by Mark Titus
To go along with these random offers and encounters with fans, just about every home game during my senior season resulted in our student section belting out the “We want Titus!” chant toward the end of the game, even during games in which I was in street clothes because I was injured. I worked out a deal early in the season with the Ohio State compliance office that allowed me to sell T-shirts with my blog’s logo on them so long as all the proceeds went to a charity, so every home game (and even some road games) featured throngs of fans wearing my shirts. In fact, my shirts became so popular among fans of my blog (otherwise known as the Trillion Man March) that by the time the season ended just a few months later thousands of shirts had been sold all over the world and over $50,000 had been raised for A Kid Again, which is a Columbus-based charity focused on enhancing the quality of life for kids with life-threatening illnesses. (Quick plug: if you live in Ohio, or anywhere for that matter, and are considering getting involved with a charity, make it this one. You won’t find a better group of human beings than the people running A Kid Again, and interacting with the sick kids for five minutes will literally change your outlook on life.) There’s no way to say this without sounding like a pompous asshole, so screw it, I’m not even going to try: I can’t even begin to describe how humbling it was to raise $50,000 for A Kid Again despite being a walk-on benchwarmer who only scored nine career points. It is no doubt the single greatest accomplishment of my life, and there isn’t even a close second.
The culmination of my 15 minutes of benchwarming fame came on my senior night against Illinois, which was the final home game of the year and would be the final home game of my career at Ohio State. The entire day leading up to the game, I had a camera crew from the Big Ten Network follow me around to film a documentary for their show The Journey, which only made the evening that much of a bigger deal for me. Also adding to the aura of the night was the fact that all of the 3,000 students in our student section were wearing my shirts and the fact that a win would clinch the regular season Big Ten title for us.
Not to give away any spoilers, but thanks largely to our student section wearing my shirts, chanting my name throughout the game, and just generally being the best student section in college basketball, I cried like a baby before and after the game and still get chills thinking about it. It was the most memorable night of my life, and I’m not saying that as hyperbole. I can vividly remember everything about that night and likely won’t forget it as long as I live. When I think back on my four years at Ohio State, nothing else comes close to sticking out in my mind as much as my senior night. Not the National Championship from my freshman year. Not the numerous fights with The Villain. And not even Ivan’s infamous beej.
I came to Ohio State as an unknown average kid who majored in math, aspired to be an orthopedic surgeon, and filled up water bottles for the basketball team as a hobby. And yet, on that senior night it was clear to me that I had somehow transformed into a local celebrity thanks to the combination of an absurd amount of luck and my inability to take anything seriously. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it then and still can’t wrap my mind around it now. All I know is that I was incredibly lucky to be in the position I was and will be forever indebted to Coach Matta, the media as a collective whole, and, most especially, the Ohio State fans. I may have only had 15 minutes in the spotlight, but I’ll be damned if they weren’t the most entertaining and exciting 15 minutes of my life.
(And with that, my autofellatio is officially over. Again, I apologize for seeming like a conceited asshole, but I promise my intention wasn’t to brag about being “famous,” mostly because I fully acknowledge that at best I was a quirky national story with a cult following and at worst I was just a guy a few people around Columbus knew. My intent was instead to give you, the reader, an inside look into my life in the [not really that bright] spotlight. I thought some of the things were bizarre and random and made for interesting stories, so if you didn’t see it that way and instead interpreted it as me blowing my own horn, I’m sorry. As always, if you really have that big of a problem, I’m perfectly fine with letting you lick my chode.
Now, let’s get back to the good stuff.)
PART SEVEN
All you’ll ever be is a couch potato bum who mooches and rides coattails.
—The Villain
THIRTY-FOUR
We opened up the 2009–2010 season with a 40-point win over Alcorn State (thanks in large part to The Villain’s first career triple-double) and another blowout win over James Madison to advance to the semifinals of the 2K Sports Classic, where we were to play defending national champion and fourth-ranked North Carolina in our first big game of the season. The Tar Heels jumped out to a big lead on us right from the tip and maintained a double-digit lead for most of the game until we mounted a furious comeback and carved the deficit down to two before the final buzzer. We ran out of time with our comeback attempt and came up a little bit short, losing by just four in a game that all along seemed like we were about to get blown out of. In other words, it was what we in the business refer to as a relatively good loss, even though the term “good loss” seems like it’s as big of an oxymoron as a hooker named Chastity.
The North Carolina loss set up a consolation game matchup against 12th-ranked Cal, which was a game that was a bit of role reversal in that this time we were the ones who jumped out to a huge lead and eventually let Cal claw their way back into the game. But like our comeback attempt against North Carolina, Cal ultimately ran out of time and we won by six, giving us our first marquee win of the young season.
