walter pulls out his cell phone and calls somebody to discuss the situation. I ask him who he is talking to and he says his girlfriend. I respond with, “Is this the same one from last night?” loud enough for her to hear me. Walter flips out again and explains to his woman that it was just a joke.

  6:34 p.m.—I eyeball the top of the elevator and think about a possible escape by climbing out of the elevator and down the elevator shaft. Walter is still talking to his girlfriend explaining that I was only kidding about him being with another girl. Danny is texting various people on both his “work phone” and his “phone for the ladies.” Yes, you read that right—Danny has two cell phones and refers to one as a work phone (even though he’s a college basketball player and in no way has enough time for a real job) and the other as his phone for the girls he talks to. (More than anything else, that’s all you need to know about Danny.)

  I approach Vince and ask him to tape my ankles for added support during the escape. Sure it might sound crazy to get my ankles taped, but I can’t help but think how badly it would suck if I somehow slipped during the escape, fell 90 feet down an elevator shaft, and tweaked my ankle as I landed at the bottom. Safety always comes first.

  6:37 p.m.—The film session is supposed to have started. I don’t feel quite as badly as I should that I’m missing it.

  6:40 p.m.—As I’m preparing to make my escape, I remember that the two most popular places in hotels for serial killers to stash their victims’ bodies are in the shower of the victim’s room or on the roof of an elevator à la Hannibal Lecter. I decide that the possibility of opening the hatch on the ceiling of the elevator and having a dead dude without a face fall down is too much of a risk for me to try it, especially considering I had priors and the cops would have surely thought I was somehow involved. I opt to wait it out instead.

  6:42 p.m.—I rewind the video I recorded and begin watching it to pass the time. Walter is still a little distraught, so he calls the front desk lady back on the emergency phone and makes small talk with her. He begins telling her stories about his basketball career that date all the way back to when he was in junior high. I find this conversation he is having worthy of recording on the video camera, so I stop the tape I am watching and begin recording Walter again.

  6:45 p.m.—Walter asks the lady at the front desk, “You think we can get some pizzas or something since your elevators broke on us?” He then goes on to order pizzas for everyone in the elevator. Right before he hangs up, he says, “Thanks for those pizzas. We’ll call back in 10 minutes with more demands.” Danny explains to Walter that we aren’t holding anybody hostage and “we’ll call back with more demands” was probably a poor choice of words.

  6:51 p.m.—I realize that by rewinding the videotape earlier and not fast-forwarding it back to the end when I started recording again, I recorded over all the footage I had previously taken. My inability to operate a video camera is now becoming annoying to everyone in the elevator.

  6:53 p.m.—I put the camera back on Walter and ask him if he has anything to say for the camera. He begins talking to the camera as if it represents all of his loved ones by saying things like “Just want you to know that I love you, Mom, and I’m going to find a way out of here, I promise.” This gives me an idea. I suggest to Walter that he should make a video to play at his funeral in case we don’t make it out of the elevator. This sets him off again and makes him yell at me to stop talking about the possibility of us dying.

  6:54 p.m.—Since Walter has no interest in doing it, I decide to make a mock video for my funeral, mostly because I know it will drive Walter insane. For the first time since this whole ordeal started, I question whether or not I’m being too mean to Walter, but in the end I decide that, just like with Othello on the plane, this is something we’ll all think back on and laugh about someday. (Luckily, unlike Othello, Walter does laugh about it now.)

  6:59 p.m.—Walter calls back the lady at the front desk. She claims help is on the way and we’ll be rescued soon, which is the exact same thing she said 30 minutes ago. I ask Walter to put in a good word for me and to ask her what color of panties she is wearing. He does neither. I guess this is his way of paying me back. Walter instead asks her for a free iPhone because he claims his iPhone somehow was destroyed when the elevator broke down. Walter doesn’t even have an iPhone to begin with, and the phone he does have is obviously not broken. I can’t hear what her response is, but seeing as how Walter goes on to say, “I was just messing witchu, I’m sorry,” I’m guessing she has no plans to get Walter a free iPhone. I realize at this point that there is no way in hell the people on the outside are doing all they can to rescue us after Walter’s spectacular performance on the phone.

  7:05 p.m.—A call comes in to Vince from Egelhoff. He explains to Vince that the team meal is almost over and if we want any food we should hurry up and get out of the elevator. Vince explains that we aren’t on the elevator by choice. And even if we were, we didn’t need the te
am meal because Walter brilliantly negotiated some free pizzas from the hotel staff.

