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

  The Villain bounced back in our second-round game against 10th-seeded Georgia Tech with another near-triple-double that led the way in our nine-point victory over the Yellow Jackets. The win put us in the Sweet Sixteen for the first time since 2007, when we lost to Florida in the Final Four. And after top-seeded Kansas (who was the best team in our region) was upset by Northern Iowa in their second-round game, it seemed as though our path for a return trip to the Final Four wouldn’t be nearly as challenging as we had originally anticipated.

  Next up was sixth-seeded Tennessee, who we were set to play in St. Louis for a trip to the Elite Eight. Coincidentally, we had played Tennessee in our last trip to the Sweet Sixteen in 2007, when we pulled off one of the most impressive comebacks in NCAA Tournament history and beat them by one in San Antonio. This particular Tennessee team was much like the one from 2007 in that while they might have been inconsistent throughout the year, they had proven time and time again that they could beat anybody in the country on any given night, so we knew we’d have our work cut out for us.

  We were pretty confident we would win because we had been playing some of our best basketball of the season and, when all else failed, we had the runaway National Player of the Year on our team (The Villain would officially win the award in April) and could just give him the ball and let him take over if need be. Simply put, while Tennessee was certainly a good team, there was nothing in the week leading up to the game that even remotely had me concerned we would lose. The morning of the game, though, was a completely different story, as a serious catastrophe struck our team.

  By now it should be obvious that when I say that a “serious catastrophe struck our team” what I really mean is that something bad happened to me individually but our team as a whole was largely unaffected. This time around I woke up around 4:00 a.m. on the morning of the game and rushed to my hotel bathroom because I felt sick to my stomach and needed to barf. After I puked for about a half-hour, I returned to bed and prayed that I’d feel better in the morning, but when 9:00 a.m. rolled around and I woke up to go to our shootaround, I felt ten times worse and had a throbbing headache to go along with my funky stomach.

  I decided to man up and go to the shootaround because I thought if I skipped it I’d have to also skip the game, but this turned out to be a terrible decision. I became increasingly sick throughout the duration of the shootaround, to the point that I just lay on the bench for the final 15 minutes and showered myself with vomit and self-pity. Once we returned to the hotel, Vince quarantined my room and made Danny go hang out in one of the managers’ rooms, gave me a bunch of meds, explained to me that I had caught the stomach flu bug that was going around the team (a handful of guys had been sick at the Big Ten Tournament, but that was two weeks earlier), and then said that unfortunately the worst was yet to come. According to him, I’d be at rock bottom about an hour before the game was to tip off, which meant I had no choice but to lie in bed all night and miss the game. I was less than pleased with this news.

  As game time approached, I discovered that Vince knew exactly what the hell he was talking about because I spent most of my time leading up to the game with my head in my hotel trash can puking my brains out and questioning what life decisions I could have made differently so I wouldn’t have ended up in the position I was. Further complicating things was that I was in a sling and had no use of my left arm at all, which meant, if I accidentally got puke on my shirt or something it would have to stay there because I didn’t have the energy or dexterity to clean it up. It was the worst I’ve ever physically felt in my life, and based on the sounds I was making as I vomited, you’d have been entirely justified in thinking that either I was getting the devil exorcised out of my body through my mouth or I was Oprah devouring a heaping plate of biscuits and gravy.

  Once the game finally tipped off, I didn’t even really have the energy to pay all that much attention. I had the game on TV, but most of the first half was a blur for me because I was more concerned with surviving the night than I was with our team’s success (selfish, I know). When the second half started, though, I had recovered enough to at least lie up in bed and yell at the TV every so often, making me feel like some sort of combination of Gerry from Remember the Titans and Shooter from Hoosiers.

  It was unbearably frustrating to not be at the game, even though I knew I would have had literally no impact whatsoever had I been on the bench instead of in my hotel room following Mike O’Malley’s orders by “spilling my guts.” (By the way, Mike O’Malley on GUTS was Gus Johnson before Gus Johnson was Gus Johnson, and that is a fact.) Still, I thought that if I was at the game I could’ve somehow given the guys the kick in the pants that they needed to find that last bit of strength and put Tennessee away.

  After we had led for most of the second half, and really most of the game, Tennessee took the lead from us with about six minutes left and seemed to have all the momentum. But something clicked and made us realize that losing the game would not be nearly as enjoyable as winning the game, so we fought back to regain the lead with about two minutes left. We then turned around and handed the lead back to Tennessee, before The Villain hit a clutch three with 44 seconds left to give us a one-point advantage.

  The tension was enough to make a healthy fan feel uneasy, so it goes without saying that I was blowing chunks while all this was happening. Tennessee answered The Villain’s three with a tip-in off an offensive rebound and then followed that up with a huge steal on the defensive end. After we fouled to stop the clock, they sank two big free throws to take a three-point lead with 13 seconds left. Our backs were against the wall, but we had been in this position before and knew that all it took was another big three to force overtime.

