by Mark Titus
PART SIX
If you don’t know who Mark Titus is, you should be put in juvie.
—Robbie Fiscus, my then-eight-year-old neighbor
THIRTY-ONE
A note from the author: Let me first admit and warn you up-front that this will undoubtedly be the douchiest section of the entire book, since it’s the part that will leave many of you thinking I’m a conceited dickwad. That’s because this section discusses the rise in popularity of my blog and all the notoriety that came with it. But before you flip ahead, you should know that it’s not what you think. I’m not writing this section as a way of boasting. I’m writing it to give you an idea of what my 15 minutes of fame were like, because even though I was technically a well-known college basketball player, as you’ll soon see I had a completely different experience “in the spotlight” than your typical well-known college basketball player. As always, if you have a problem with me writing about this, you can go to your local supermarket, buy a couple of sticks of butter, glaze your forearm until it’s nice and smooth, and hastily fist yourself.
A couple of months after Bob Baptist wrote about my blog in the Columbus Dispatch, I got an email from an AOL account claiming to be ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons, asking if I’d be willing to do an interview for his podcast. Simmons had a following of millions and had been my favorite sportswriter for years, so I guess you could say that this was a pretty big deal. But instead of getting excited, I was certain the email was a hoax and deleted it. I didn’t think it was a hoax. I knew it was a hoax, for a variety of reasons.
First of all, I knew that Simmons was widely considered to be the pioneer of sportswriting on the internet, so I assumed that he would be pretty internet-savvy. But this email came from an AOL account in 2008, which was a dead giveaway that whoever sent it was anything but “internet-savvy.” Secondly, with the exception of Baptist writing a blurb about me on his blog, I hadn’t gotten any media attention at any level. It seemed to me that the natural progression would’ve been for the Ohio State school paper to write about it, then maybe the Dispatch, then after that maybe a couple of papers from other Big Ten cities, until ultimately a couple of national outlets wrote something about it (if it ever got that far, of course). At the time, I had yet to do a single interview about my blog, so I wasn’t buying for a second that my first interview was going to come from the most popular sports columnist on the planet instead of an Ohio State journalism student. Nothing about that made sense.
Lastly, my circle of friends knew that Simmons was pretty much the only sportswriter I regularly read, so I was certain that one of them had created a fake email account and was pretending to be Simmons because they thought that had the best chance of making me freak out from excitement. Had it been any other national sports columnist, I might have believed it, but this was like I started a garage band with my friends and we joked, “What if U2 wanted to collaborate with us?” before we even wrote a single song, and then Bono and The Edge showed up at my front door a couple of weeks later.
The day after I got the email, I called my buddy Keller, who has been my best friend since we both were in sixth grade, and told him that I didn’t fall for his prank and it was a pretty awful attempt. He had no idea what I was talking about and assured me that he had nothing to do with the email. Although there was a chance he was just refusing to give up on his prank, I trusted him and sifted through my deleted mail to forward it to him per his request. After Keller read it, he told me he was 99 percent sure the email was real for a few reasons, most notably that he “remembered reading somewhere that Simmons had an AOL email address.” I couldn’t believe it.
It’s embarrassing to admit now, but after my conversation with Keller I spent the entire day crafting a reply email to Simmons that was at least five paragraphs long. Even though all he was looking for was a simple, “Yeah, I’ll come on your podcast” reply, I sent him an email that told him my life story and reeked of desperation, to which he responded by basically saying, “Cool story, bro.” Also included in his response was a number for me to call the next day. With the possibility of it being a prank still lingering in my mind, I Googled the number and confirmed that it was in fact an ESPN number—and in doing so proved that the email most certainly was not a hoax.
The reality and magnitude of everything finally sank in. After doing a grand total of maybe three or four interviews in my entire career at Ohio State, I was now about to go on Bill Simmons’s podcast. The next day I called the number I was given at the designated time and tried my hardest to mask my nervousness. The 10-minute interview felt like an eternity. In reality, it was more of a laid-back conversation than an interview, but the format was entirely irrelevant to me. The only thing I cared about was that my first legitimate interview was going to be heard by millions of people and the fact that it was for a podcast and not a print article meant that Simmons couldn’t change my words around and make me sound cooler than I really was. No, the millions of people who were going to listen to this were going to hear my words straight from my mouth, which scared the absolute shit out of me.
After the interview ended, I hung up the phone, took a deep breath, and mentally braced myself for the inevitable outpouring of reaction. And what an outpouring it was. Just two days after I deleted Simmons’s email and came so close to pissing away a great opportunity, my life was turned completely upside down and forever changed.
THIRTY-TWO
As I’m sure you can imagine, my blog exploded after I went on Simmons’s podcast. After averaging around 1,000 page hits per day on the blog for its first few months (I thought that was a ton), the podcast appearance skyrocketed my page hits to 50,000 per day for at least a week, and even when the initial boom died down, I still maintained around 20,000 hits per day throughout the rest of the season, which was pretty mind-blowing. Of course, none of this really matters because anyone who measures the success of their blog based on their page hits is clearly doing it wrong.