In our next game, we beat Lipscomb pretty easily on the back of The Villain’s second triple-double in five games (well, third if you count his 23-point, 11-rebound, and 10-turnover performance against North Carolina). Coming into the season, there had only ever been one triple-double in Ohio State history (Dennis Hopson in 1987), so for The Villain to have two in only our first five games was quite an accomplishment. It was still early, and there was a lot of basketball left to be played, but through the season’s first few weeks The Villain had already established himself as the front-runner to win the National Player of the Year Award and was seriously flirting with obliterating the Ohio State record book.
The Lipscomb win was followed up with an absolute curb-stomping of St. Francis (Pennsylvania) in which we won by 63 and destroyed them so badly that I got to play a career-high five minutes. I also recorded another career high in that game with two shot attempts in those five minutes, but since I missed them both and in the process embarrassed myself and shamed my family, I don’t really want to talk about it. Let’s just move on.
After the St. Francis win, we beat a pretty good Florida State team at home in the ACC–Big Ten Challenge and in the process helped the Big Ten clinch a collective victory over the ACC for the first time in the 11-year history of the event. Following that, we beat Eastern Michigan by 51 to set up a top-20 matchup at Butler with our next game. But even though the box score from the Eastern Michigan win might make it seem like the game was business as usual, it was actually far from it.
That’s because, with about 12 minutes left in the first half, The Villain drove to the basket and was nudged from behind by an Eastern Michigan player as he went up for the dunk, which threw off his balance ever so slightly and caused him to lose his grip on the rim as his body swung toward the baseline. His momentum continued to carry his feet upward until he lost his grip on the rim and let go, resulting in him plummeting to the floor and landing square on his lower back with a loud thud, kinda like how Antoine Tyler fell in The 6th Man. And with that, the best player in college basketball and the one guy we absolutely could not afford to lose had a broken back and was out not only for the rest of the Eastern Michigan game, but also for the foreseeable future.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: this was not good. In fact, one could argue that because he was the best player in college basketball and was directly responsible for most of our team’s suc
cess, his injury was detrimental to us because it appeared as though we weren’t going to achieve the same amount of success we would have otherwise achieved had he not broken his back.
Simply put, our team’s collective mood when Evan went down could best be summarized by the immortal dying words of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn:
“Oh, shit.”
THIRTY-FIVE
The first game on the schedule following The Villain’s back injury was against 20th-ranked Butler on the road. To add insult to The Villain’s injury, I often acknowledged him as either “cheesedick” or “twat lips.” And to add an unfavorable situation for our team to The Villain’s injury, Butler was really good that year and actually played in the National Championship game at the end of the season where, according to John Brenkus of Sport Science, they were only 0.5 miles per hour and 3 inches away from winning the thing. It would have been tough to beat them at their place with The Villain, so I figured we were screwed now that we were playing for the first time without a guy who literally had the ball in his hands during offensive possessions more than every other guy on the team combined. And as is usually the case with most things, I was absolutely right: we lost to Butler by eight.
After the Butler loss, we blew out Presbyterian by 30, beat Delaware State by 16, and took care of business against a decent Cleveland State team at home to head into the Christmas break on a three-game winning streak. We hadn’t exactly rattled off three marquee wins or anything, but it was a three-game winning streak nonetheless, and it was encouraging to see us have some measure of success without The Villain. Since we were on a winning streak and there were good vibes in our locker room, and since we had over a week off in between our games because of Christmas break, I decided it was a perfect time to play a prank on one of our coaches. I targeted Coach Jeff Boals, who had joined the coaching staff from Akron right after my junior season ended, because he was undoubtedly my favorite coach. Even though I had only known him for eight months at the time, I had already gotten a good read on him and was pretty confident he would appreciate a good prank, so I asked Keller to help me come up with something.
Keller and I are both notoriously lazy, so we wanted something that would require minimal effort on our part. Ultimately, we decided to create a fake email account and send Boals a hateful email. We created a character that was supposed to be a stereotypical redneck from rural Ohio, which is another way of saying we created a character who was an uneducated racist homophobe, had tons of pent-up anger, and loved his Buckeyes probably a little too much. Since Keller is a master at writing as if he’s someone else, I let him write the bulk of the email, and I contributed basically by just giving him a handful of ideas and providing details about Coach Boals to make the email more personal.
(Please keep in mind as you read it that we were playing a character and chose to make our character racist and homophobic only because we wanted him to come across as hateful, which we thought would make the prank more effective since it would give the email a threatening tone. If, for whatever reason, you do get offended, you’ll have to take your complaint to Keller, since he’s the one who wrote it. But if you aren’t offended and think it’s funny, give me credit since I’m the one who wrote it.)
Listen here, you four-eyed fuck.
I made the mistake of going to an Ohio State basketball game and the program that my fucking girlfriend made me buy had some glasses wearing doofus on the front cover. After discovering that this liberal fucking state doesn’t sell beer at the games, I took to reading the program. Lo and behold, the loser I saw on the front turned out to be you, Mr. Bowls. Could there be a bigger fucking pansy on this planet than you? Honestly, you were wearing a pink shirt. Unless you have breast cancer, stop wearing such faggy colors. The last time I checked, my Buckeyes’ colors were Scarlet and Gray, not Scarlet and Gay. It’s complete horseshit that the legacy of this fine university is being tarnished by some nearsighted poopdick.