  We inbounded the ball to The Villain, who dribbled up the court and picked up his dribble to fake a handoff to Jon Diebler. Since Jon was our best three-point shooter, both Jon’s defender and The Villain’s defender bit on the fake and stayed with Jon, leaving The Villain wide open. But he had both of his feet in front of the three-point line, so he had to pass to Kyle and get his feet situated before he could shoot. Kyle passed it back to him in the left corner with just five seconds left.

  The Villain caught the ball, pump-faked, and then shot an off-balance three that never had much of a chance, but he got his own rebound after it grazed off the front of the rim. He quickly dribbled back out to the top of the key, swung his body around to face the basket, and let another potential game-tying shot go right before the buzzer sounded. But it didn’t get far because Tennessee’s JP Prince got a hand on it and sent it straight up in the air.

  Game over.

  Season over.

  Career over.

  As I sat in the hotel room and watched Tennessee’s bench storm onto the court in celebration, a numbness came over me unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. Throughout my career, I was absolutely certain that I was going to cry if we lost in the tournament my senior year, but now that it had happened I really couldn’t do anything but stare at the TV in disbelief. After all the incredible things I was able to experience over the course of my four-year career, I never could’ve possibly anticipated that everything would come to an end as I lay in a hotel bed in St. Louis and threw up every bite of food I had eaten from the previous week.

  But that kind of sums up my entire four years at Ohio State. From start to finish, nothing about my walk-on career was typical, so it was only fitting that the ending was equally bizarre and untraditional. Plus, it was a perfect way to bring my career full circle. After all, on November 9, 2006, I spent my first official day on the Ohio State basketball team hugging a trash can as I was reminded how out of shape I was and now, exactly 1,234 days later, I was spending my last official day on the Ohio State basketball team doing the exact same thing.

  Those two days of puking will forever serve as bookends for the single greatest time in my life.

  EPILOGUE

  Shortly after I completed my prestigious walk-on career and gradua
ted from Ohio State, I was in the training room at the Ohio State’s gym rehabbing my shoulder and missed a call from someone who claimed to represent the Harlem Globetrotters. I went back into the locker room, listened to the voice mail that he left, and immediately thought someone was playing a prank on me. I figured it was worth the risk to call back, though, so I did and soon found out that I was one of six people the Globetrotters had “drafted” and that I was invited to participate in a training camp in September.

  I had the same reaction everyone else had. “The Globetrotters have a draft? And white people are allowed to play for them?” As it turned out, they had apparently had a draft since three years prior to drafting me, and there had been two other white guys who had played for them in their 84-year history. Because of the fan base I had built with my blog, and because my “Mr. Rainmaker” video successfully showed off my trick shot skills, my guess was that the Globetrotters thought I’d fit right in and could give their dying brand a shot in the arm. And for the first week after they drafted me, that’s kind of what happened.

  The whole “Globetrotters draft a white benchwarmer” angle became a quirky national story in the world of sports, and I gave interviews for media outlets all over the country for about a week and a half. I mean, it wasn’t like I was the story in America or anything, but I definitely provided the Globetrotters with some good publicity for a couple weeks that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. I figured that drafting me as a publicity stunt was their plan all along, but I also assumed that they would want to keep using me (and more importantly, keep using the following I had from my blog) to get as much publicity as they could for as long as they could. I quickly found out that this plan apparently made way too much sense.

  A few days after our initial conversation, the Globetrotters’ rep sent me a jersey with my nickname (Shark) on the back, along with a headband and two sweatbands (seriously), and then told me he’d keep in touch with me until the September training camp rolled around. This was in late June. On July 29, I hadn’t heard anything from him, so I decided to send him an email to see if he had any details about the training camp or if there was anything I needed to do in the weeks leading up to the camp. He told me that “my timing was perfect” because the camp was actually being held in August and someone else with the Globetrotters had planned on calling me in the next couple of days to iron out all the details.

  That call came the very next day, and much to my surprise, the “someone else with the Globetrotters” turned out to be Globetrotter legend Sweet Lou Dunbar. Also to my surprise, Sweet Lou informed me that the camp was not only going to be held in August, but it was going to be held August 5. In other words, the camp started in six days. I was so shocked I damn near spilled soda pop all over my britches. I mean, who would have ever thought that the chick from The Ring, who at least gave a seven-day advance notice to her victims, would be more courteous than the Harlem Globetrotters?

  The short notice was compounded by the fact that I had already made plans to go to Charlotte with my brother August 4–8 to visit his friends and celebrate his birthday. My trip really wasn’t that big of a deal, so I told the Globetrotters that I’d be able to make it up to Long Island for the camp. I asked them to book my flight to Long Island from Columbus, but to make my flight out of Long Island go to Charlotte because I wanted to at least salvage a couple days of the vacation I had planned. (Plus I had booked my flight to and from Charlotte months earlier, and it would’ve just been lost money if I didn’t at least use the return flight to Columbus.) They said that this wouldn’t be a problem.