Instead of counting page hits, blog success should be measured exclusively by the fans. And by that I mean that blog success should be measured by the amount of random encounters with fans and the unusual ways in which the fans choose to interact with you. You know, things like getting pet rabbits named after you or having a middle-aged man say, “I’ll let you have my beautiful wife if you mention me on your blog,” while his definitely-not-beautiful wife is standing right next to him. Yes, when you get a guy to offer you his wife in exchange for a simple shout-out and she is perfectly fine with it, you know that you’ve accomplished something.
The thing about my newfound “fame” was that I was far from being anything that could even remotely be interpreted as a celebrity and was instead just a guy that a few handfuls of people recognized. It’s not like I was suddenly the big man on campus at Ohio State, which made the interactions with people who knew of me that much more fun. Had I been a full-fledged celebrity in Columbus like Jim Tressel or, to a lesser extent, The Villain and had to deal with people harassing me everywhere I went, I’m sure I would have hated it every time people stopped me in public to introduce themselves.
But because I was only noticed maybe once or twice every time I stepped outside of my apartment, fan interactions weren’t overwhelming. It was kind of a nice stroke to my ego to finally get recognized after living in anonymity for my first two seasons with the team. Plus, the fan interactions were always so much fun for me (and still are) because it was always unpredictable as to who would be the one person that recognized me each time I was out in public. One time a guy sitting by me in one of my classes, who had been pretty reserved and shy for most of the semester, leaned over while our professor was talking and appeared as if he was going to ask me for a pen or a piece of paper (as if I ever brought pens or paper to class), but instead said, “Love the blog.”
Another time I took my car to get some maintenance done, and a middle-aged car mechanic, who definitely did not fit into the target demographic for my blog, walked all t
he way over from the other side of the shop to tell me he was a fan. I even had elderly women and some of my professors recognize me. I truly did have a guerrilla fan base in the sense that they would seemingly disguise themselves among the rest of the general public and pop up out of nowhere to flatter me when I least expected it. And although I loved it every time it happened, no guerrilla interaction will ever top the time Erin Andrews surprised me at a restaurant in Champaign, Illinois.
By the time we played at Illinois in late January, I had already established a solid fan base, but I was far from being a household name in the world of college basketball. I liked this because I could write about people I spent a good deal of time around without having the things I wrote get back to them (because I knew there was no way in hell they were reading my blog).
I would frequently write on my blog about my plans to pull pranks on The Villain, sometimes even calling on my readers to assist me in pranking him, and for the longest time he would be oblivious to the source of the pranks even though I was publicly announcing what I was doing. Along the same lines, I would frequently write on my blog about my affection for Erin Andrews because I, like every other straight red-blooded American male, appreciated everything she brought to the world of sports, which is really just another way of saying I kinda wanted to put my face between her breasts (if you know what I mean).
Because Erin and I frequently crossed paths (she worked a lot of our games), and because when we did cross paths she would never have any reason to talk to me instead of my superstar teammates, I would write about my awkward interactions with her and play up the similarity between me and the stereotypical high school nerd who is afraid to talk to the cheer captain. I even went as far as pretending she and I were in a relationship on my blog, which further underscored the notion that I was a desperate loser and couldn’t wait for the day when she’d finally acknowledge me. Well, when that day finally came, I couldn’t have possibly been any more embarrassed.
Before we get to that, though, we have to first go back. Just before our home game against Indiana during my junior season, Erin walked over to our bench during our warm-up with a notebook in hand and sat down right in between Dave Lighty and me. Dave and I both had foot injuries and were projected to be out for a while, but Erin obviously did not give a single shit about my injury because Dave was our leader and team captain and I was a worthless walk-on. When she sat down between the two of us, she turned her back to me to ask Dave how he was dealing with his injury, took down all the information she needed, and then stood up and walked away without so much as even acknowledging my presence. What’s worse, during the game she actually pulled Dave aside for a live in-game interview, during which she failed to mention that he wasn’t the only one on the team dealing with a serious foot injury.
Because this played out in front of our student section, and because my relationship with Erin had become one of the more prominent storylines on my blog, I knew this incident would be great fodder for a blog post. In the next few days, I wrote a post in which I called Erin out for turning her back to me. She had ignored me one too many times, and dammit, I just wasn’t going to tolerate it anymore, so I had no choice but to publicly end my imaginary relationship with her. I was sure that this would send an effective message and she’d be devastated and come crawling back to me. And by that I mean that I was sure she had no idea I was writing about her so frequently and if she knew she’d probably think I was creepy as hell and get a restraining order against me.
Less than a week later, the entire team went to a Champaign restaurant the night before our game against Illinois. When we went to restaurants on the road like this, it wasn’t unusual for the TV crew that was going to call the game to be there too, either by coincidence or because they wanted to pick Coach Matta’s brain for information to use for their broadcast. Well, as we walked into this particular restaurant, it became clear not only that the TV crew was at the restaurant, but also that one of the members of the crew was none other than Erin Andrews herself.
