Don't Put Me In, Coach (29 page)

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.

I can’t get into specifics about the tryout because I signed a confidentiality agreement with the team and could face up to three buckets of confetti poured on my head if I violate it, but I can say that I hadn’t yet been fully cleared from shoulder surgery and therefore couldn’t take part in any contact drills at the tryout. I assumed this wouldn’t be a huge deal because I’ve seen my share of Globetrotter performances, and there is about as much physical contact as there is at a fifth-grade dance. But surprisingly, I assumed wrong.

I couldn’t participate in most of the tryout, and when all was said and done, it essentially consisted of shooting about 25 jump shots (all of which were really deep threes). Having a bum shoulder wasn’t ideal, but I’d told the Globetrotters from the start that I wouldn’t be 100 percent until September, so they knew what to expect.

I was a little rusty, and while I wasn’t exactly terrible, my jump shot was a ghost of my usual silky smooth J. Still, like I mentioned, it’s not like I provided a large enough sample size for them to make a well-informed decision (especially considering that it was only three days after I was cleared to start shooting again). But naturally, common sense wasn’t about to stand in their way.

After the tryout, we were told that we’d have individual meetings with the Globetrotter coaches and front-office personnel. My meeting was set for 8:00 p.m., and since we got back to the hotel at around five, I figured I’d grab some dinner. But when I left the hotel to find a place to eat, my phone rang. “We were just wondering where you were because the coaches are downstairs waiting to have their meeting with you right now.”

“Of course they are,” I said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

At this point, changing the meeting time without telling me was really just another drop of water in the ocean, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating. The meeting actually went pretty well, but like I said, it was a moot point because I had already made up my mind that the Globetrotters could massage their tonsils with my balls.

I left Long Island expecting to never hear from the Globetrotters again. After all, it was pretty clear to me that they never wanted me at the tryout in the first place. Nonetheless, they told me when I left that they’d let me know about their decision in a few weeks, and strangely enough, they followed through on that promise. Some two or three weeks later, the same Globetrotter rep who had been calling me throughout the past few months was on the other end of the phone telling me that I’d be a perfect fit for the Washington Generals, which as you may know is the team that the Globetrotters play on a nightly basis and consequently dominate on a nightly basis. Doing my best to hold in my laughter, I respectfully declined. After all, this was like getting drafted by the Lakers and being asked to play for the LAPD’s coed Gus Macker team instead. Anyway, in the next few months the Globetrotters called me no less than four times and asked me to either reconsider their offer or to at the very least play for the Generals when the Globetrotters came to Columbus.

Each time they called I tried my best to make it clear to them that I had no intention of playing basketball after college and the only reason I had been even slightly interested in playing for the Globetrotters was because it was such a unique and bizarre opportunity that I thought it would be fun to follow through with it. The last I heard from them was in December 2010, when I ignored an email that asked me to again reconsider their offer, and in doing so I ended my six-month affiliation with the Harlem Globetrotters.

Now that you know the whole story, let’s break it down. Here’s what I think happened from their perspective, although I’m probably giving them a little too much benefit of the doubt with some of
this: I think they drafted me because they knew I had a cult following from my blog, they knew I was a good shooter (and specifically a good trick shot artist), and they knew I considered myself an entertainer of sorts. But more importantly, they knew that drafting a white guy who never played in college would generate some media interest and get people talking about the Globetrotters again.

Then, sometime after the draft, they decided that waiting for me to heal from shoulder surgery wasn’t worth it and/or that they had gotten all the media attention and fan interest from drafting me that they were after. I wouldn’t have had that big of a problem with this, except for the fact that they failed to relay this news to me and consequently left me hanging about what was to happen next.

My email to the Globetrotter rep put them in a bind and ruined their plan to ignore me. They most likely wanted to respond by saying, “Sorry, Mark, but we only drafted you for a flash-in-the-pan thing that would put us in the media spotlight for a few days. We’re unfortunately going to have to tell you that we don’t think you’d be a good fit for us, and we don’t want to waste your time by making you come to our training camp.” But instead, they shrugged their shoulders and thought, “Ah, what the hell, we might as well give the kid a shot.”