  Three days later, on August 2 (two days before I was to fly to Long Island for the camp), a different Globetrotter rep sent me a confirmation email for my flights. According to the itinerary, I was to fly from Columbus to Long Island on August 4, and on August 6 I was scheduled to fly from Long Island to—you guessed it—Raleigh, North Carolina, a three-hour drive from Charlotte. Sadly, this was just the beginning of the comedy of errors.

  This flight was eventually fixed the next day, and I decided to give the guy the benefit of the doubt since he most likely made an honest mistake. I flew into Long Island two days later, and in the airport when I landed I met one of the Globetrotter coaches and another kid they had drafted. As we took a shuttle bus to our hotel, the coach asked us both a handful of questions to find out more about us and failed miserably in attempting to make sure his “who is this white dude?” thought wasn’t expressed on his face when he talked to me.

  We got to the hotel, and I followed the guys to the front desk and watched as they both checked in. But when it was my turn, the receptionist furrowed her brow and banged on her keyboard for at least a minute. After she had apparently exhausted all of her ideas, she looked up from her computer and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have a reservation under that name. Are you sure you didn’t book the room under a different name?”

  I told her that I wasn’t the one who made the reservation, which meant that there was no way that the room could’ve been booked under my alias. But I suggested that she should still check and see if there was a reservation for “Dr. Trevor McThundercock,” just in case my alias had been used for whatever reason. Just as I suspected, though, there wasn’t a room booked under that name either.

  I caught up with the coach and told him there wasn’t a room for me, but he told me that he had nothing to do with it and I should just wait in the lobby for the guy who was responsible for arranging the hotel accommodations to show up. Fifteen minutes later, that guy finally showed up, told me there was a mix-up, and convinced me he’d take care of it. And while he did just that, I couldn’t help but think that something felt a little off.

  The next day, when I walked downstairs to get on the bus and head to the gym for the camp, I noticed about 15 tall black dudes congregating in the hotel lobby, and my curiosity was piqued. Upon further investigation, I learned that these guys were also taking part in the training camp and there were so many of them because, ohbytheway, the training camp was actually a tryout. While I wasn’t exactly thrilled with this, being forced to try out after being drafted wouldn’t have been a big deal if not for the fact that the Globetrotters only drafted six people, yet the number of people trying out was somehow double that. So, if there was no real distinction between the guys who were drafted and the guys who weren’t, why even have a draft in the first place? Answer: because the draft gave them an opportunity to use a handful of former college basketball players to garner a little publicity.

  Among the other people drafted with me were both the champion and runner-up of the college basketball slam-dunk contest, as well as a husband and wife from Montana who had been married for four years and became a national story because they both played basketball at the University of Montana at the same time. So yeah, it was kind of obvious that they were just trying to piggyback on whatever name recognition (no matter how large or small it might have been) any of us had.

  I can’t say I blame them. It made perfect sense to do whatever was necessary to spark some interest in their brand, and drafting all of us accomplished that. No, the issue I had was that what happened following the draft proved that either they were the most inept organization I had ever been involved with or they were just trying to exploit me. And quite honestly, I’m not sure which is worse.

  The tryout was held at a local high school in Long Island, but it looked more like a run-down prison than a place for secondary education. Steel bars protected all of the windows, and a security guard protected the front entrance with assistance from a full-body metal detector. In other words, this high school was in the heart of what Will Buford would refer to as “the muh-fucking hood.” It was just like the high school that all my upper-middle-class, white, suburban classmates and I went to, with the only exception being that it was the exact opposite in every way.

  Since I was a marshmallow in a bag of charcoal to begin with, you can imagine how out of place I felt when I saw that the tryout was
being held at Shawshank High. (I guess it’s my fault for being naive and expecting anything else—after all, I wasn’t trying out for the Beverly Hills Globetrotters.) We made our way to the gym of the school and were told to get warmed up while the Globetrotter reps got some things organized. Five minutes later, they told us all to go over to a table to pick up a jersey that had a number on it that made us more easily identifiable for the “scouts.”

  In what should come as no surprise, I was the only guy who didn’t have a jersey waiting for him. I initially thought this was because I was the only white guy and therefore didn’t need a jersey since I was already easy to pick out, but then I didn’t see my name on the list of players the scouts had. In that moment, everything suddenly made sense. They’d had no intention of bringing me to this camp and would’ve let it come and go without ever telling me about it had I never emailed that Globetrotter rep to ask him what the plan was.

  This explains why they gave me such short notice (they weren’t going to call me until I coincidentally sent that email a week before the camp started), why they didn’t have a hotel room for me, why they didn’t have a jersey for me, and why my name wasn’t on the roster. Shortly after putting all these pieces together, I made up my mind that no matter what happened from that moment on, I wanted nothing to do with the Globetrotters and vowed that I wouldn’t play for them even if they offered me $10 million and fellatio from Curly Neal himself.