by Mark Titus
Leading up to the game at Florida, neither the college basketball experts around the country nor Doug Gottlieb had any idea of what to expect. We had obviously shown that we were a very talented team, but there was no denying that Greg wasn’t yet back to full strength, which raised a lot of question marks. Meanwhile, Florida was the defending national champion with pretty much everyone back, but leading up to the game their star center, Al Horford, had been battling a sore ankle, which had brought his effectiveness into question too. Seemingly no one could make a confident prediction about who would win, but despite all of the unknowns surrounding the game, the one thing everybody could agree on was that this was the game of the year in college basketball up to that point.
For 23 minutes, it was everything everyone expected it to be. After being down by nine at halftime, we put together a nice comeback to knot the game at 40 with 17 minutes left to play. But then Florida suddenly kicked it into high gear, beat us like we were an NFL wife, and consequently made the game a bigger letdown than Saved by the Bell: The College Years. When it was all said and done, we had lost by 26 points, which was such an ugly beat-down that I could’ve sworn I heard Digger Phelps describe it on ESPN later that night as an “ass raping.” I still have no explanation for our monumental collapse, mostly because everything happened in such a blur that I can barely remember anything from that game. And by that I clearly mean that I stopped paying attention when we got down by 10 and decided to check out Florida’s cheerleaders for the rest of the game instead.
We took our frustration out on Coppin State a week after the Florida loss by beating them by 37 points in what was our last nonconference cupcake game. I checked into the game with two minutes left and, with the Youngstown State game fresh in my mind, decided I wasn’t going to shoot no matter how open I was. This almost proved to be a disastrous decision when, following a Coppin State miss, one of my teammates secured the rebound and threw a pass down the court to me, as I was running back toward our basket, and in doing so triggered a fast break that I had total control over yet wanted no part of.
Not really knowing what I should do, I took a few dribbles toward the basket as the Ohio State fans all yelled “Shooooooot!” in unison, and for a second I came this close to giving in to their request. But when I got to the three-point line and picked up my dribble to go up for a shot, the lone Coppin State defender who had been back on defense during the entire sequence ran toward me to challenge my shot. As this happened, I saw out of the corner of my eye what appeared to be a black guy in a white jersey streaking toward the basket and instinctively made the decision to just throw the ball up toward the rim and hope like hell whoever I was throwing it to could complete the alley-oop. What I failed to notice, though, was a second defender trailing behind my teammate. As the ball left my hands the defender caught up to my teammate and jumped in the air to steal my pass, but through some sort of divine intervention, he was a little too late and slapped Dave Lighty on the arm right as Dave caught the pass and stuffed it through the rim.
I was stunned. Not only did Dave finish the alley-oop, but he got fouled in the process, which made it that much more of an impressive play. Plus, the fact that I had blindly thrown the pass without having any idea of who I was throwing it to, let alone whether or not he was expecting me to throw him an oop, made it even more insane that it actually worked out. Throw in the fact that I had never in my life had one of my alley-oop passes completed with a dunk (and the last time I had tried was when I launched a pass over the backboard in an attempt to set up Daequan during an AAU game), and it’s nothing short of a miracle that the play resulted in anything but crippling embarrassment. Anyway, that single play will forever be the proudest moment of my athletic career, which is to say that when I have my midlife crisis in 20 years, I’m almost certainly going to force my future kids to watch this play thousands of times while I repeatedly say to them, “Look how good Daddy was.”
Conference play started after the Coppin State game, and we opened with a win at home against Indiana and a win at Illinois, running our record to 13–2. Up next for us was another marquee matchup, this time against fourth-ranked Wisconsin in Madison, yet virtually nobody in Ohio cared because the Ohio State football team had lost to Florida in the BCS Championship the night before and at Ohio State vandalizing cars and setting couches on fire in response to a football loss (and a win for that matter) takes precedence over everything else.
Still, after losing our first two big road games of the year, everyone on the team agreed that this game would be a good barometer for us, even though we had no idea that a barometer is an instrument used by scientists to measure atmospheric pressure and in no way measures how well a basketball team is currently playing. Anyway, we were dealt a serious blow the day before the game when Danny contracted mono and was told by the team doctor that he wouldn’t be able to make the trip to Madison. This was upsetting news, not because Danny contributed anything to our team (he didn’t), or because I genuinely cared about Danny’s health and well-being (I didn’t), but rather because Danny and I were roommates and his absence meant I had to now share a hotel room with Ivan Harris until Danny got healthy. (I’ll explain why this was so bad in a second.)
With a shorthanded bench thanks to Danny’s illness, we ended up losing by three in a hard-fought game that saw us down by as many as 20 in the second half. It was encouraging to see us claw our way back into the game after folding in a similar situation against Florida, but it was almost more painful to ride the emotional roller coaster of coming so close to pulling off a comeback but ultimately falling short than it was to just simply get blown out. Plus, to make matters worse, Wisconsin’s cheerleaders were butt ugly.