A bigger fucking travesty than the decision to hire some jizz fiend who walks on the treadmill so his sweat doesn’t mess up his gelled hair is to leave #34 on the bench. That guy is on fucking fire every single time in warm-ups. I honestly watched that badass make 3-pointer after 3-pointer only to be banished to the bench because douchetards like you feel threatened by his ability. Just cause you and your bum ACL can’t check the man with the hot hand doesn’t mean you should keep him on the bench when he could be lighting up the arena for 50+ a night, you jealous dick. Seriously, if you can’t get on board with #34 getting buckets all over random black kids, then I question your love for America. And to think, every time he doesn’t get to go nothing but net from 25 feet away, you’re taking away an opportunity for the girls in the crowd to get their titties hard about the guy. So you’re not only a douche, but a cockblocking homo as well.
In conclusion, you should be fucking fired, and that Mark Titus guy is the key to the Buckeyes winning the title. Take the dong out of your mouth, and put that fucking guy in the game, or you’ll be sorry. I figured a gay nerd with glasses as thick as yours would be able to see talent when that’s close in front of your face. Guess not, you fucking moron.
Best regards,
Dale R. “Woody” Thornton III
Because Dale “Woody” Thornton kept making references to playing me more, we were sure that Boals would figure out that I was behind the prank. But somehow he didn’t make the connection. At practice the next day he approached me and asked if I knew some guy named Dale, which prompted me to laugh and ask him if he enjoyed the email. Confusion spread across his face as if he was trying to figure out how I knew about the email, leading me to believe that he was trying to counter-prank me. I reluctantly bit on the bait and explained that I was responsible for the email, and his face lit up.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “I thought some redneck wanted to kill me.”
I still wasn’t buying that he didn’t know I was behind the email. He insisted that he didn’t and even offered proof. “You can even go talk to Debbie [the secretary in the basketball office who is by all accounts a nice, wholesome lady]. All of the coaches’ emails go to her first, and she forwards us the ones she thinks we need to read. She told me I got some hate mail, so I asked her to send it to me. We both read it and thought it was hilarious, but we were sure it was real.”
After he told me this, I was initially pumped that my prank had worked, but I quickly changed my feeling when I realized what exactly he had said. The fact that Debbie was the first to read the email probably makes the story funnier and better, so I’m cool with it now, but in that moment I couldn’t have been more embarrassed. I darted up to her office, apologized a thousand times, told her I honestly didn’t think anybody but Boals would read it, and tried to explain to her that she was just collateral damage. She seemed to accept my apology, but the tone in her voice and her body language told me that she did so only so I would leave her office and just stop talking about it altogether. Whoops.
Perhaps Boals should have taken Dale’s advice and found a way to play me more in our next game at Wisconsin, because the substitution pattern we did use certainly didn’t work. After the first eight minutes of the game went back and forth, the Buzzcuts jumped out to a big lead to close the first half and never looked back, as they ended up beating us by 22, which was our worst loss of the season. Since it was my last trip to Madison, the loss meant that the Kohl Center was the only Big Ten arena that I never won in, which was especially upsetting since I knew we would have most likely won had The Villain been healthy.
Nonetheless, we had a chance to bounce back from the Wisconsin loss by playing at Michigan a few days later. But not having The Villain proved to be costly yet again, as Michigan used a late run to beat us by nine. Again, it was frustrating to know that we probably would have also beat Michigan had The Villain been healthy, but it was even more frustrating to know that since The Villain hurt his back against Eastern Michigan, whose campus is
just 15 minutes away from Michigan’s campus, and since we played Michigan just a couple weeks after Eastern Michigan, I was pretty confident that Michigan had asked Eastern Michigan to do them a favor and take out The Villain because they’re a bunch of cheating asshole bastards.
But that’s just my theory. Whether I’m right or wrong, at the end of the day we were 0–2 in the Big Ten and had lost half of our last six games. We needed either to figure out how to play without The Villain or to cross our fingers and hope he made a miraculous recovery and saved our season before it was too late.
THIRTY-SIX
Despite being told that he’d be out for at least eight weeks, The Villain made a miraculous recovery and saved our season before it was too late after just four and a half weeks. In his first game back, he started and played just half the game against Indiana at home, and while he only scored eight points and pulled down just four rebounds, we didn’t really need much from him because Indiana sucked donkey balls.
After we blew the Hoosiers out by 25, we went on the road and lost to a relatively good Minnesota team by nine. Against Indiana, our chemistry imbalance wasn’t a huge deal because Indiana was awful, but our inability to get The Villain fully integrated back into the team proved much more costly against a good team like Minnesota. Whatever the case, we dropped to just 1–3 in the Big Ten, which was good enough for eighth place in the conference. After having our sights set on winning the Big Ten title at the start of the season, four games into conference play it seemed as if we’d be lucky to even finish in the top half of the standings.