Don't Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey From the End of the Bench to the End of the Bench Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Mark Titus

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Jacket photograph © Deborah Feingold

  Insert photographs courtesy of the author

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Titus, Mark, 1987–

  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.

  p. cm.

  1. Titus, Mark, 1987–

  2. Basketball players—United States—Biography.

  3. Ohio State Buckeyes (Basketball team)—History. I. Title.

  GV884.T57A3 2011

  796.323092—dc23

  [B] 2011040854

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53511-3

  v3.1

  For Mom and Dad—

  Without your many sacrifices, none of this would have been possible.

  And for the Trillion Man March—

  You know I still love you, though we touched and went our separate ways.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Six

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Part Seven

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank some people for playing a significant role in my life and helping this book become a reality.

  I want to first thank my fiancée for her endless support and for deciding to give a benchwarmer a chance. I want to thank my mom for sacrificing her time and money over the years so I could pursue my dream of playing college basketball, and I want to thank my dad for finding a way to come to every game (home and away) during my senior year at Ohio State, even though he knew I probably wasn’t going to play. Special thanks go out to my brother (and his friends) for letting me tag along when I was younger, which is a big reason why I became moderately good at basketball, and much love to my sister for always being my biggest fan. And a shout-out to my best friend since sixth grade, Keller, for being a great sounding board for my ideas and for giving me some good ideas along the way too.

  I want to thank all of my teammates, including managers, throughout my life and from every level of every sport I played (especially my Ohio State teammates), for forming friendships and brotherhoods that will last a lifetime. I’ll forever be indebted to Coach Matta, all of my assistant coaches at OSU, and The Ohio State University in general for giving me an opportunity that I know I was never entitled to. I want to thank all the Ohio State fans all over the world and the people of Columbus, Ohio, for accepting a Hoosier into the community. I also want to thank my fifth-grade creative writing teacher, Mrs. Boles, for showing me that writing can be fun and doesn’t always have to be an arduous process. And a big thank-you goes out to all of the people back in Brownsburg, Indiana, and Danville, Indiana, who supported me even when I was a nobody. There are too many of you to name everyone, but you know who you are.

  I want to thank Bill Simmons for giving me my big break, and Jimmy Kimmel for being a mentor for the past couple of years. I also want to thank my agent, James “Babydoll” Dixon, as well as Alex Glass and Scott Trident Media Group, for negotiating a multimillion-dollar book deal for me. And of course, I have to thank all of the fine people at Doubleday, specifically my editors, Jason Kaufman and Robert Bloom, for working hard behind the scenes to make this book much better than it would have been otherwise.

  And lastly, I want to thank the Trillion Man March for taking me on an unbelievable ride that I’ll never forget as long as I live. You guys are awesome. But you knew that already.

  PROLOGUE

  I woke up on the morning of August 28, 2009, in Windsor, Ontario, with groggy eyes and a pesky morning wood I couldn’t seem to get rid of.

  Undaunted, I crawled out of bed and slowly made my way down the hallway to the bathroom. I positioned myself in front of the toilet, lowered my underpants, and emptied a stream of urine into the bowl, although nearly half of it ended up on the seat. Sucks for whoever has to clean that up, I thought before flushing the toilet and returning to my room, where I crawled back into bed and played a game on my cell phone for at least a half-hour.

  Yes, August 28, 2009, started like most days typically do for me. Little did I know, though, that by the time I got back into that same bed later that night, it would certainly end up being anything but a typical day.

  I was about to start my senior and final season as a walk-on benchwarmer for the Ohio State basketball team, and I was in Windsor because our team had traveled there a couple of days earlier to play the University of Windsor and the University of Western Ontario in a few exhibition games. Even though it was still the off-season and most American college basketball teams weren’t allowed to practice together yet, we were able to play in Windsor because of an NCAA rule that allows teams to make international trips during the off-season once every few years to play foreign competition. And yes, teams are permitted to go just about anywhere in the world on these trips, yet we chose to go to a place that was five minutes away from America and, at just a four-hour drive, was literally the closest foreign soil to our campus in Columbus, Ohio. In other words, this was an “international trip” in the same way that OJ was “not guilty”—I wasn’t buying it, even though pretty much all of the black guys were.

