Don't Put Me In, Coach (24 page)

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

H
eading 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.

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

W
e 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.