  7:15 p.m.—After about an hour of being stuck, the elevator finally starts moving. We drop down to the eighth floor. I push Walter out of the way so I can get a good shot of the welcoming party that is surely waiting on us. I’m envisioning banners, balloons, confetti, news cameras, and an oversized card signed with sloppy cursive by an entire elementary school waiting for us right outside the elevator. Basically, I’m expecting the equivalent of a soldier’s homecoming party. This doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

  7:17 p.m.—The door is still yet to open. I turn my camera off to conserve battery for the actual rescue. As soon as I power down the camera and begin putting it away, the door opens and the only person I see is a middle-aged lady with a name tag that reads Bernice. Walter asks if she is the lady we were talking to on the emergency phone in the elevator. Bernice confirms that she is. I immediately regret my request to ask for the color of her underpants.

  7:18 p.m.—Danny texts one of our coaches and asks what the team is doing. The coach says they’re about to start the film session. Danny relays the information to me, at which point I kindly ask him if he is shitting me. Danny confirms that he is not in fact shitting me and that the team really did delay the film session just for us.

  To give you a proper analogy, this is the equivalent of your wife saying, “My friend really wants to go to the ballet with me, but I told her I couldn’t give her my extra ticket because I figured you would want to go.” You mean to tell me that a legitimate opportunity to get out of something I despise presented itself, but you screwed everything up because you thought you were doing me a favor? Sonofabitch.

  7:21 p.m.—We arrive at the film room. I rack my brain for ideas on how I can avoid having to sit through an hour of film after spending the past hour stuck in a crammed elevator. Ultimately, I realize that if getting stuck in the elevator wasn’t going to get me out of film, nothing was. Damn.

  7:56 p.m.—We get out of film and two large pizza boxes are waiting. One has Walter’s name on it, and the other has my name on it. Danny is furious that his pizza is missing. Danny calls Vince, and Vince tells him that he also got his pizza. Apparently, Danny is the only one of the four that didn’t get any pizza. Sucks to be him.

  8:05 p.m.—Danny and I return to our room. I’m devouring my pizza in front of Danny. I explain to him how karma works, and Danny is not amused in the slightest. He calls the front desk asking for his pizza. The lady at the front desk claims she ordered one for him and placed it outside the film room. Danny swears his pizza was stolen, but I think the lady knew all along that it was his fault the elevator got stuck and “forgot” to get a fourth pizza for him. Either way, my pizza is delicious and I’m not sharing.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After our Minnesota loss, we went on the road to play eighth-ranked Michigan State in East Lansing, where we ended up losing by nine despite outscoring the Spartans in the second half. It was certainly an excusable loss considering we played pretty well and Michigan State was one of the best teams in the country that year, but now that we were 1–3 since our captain (Dave) went down with a foot injury (and 1–2 since one of our players quit after trying to fight me when I was naked), it was obvious that we were in a state of turmoil. We needed to get back on track, and we needed to get back on track fast. Thankfully, our next two games were against an atrocious Houston Baptist team and an only slightly better Indiana team. But just a few weeks after we lost our team captain for the rest of the season, our bad luck continued when the face of the program and our team’s best player fractured his foot in practice and was declared out for six weeks.

  To be honest, I don’t remember a whole lot of specifics about the circumstances of my foot injury. (What’s that? You didn’t think I was talking about myself when I said “face of the program” and “team’s best player”? Shame on you.) All I really remember is that Dallas tried to block my layup attempt and all 250 pounds of him came down right on my foot as I was rolling my ankle, causing the most physical pain I had ever felt in my life. I also remember the next morning when I rolled out of bed, took one step toward the bathroom to take my routine morning pee, and then instantly collapsed to the floor as intense pain shot up my leg.

  At practice later that day, Vince examined my foot and told me that I probably had a Lisfranc (pronounced “Liz Frank”) fracture, which prompted me to ask if it was named that because that Jewish chick with the diary hurt her foot while trying to hide from the Nazis. He responded by telling me that the injury was actually named after a French gynecologist for some reason, which was proof to him that I didn’t hurt my foot but instead must have hurt my vagina. Touché. Either way, I had a hairline fracture on the top of my foot and was suddenly even more useless to the team than I had been, which was something that I had always thought was an impossibility.

