Don't Put Me In, Coach (23 page)

So, the next day I went to Egelhoff’s office and told him I wanted to enter my name into the NBA draft, and he laughed and gave me the papers. Once I wrote down all the pertinent information, he hit a few buttons on the fax machine and sent the papers to the NBA. And with that, I had officially declared myself eligible for the 2009 NBA draft.

A little over a week later, I was working out (shocking, I know) in our practice gym, when Egelhoff opened the doors and walked straight toward me with papers in his hand. He stood about a foot away from me while I was in the middle of a timed shooting drill and said, “The NBA is pissed. Sign these now.”

A couple of days earlier, an assistant coach told me that the NBA had called the Ohio State basketball office a few times and told them I was making a mockery of their process, but I assumed he was joking. But now that Egelhoff was urgently shoving papers in my face that appeared to be the papers I was supposed to submit to withdraw my name from the draft, I realized that the NBA wasn’t nearly as amused as I was. Even though I didn’t technically have to sign the papers, I figured the charade had run its course and I didn’t want to tarnish the relationship between the NBA and Ohio State, so I obliged and signed.

After I was forced to remove my name from the draft, I took to my blog to explain what happened. I said “it was fun while it lasted” and explained that I wasn’t that upset because I was going to remove my name eventually anyway, so to be the first guy kicked out of the draft was actually an accomplishment I was proud of. Technically and legally speaking, I wasn’t actually forced out of the draft, but I pretty much had to sign the papers that were shoved in my face lest I deal with some sort of repercussions … so for all intents and purposes I was forced out.

I thought that the blog post would serve as a natural ending to my draft experiment, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Almost instantly after I published my blog post, the ordeal became a huge national story, to the point that it was one of four feature stories on Yahoo.com’s home page (along with a story about Barack Obama,
a story about Michelle Obama, and a story about the flu outbreak in America), and it was the second-most-searched topic on Google for the day.

Some people were outraged with the NBA, and in the comments section of one article I actually indirectly sparked a race war because a handful of ignorant white guys claimed that I was kicked out just because I was white, a handful of black guys disagreed, and things snowballed from there. A few people emailed me and tried to persuade me to sue the NBA. Others thought I should go to the draft and walk up onstage when an absentee draft pick’s name was announced. Everyone I talked to had an opinion on how I should handle the situation, all of them oblivious to the fact that I honestly did not care about getting kicked out and was perfectly fine with it because it worked out much better for me than it would have had I been able to stay eligible for the draft for an extra couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, as everyone around me seemed to be completely enraged, I sat back and laughed at the irony of the situation: the NBA had made me take my name out because they claimed I was making a mockery of their draft, yet by forcing me out they had made the process more of a mockery than I could’ve ever possibly done on my own.

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

A
s 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 the 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.