After the Wisconsin loss dropped our record to 13–3, we went on a tear and rattled off 22 straight wins, beginning with a squeaker over 20th-ranked Tennessee at home. Since the game was played on a Saturday, we stayed in an on-campus hotel the night before, which was standard procedure for us on weekend games because Coach Matta is a firm believer in limiting the players’ opportunities to do stupid things that could make them play poorly the next day. As previously mentioned, I was given the honor of sharing a hotel room with Ivan because Danny’s mono still had him out of commission, which was something I dreaded due to the fact that Ivan and I couldn’t possibly have been more different people. At Wisconsin, I avoided having to hang out with Ivan by just going straight to bed when I got back to my room after watching the National Championship football game in another room, and since that strategy worked so well the first time I thought I’d try it again. I hung out in the room of one of my other teammates for most of the night, and when I eventually got tired I returned to my room and got ready for bed right away.
While I got situated in my bed and tried to fall asleep, Ivan mostly kept to himself and only spoke every few minutes when he’d let out the occasional “daaaaaammmn” in reaction to whatever he was watching on his laptop. (There’s a 0 percent chance it was anything other than basketball highlight videos or porn.) Despite these random outbursts, I eventually fell asleep, but after five minutes of shut-eye I woke up in a puddle of sweat (yet another reason why I missed Danny as a roommate—white guys like the room a little chilly, but the black guys prefer a sauna). Desperate to cool down, I decided my only hope was to sleep naked, so I took my pants off, tossed them to the side of my bed, and pulled my sheets up over my body so my junk wasn’t out in the open. This proved to be a great decision, because my body temperature quickly dropped to a normal level and I almost instantly fell back asleep. A couple of hours later, though, I was woken up again, this time by a faint female voice in the room. I popped my head up, squinted my eyes in the direction of the voice, and saw Ivan and the mystery girl whispering to each other next to Ivan’s bed. I then looked toward the end of my bed and was greeted with the sight of my own bare ass staring back at me.
Apparently I had gotten hot again while I was sleeping and brushed the sheets to the side of the bed i
n the middle of my slumber without even knowing it, which was a technique that worked wonders for me when I slept in my own bedroom by myself. The obvious problem, though, was that I wasn’t in the room by myself this time around. Because the lights to our room were on, it was almost a certainty that the girl Ivan brought into the room saw my exposed, pale, and hairy rear end. What’s worse, since I sleep on my stomach and usually spread out to take up the whole bed, there’s a good chance she also could see between my legs and got a decent glimpse of my man meat too.
Being as naive as I was, I felt a sense of embarrassment come over me at the thought of accidentally showing my private parts to Ivan’s sister or cousin or whatever relative it was he was talking to. I quickly covered myself back up and tried my hardest to fall back asleep and avoid the awkwardness.
A few minutes passed before the lights were turned off and I heard the door close, leading me to believe that Ivan’s relative had left and he was finally going to go to bed. Right as I was dozing off, I heard Ivan softly say something and assumed he was talking to me since I was still under the impression that I was the only one in the room. When I rolled over to see what he wanted, though, I clearly heard Ivan say, “Oh yeah, girl. Work it just like that,” and realized what was going on. Ivan was lying in his bed, holding his sheets up, and looking underneath said sheets to watch the performance. That’s right—Ivan was getting a beej as I lay awake ten feet from him.
To say I was stunned would be a bigger understatement than saying the temple guards from Legends of the Hidden Temple had pedophiliac tendencies. Even more disturbing was that, after seeing me roll over in my bed, Ivan turned his head my way, looked me in the eye, raised his eyebrows, and stuck out his tongue as if to say to me, “She’s putting my penis in her mouth! Isn’t this awesome?!” I rolled back over in my bed and distinctly remember thinking to myself that nothing in the world could have possibly made me feel any more uncomfortable.
Following the Tennessee win, nothing too crazy happened either on the court or off the court for the rest of the regular season, which is my way of saying that I didn’t play in very many games and I didn’t attach any Nerf darts to my scrotum or witness one of my teammates get orally pleasured. But truth be told, we did have a handful of exciting games after our thriller against Tennessee, the first of these being a home win against Michigan State at the tail end of January in which we led by 20 at halftime but almost choked it away thanks to Drew Neitzel dropping 24 points on us in the second half.
The next close call was at Penn State, where we again relinquished a big lead and only won by two despite being on the verge of a blowout earlier in the game. We were especially lucky to win this game because Penn State’s best shooter, Mike Walker, missed a wide-open three at the buzzer that would’ve won them the game and surely would have been the greatest moment in Penn State basketball history. Hell, come to think of it, it’s still probably the greatest moment in Penn State basketball history that he even had an open shot to beat the number-one team in the country in the first place.
Either way, we had our rematch against Wisconsin 11 days later in what was the first Big Ten game to ever feature the number-one team in the country against the second-ranked team in the country. (We were first in one poll, and Wisconsin was first in the other, so it technically was the first-ever Big Ten matchup of two top-ranked teams.) Thanks to a last-second shot by Mike, we won the game by one and clinched the Big Ten regular-season championship, but stuff that happens on the court and doesn’t involve me doing my best to avoid embarrassing myself is boring and can be read about in a bunch of other books, so let’s just move on.