  As I’m sure you could have guessed, my absence didn’t really have much of an effect on the team, as evidenced by the fact that we basically told both Houston Baptist and Indiana to shut up and make us a sandwich en route to two 24-point wins. Those two blowouts were then followed up with a seven-point win in Ann Arbor against 24th-ranked Michigan, which gave us our first significant win since Dave (and I) got hurt. Unfortunately, though, our elation was short-lived, because just three days after the Michigan win we were blown out at 24th-ranked Illinois and then lost by 11 to seventh-ranked Michigan State in our rematch with them at home, dropping our record to just 4–5 since Dave got hurt.

  But just as it seemed as though we were never going to figure out how to gel without Dave (or me), we went on a tear and rattled off four straight wins, with the first two coming in the form of an 18-point mushroom-stamping of Michigan at home and a blowout of Indiana at their place. To complete our streak, we squeaked out an overtime thriller against 12th-ranked Purdue at home and followed that up with another big home win against 19th-ranked Minnesota. And with that, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves because we were playing our best basketball of the season and had finally proven that we could win big games without Dave. More importantly, on a personal level, I was not only happy that we were playing well, but also pretty pleased that none of my teammates had tried to fight me in quite some time. It wouldn’t take long for The Villain to change this, though.

  Shortly after the Minnesota game, my foot was declared to be fully healed, and I was cleared to start practicing again. But within the first five minutes of my first practice back, Dallas, honest to God, landed on the exact same foot he had injured six weeks earlier, which forced me to make my comeback a little bit slower than I was originally planning. I timidly eased my way back into practice and eventually started participating in live contact drills about a week later, which was perfect timing considering we lost a close game at Wisconsin just days earlier and my comeback, I thought, would surely galvanize the team to make sure the singular loss didn’t turn into another losing streak. Only instead of being excited to see me making it rain on the practice court again, most of the guys on the team were indifferent to my return, and some didn’t even have any idea that I had been hurt in the first place. The Villain, though, was the one exception who was no doubt thrilled to see me practicing again, as evidenced by the fact that he had to be restrained by a group of my teammates because he tried to instigate yet another in-practice fight between us.

  The genesis of this particular altercation came when I somehow found myself on the court during a scrimmage at the end of practice in which my team was up by two with the ball and there was less than a minute on the clock. For whatever reason, The Villain (by far the best player on the court) was guarding me for this critical possession, most likely because he remembered my late game practice heroics from the year before, when I hit the three at the buzzer to send our scrimmage into overtime (and Jamar proceeded to get four technicals and ruin everything), and he wanted to embrace the challenging assignment of shutting The Shark down in crunch time. This
time around, though, I was confident that I would not be called upon to do anything because not only was I considered the worst player on my team, but I also was just getting back from a serious foot injury and was therefore even worse than I usually was. (I can’t even begin to guess why I’m on the court in the first place in these situations.) But obviously, I wouldn’t be telling this story if I just stood out of the way and didn’t do anything.

  As the shot clock ticked down to about eight seconds, whoever had the ball on my team started dribbling toward me, so I cut toward the basket and ran to the opposite corner because it served the dual function of getting out of the way and making it seem as though I was legitimately trying to make something happen (even though I wasn’t). My teammate interpreted this cut as the latter instead of the former and immediately passed the ball to another teammate at the top of the key, who then swung the ball to me in the corner. In both of these guys’ defense, I did create some separation from The Villain and might have been able to get a shot off had I shot the ball as soon as I caught it. But even so, as a general rule of thumb, passing me the ball with a dwindling shot clock under any circumstances is a recipe for disaster.

  Nonetheless, as I caught the ball I couldn’t help but think that it might be the only time in my entire basketball career at Ohio State that I would have carte blanche. Since the shot clock was winding down, I would have been completely justified in taking pretty much any shot I wanted. I could have shot a left-handed fadeaway or a running hook shot, or just thrown the ball over my head with my back to the basket if I wanted. My coaches would have been fine with truly any shot, because with just six seconds left on the shot clock, it was clear that the one decision that had already been made for me was that I had no choice but to shoot the ball.

  I decided to disregard the safe play and bypass the initial shot I would have had if I’d let it fly as soon as I caught it, and instead chose to back The Villain down into the post to feed him a heaping helping of fundamentals. Now, intuition would tell you that this was a terrible idea on my part because The Villain was bigger, faster, stronger, more athletic, and generally just much more talented than me. You would think that I should have just shot the ball while I had the chance instead of letting The Villain get in a comfortable defensive position. But what you’re failing to realize is that I had a leg up on The Villain in a couple of other areas, namely basketball (and overall) IQ and my ability to tie balloon animals. On this particular play, though, I would only need to utilize one of those strengths.