  The first game on our trip was to be later that night against the University of Windsor, who we were actually scheduled to play the following night as well. Throughout the day leading up to this first game, I was certain of two things. First of all, I knew for an absolute fact that we would destroy Windsor because, we
ll, they were Canadians, and if there are two things that I can think of that Canadians are historically not very good at, they are basketball and beating Americans. (I tease you because I love you, Canada.) And secondly, because I knew that we would easily beat Windsor, I was also absolutely certain that I would get to play in the game. As a walk-on benchwarmer for the team, I typically only saw the court during games when there were only a few minutes left and our team was in the midst of a blowout. It seemed to me that this game would qualify as one of those times, so I spent all day mentally and physically getting prepared.

  Now, to an outsider, playing for just a handful of minutes in a game in which the outcome has already been decided might not seem like much, but for most of us walk-ons it can be a pretty nerve-wracking experience. After all, when it’s time for us to check into the game we’ve typically been sitting on the bench for a couple of hours and are therefore in no way warmed up or physically prepared to play high-level basketball. Plus, since we’re walk-ons, it can be assumed that even if we were properly stretched and warmed up, we’d still be much less athletic and much less talented than all the other guys on the court, so really, we’re at a huge disadvantage from the start.

  But most importantly, what makes the experience so nerve-wracking is the fact that there are thousands of people in the stands and it seems like just about every one of them wants to see us make at least one shot, most likely because nothing conveys complete dominance over another team quite like walk-ons scoring. In reality, what we do on the court is completely trivial because nobody really remembers or cares all that much the next day whether or not the walk-ons scored, but it doesn’t matter to us. No matter how many times we do it, each and every game that we play in feels like it’s the Super Bowl and every single person in the building has their eyes locked in on us. And even though it’s probably entirely unwarranted, there truly is an enormous pressure that comes with this.

  On this particular day, it seemed like that pressure was getting to me a little bit. That, or it was the trip the day before to the Canadian McDonald’s, where I got a little carried away with my amazement at the concept of a Double Big Mac and ended up eating two of them. Either way, on the day of our first game I found myself fighting a serious battle with my bowels, and judging from the fact that I had spent most of the day on the toilet, I’d say my bowels were winning. I already had some butterflies in my stomach from knowing that I was about to play in my first international basketball game and—because of an injury I suffered the season before—my first basketball game of any kind in over a year. But now I was facing a serious crisis because the butterflies in my stomach had some company in the form of explosive diarrhea.

  My stomach got so bad that when the game finally rolled around, I had to excuse myself from my spot on the bench during the first half so I could return to the locker room bathroom and take care of some business. By that time I had spent the better part of the day on the toilet and my bunghole was consequently a little tender, but I really had no choice but to suck it up because the fact of the matter was that I was going to have to find a way to get ready to play the last few minutes of the game. There was simply no way around it. No matter how much I might have not wanted to go into the game, the bottom line was that I was a walk-on who rarely got any playing time, so I had no choice but to take the opportunity to play whenever I could get it. Plus, it wasn’t like I could turn down my head coach, Thad Matta, when he asked me to check in. That’s because it was understood that a walk-on doing such a thing would require a huge set of brass balls, since it would give the head coach the impression that we really didn’t care about getting better at basketball and weren’t taking our role on the team seriously. In short, despite my digestive problems, I was going to have to play high-level college basketball in front of a few thousand people in less than an hour and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

  As the game reached its final stages, the tension was so thick it seemed tangible, not so much because the outcome of the game hung in the balance—we had at least a 50-point lead—but more because I knew Coach Matta was inevitably going to tell me to check in at any moment. Then, with about three minutes left on the clock and our lead holding steady at around 50 points, it happened. He stood up from his spot at the head of the bench and walked down to the end of the bench I was occupying. “You ready to go in?” he asked. I momentarily froze.

  I took a deep breath, looked up at him, and said:

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I couldn’t believe I had the gall to actually go through with it. This wasn’t the first time I would have rather just sat on the bench as the game’s final minutes ticked away instead of actually playing a little bit. But even when I didn’t feel like playing, I always responded with an enthusiastic “Yep!” and peeled off my warm-ups as I darted off the bench. I don’t know whether the diarrhea had screwed with my brain or the fact that I was a senior made me feel a false sense of power, but something came over me and told me that now was the time to pull out my brass balls for all the world to see. Now was the time to finally tell Coach Matta I wanted to stay on the bench. There was no turning back now.

