Don't Put Me In, Coach (16 page)

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 to 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 his 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.

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

A
s 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?