Our last regular-season game of the year was at Michigan, and since we had already clinched the Big Ten championship and were basically guaranteed a top seed in the NCAA Tournament, we really didn’t have much to play for. Michigan, on the other hand, had everything to play for, as both their NCAA Tournament hopes and the job security of their head coach, Tommy Amaker, rested solely on our game. This was the primary reason why they gave us a run for the money and kept it close, but we went on a 10–0 run to finish the game and won by four, Michigan went to the NIT, and Tommy Amaker was fired after the season. Suck it, Michigan.
After closing out the regular season, we played Michigan again in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament in Chicago and again had our way with them. Then we beat Purdue for the third time in the season in the semifinals, setting up the grudge match with Wisconsin in the championship. But as thrilling as the first two games against the Buzzcuts were (I refer to Wisconsin as the Buzzcuts because 99 percent of the guys who have played for Bo Ryan at UW have had buzzcuts—look it up, it’s a fact), the championship game was anticlimactic as we steamrolled them en route to a 23-point win that was never really anything to sweat over.
I actually got to play in the final minute and made the most of my time by setting up the biggest what-if play of my career. In my first defensive possession of the game, the guy I was guarding caught the ball on the wing, and I let him dribble around me (at least that’s what I tell people) so I could do that poke-from-behind steal that pretty much every white guy who has ever played basketball has gotten good at since it’s usually our only hope on defense. I knocked the ball out of the Wisconsin guy’s hands and took off running toward the other end of the floor as the ball fell right into Danny’s lap. (Danny had finally finished his bout with mono by that time.)
See if you can guess what happened next. Your two choices are that either (a) Danny saw that I was wide open and had at least a 15-foot head start on all the guys on Wisconsin, threw the ball up to me, and I completed the only dunk of my college career, or (b) Danny covered up the ball to ensure that he properly secured it, slowly dribbled up the court, and then proceeded to miss a layup in traffic to cap off an offensive possession in which Danny was the only guy on our team who touched the ball. Here’s a hint: the answer is “b.” So to recap, just a few months after freezing me out in my hometown, Danny stripped me of a legitimate chance to dunk in the Big Ten Tournament Championship.
For those who doubt whether I actually would’ve been able to dunk had Danny passed to me, consider this: the only time I ever dunked in a game in my life was in eighth grade, when I used the exact same “poke-from-behind steal and take off running” strategy that I used against the Buzzcuts, only in eighth grade my teammate passed the ball up ahead to me. (Yes, I seriously dunked in eighth grade—I tried to tell you earlier that I was a monster when I was younger.) So yeah, if I could’ve completed the same play in eighth grade, I don’t think I would’ve had much of a problem as a college freshman. Nonetheless, I think the saddest part of this whole situation is that, even though Danny repeatedly cockblocked me on the court throughout the season, I still would have much rather shared a hotel room with him than have to suffer rooming with Ivan again.
ELEVEN
Winning the Big Ten Tournament improved our record to 30–3, which was good enough for us to get a number-one seed in the NCAA Tournament for just the third time in program history. We drew Central Connecticut State for our first-round game that was to be played at legendary Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. Even though I had played in almost half of the games up to that point, I was pretty nervous about this game because the NCAA Tournament is a completely different beast, and since Central Connecticut State kinda sucked I figured there was a good chance I’d get to play. And once again, I was right. We jumped all over Central Connecticut State right out of the gate and never looked back, giving me an opportunity to make my lifelong dream of playing in the NCAA Tournament a reality.
When Coach Matta gave me the nod with a minute left, I tried to mentally approach the game as if it were any other, which is to say that I told myself over and over not to try to do anything special and to instead just do my best to stay out of the way. But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself it was just another game, I couldn’t calm my nerves. After all, I usually only played in front of a few thousand peopl
e, but because this was a tournament and there was another game after ours, the fans from the other two teams had combined with the Ohio State fans and the 12 Central Connecticut State fans to pack Rupp Arena. Throw in the fact that millions were watching on TV and my attempt to convince myself it was just another game was a lost cause.
As I walked to the scorer’s table to check into the game, Coach Matta could tell I was nervous, so he stood up from his chair and called me over to him. He then put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and waited a second before he said, “Don’t fuck this up,” and returned to his seat. Pretty sound advice, really. With these four words resonating throughout my head, I calmed down enough to grab a rebound and outlet the ball to Danny after my first defensive possession of the game. Then my built-up karma was put to good use when Danny took a couple dribbles and tried to throw an alley-oop to Ivan from half-court but threw it too high and consequently made himself and Ivan both look bad. Justice never felt so good.
Our second-round game was against Xavier, where Coach Matta had coached three years earlier before he decided to ditch them and come to Ohio State. Naturally, Xavier fans lost their minds over having to play their former coach and booed and heckled him the entire game for being a traitor, as if they honestly expected him to stay at a program that had had one Sweet Sixteen appearance before he got there, paid him less than half of what he now makes at Ohio State, and had no ties to him until he coached there for three years. Still, the history surrounding Coach Matta gave the game an “upset in the making” feel to it. Simply put, Xavier wanted to beat us, and they wanted to beat us badly.