  Naturally, Coach Matta was taken aback by my response. He replied, “You’re good? You don’t want to play?”

  Unsure of whether or not he was pissed, I added a little more detail. “Yeah, I’m good right here. I had stomach trouble all day, and my butthole is on fire right now because of it. I just really don’t feel like running around out there with a fiery butthole, you know?”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I’m dead serious, Coach. We’re playing the same team tomorrow night, so why don’t we just wait until then for me to play?”

  He shook his head, let out a laugh, and returned to the other end of the bench. The next night I played three minutes and scored three points in our rematch against Windsor, and the incident was never spoken of again.

  And just like that, I made walk-on history. Not only did I tell my head coach I wasn’t going to go into the game because I didn’t feel like it, but I also didn’t get reprimanded in the slightest. I had already established myself as a bit of a pioneer in the walk-on community because of the blog I had started writing a year earlier, but in that moment I instantly became a walk-on revolutionary. I had just disregarded the unwritten rules for walk-ons and done something so inconceivably foolish that no one had ever even attempted it before me. But I didn’t just attempt the impossible—I conquered it, and in the process set a new precedent for all walk-ons who were to follow me.

  Yes, August 28, 2009, certainly ended up being anything but a typical day. But that’s probably because I was anything but a typical college basketball walk-on.

  My name is Mark Titus, and this is my story.

  PART ONE

  People who have the least to do with the success of a team often have the most to say about it.

  —Larry Bird

  When the Game Was Ours (2009)

  ONE

  Anybody who has ever been a walk-on for a Division I football or basketball team will tell you that being likened to Rudy at least once during a four-year career is pretty much an inevitability. The general public hears the term “walk-on” and immediately thinks that anyone who couldn’t earn a scholarship must have been told his entire life that he wasn’t good enough, before he relentlessly annoyed coaches for a spot on the team and got life-changing advice from what has to be the wisest field maintenance guy to ever live.

  Sadly, this image of a short, white walk-on caring more about the success of the team than all of his teammates combined is reinforced every March, when the guys wearing all their warm-ups on the end of the bench react to routine plays in the NCAA Tournament like tween girls at a Bieber concert. These douchers ruin it for the rest of us, as they cement a stereotype for all walk-ons that forever perpetuates the Rudy comparison. Well, you’re never going to believe this, but not all walk-ons actually f
it this description. I know, I know. It’s hard to wrap your mind around the fact that there are sometimes exceptions to stereotypes, but you’re just going to have to trust me with this one.

  I was fully aware of the walk-on stereotype when I started my career at Ohio State, which is why I promised myself that I would do everything in my power to be an exception. Don’t get me wrong, I think Rudy is full of all sorts of inspiration and is the second-best sports movie ever made. (I’m from Indiana and played basketball—I’ll let you guess what I think the best sports movie of all time is.) But I’ve found that very few people make a Rudy comparison in a complimentary way. Instead, they seem to be saying, “I think it’s adorable how you try really hard even though you suck balls and there’s no way you’ll ever get a chance to play.” This is why, from day one, I tried to distance myself from the Rudy comparison by pulling pranks on superstar teammates, routinely falling asleep during film sessions, and basically spending every day with the team trying to figure out exactly how much I could get away with. And as it turned out, I could get away with a lot.

  Whenever I reminisce with my friends and family about my four years of being a dickhead at Ohio State, they always seem to ask how exactly I was capable of getting away with some of the things I did. (Don’t worry, we’ll cover all of my shenanigans later.) After all, I was the bottom-feeder on the team who was supposed to just keep his mouth shut and stand on the sideline during practice until a coach told me to step in for a drill and essentially get sodomized in my role as human punching bag. You’d think that it would only take one screwup on my part for Coach Matta to send my ass packing, but instead he seemed to embrace me as the comedic relief for the team.

  In the history of the walk-on–head coach relationship, this was unprecedented. Never had someone in my position been given the freedom I was given, which is why I felt a great responsibility to use this privilege to my advantage. Which brings us back to the original question: how did I go from being a math major basketball manager who knew only three people on campus to one of the loudest voices in the locker room of the number-one-ranked college basketball team in less than a month? The answer to that lies deeply buried in a story about drugs, prostitution, love, betrayal, organized crime in the 1920s, and one man’s pursuit of the American Dream.