As we all filed to the back of the restaurant, Coach Matta waved at her while all of our managers freaked out and asked me if I had noticed that she was there. I told them that I had noticed, but that I didn’t care because I was over her and had publicly ended our relationship, and then I went to my table and sat down with the rest of the team. And that was the end of that. Or so I thought.
About an hour later, a manager came up to me while I was eating my dinner and told me that he had just gone to the bathroom and, on his way back, Erin stopped him to ask specifically if I was in the restaurant with the team. I thought he was just trying to mess with me, so I told him to go fill up my water bottle and sit back down because I didn’t believe him for a second. As he walked back to his table, though, Erin opened up the doors to our private dining room and stood still in the door frame as she scanned the room. I thought about what the manager had said, but I still assumed that she was looking for Coach Matta because she wanted to talk to him about the upcoming game or something. Just to be sure, I stopped eating and looked up from my dinner to see what her next move was going to be.
After a few beats, she finally opened her mouth and said, “Where’s Titus? We need to talk!”
I was so stunned that I probably would have pissed myself had I not been fully erect.
She eventually found me and walked over to my table. “What’s with all this talk about you breaking up with me?”
My face turned bright red, and as I tried to talk I ended up stuttering some gibberish instead. Once I calmed down and collected myself, I tried to explain to her that it was all a big joke and the only reason I ever started talking about our fake relationship was because I thought it would be funny to see if a walk-on benchwarmer could ever get her attention. But as it turned out, it was instead thoroughly embarrassing.
I continued pleading with her to believe that I wasn’t as creepy as I seemed, and eventually she seemed satisfied with what I had to say, even though she had a “uh huh … suuuure” look on her face the entire time I was talking. This went on for the next five minutes or so until I asked her for her number, one thing led to another, yadda, yadda, yadda, I never really talked to her again. I’ll let you fill in the details as you see fit.
THIRTY-THREE
Heading into my senior year at Ohio State, many people suggested that my blog had made me the most popular guy on our team, even though The Villain was a preseason All-American and projected to be a lottery pick in the NBA draft after the upcoming season. (He was eventually picked by the Philadelphia 76ers with the second overall pick in the 2010 draft.) This notion was, of course, completely wrong, but the fact that some people in the media suggested it seemed pretty incredible to me. After all, just two years earlier I was as big a nobody as you’ll ever find in the world of college basketball, and now I was arguably the most popular player on a top ten team. To be anything more than an anonymous scrub on the end of the bench would have been a huge deal to me, so this attention was pretty mind-blowing.
By the time the end of November rolled around and we had already played a handful of games, The Villain had established himself as the front-runner to win the National Player of the Year Award (which he eventually did do), but the sports information director at Ohio State, who was in charge of organizing all of our interviews with the media, claimed that I was getting more interview requests than him. And honestly, it’s hard to refute that claim. After going on Simmons’s podcast, I kind of became the media darling on our team. Sportswriters all over the country thought I had a quirky and offbeat story that was unlike anything else in college basketball, so they seemed more interested in writing about The Shark and Club Trillion than writing another clichéd article about how good The Villain was. All of this attention didn’t necessarily translate into more hits for my blog (not that I cared), but it certainly did translate into me getting recognized in public much more frequently.
It also led to me receiving unprecedented support
from opposing teams’ fans. Virtually everywhere we played, students from our rival schools would talk to me during our pregame warm-ups and tell me they were fans of my blog, tell me they appreciated what I was doing because they were benchwarmers in high school or something, or sometimes even ask me for an autograph (or all three).
This happened at literally every school in the Big Ten except Northwestern (probably because my lowbrow humor was too juvenile for their intellectual tastes) and Michigan (probably because it was too difficult for Michigan fans to read my blog and at the same time have Ohio State fans’ balls slapping against their chins). Students from Wisconsin, Indiana, Purdue, and Iowa even made signs to show their support for Club Trillion. One sign at Indiana actually proposed marriage. A group of students from Minnesota took things another step further than that by starting a “We want Titus!” chant toward the end of our game with them my senior year. Yes, you read that right—Minnesota’s student section actually started a chant at the end of a game for an opposing team’s walk-on. I can’t say for sure, but I think this might have been the first time something like this happened in the history of college basketball.
But as cool as it was to get a warm reception on the road, obviously nothing came close to how awesome the treatment from Ohio State fans was. I’ve already mentioned how one middle-aged Ohio State fan asked for a shout-out in exchange for “his beautiful wife” and how one girl informed me that she had named her pet rabbit after me. What I haven’t mentioned, though, is how I was asked to write a speech for a best man at a wedding because the groom was apparently a fan of mine, or how I was asked to throw out the first pitch at a community wiffleball tournament in the small town of Coldwater, Ohio. And I also haven’t mentioned that sometime during my senior year I was offered a key to the city of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, which was something I particularly got a kick out of because Upper Sandusky was the hometown of my teammate Jon Diebler, and he told me that I was offered a key to his own hometown before he even was. (This is especially remarkable considering Upper Sandusky is a small town and Jon is treated like a god there.) I also got a kick out of it because the offer was eventually rescinded, but that kind of ruins the story, so let’s just pretend that I actually was given a key to the city.