Don't Put Me In, Coach (26 page)

This was a game-changer for Keller. “I’m in.”

I explained to him that in order for the prank to really work, he should say things that were the complete opposite of what Danny would say, so he should talk about how much he loved being a manager (specifically doing the bitch work), he should talk about how he took the current managers out for milkshakes and french fries all the time, and he should just generally be as douchey as he possibly could. He told me he’d take care of it, so I hung up on him, texted the
Lantern
guy Keller’s number, and waited.

An hour later, Keller called me to tell me he had done the interview, and he could hardly hold in his laughter. He went on to tell me that during the interview he had found a way to say all of the following things as if he was Danny:

“The best part about being a manager was getting to fill up water bottles and wipe sweat off the floor. All the other managers hated doing that, but I loved it because I knew I was making a difference.”

“I know what it takes to be a manager at such a high level, so to show my appreciation for our managers, I invite them over for a sleepover at my place at least once a month. It’s a good opportunity for us to bond, and I think they really have a lot of fun.”

“I like being a player, but I think I’ll like it more when my dream comes true and I finally dribble down the court, pass to my best friend Mark Titus, and watch him sink a three-pointer while the crowd chants his name. That would just be awesome.”

“Yeah, Mark and I have been best buds for a while. We actually have a nickname for ourselves—Los Dos Amigos. It’s like we’re the Three Amigos, except there’s only two of us.”

A couple of days later, the article ran, and while it quoted Danny only once, it was enough to grab his attention. (The quote they
used basically just had Danny saying that “playing on this team is a dream come true.”) He somehow found out that he had been quoted in the article and when he did, he immediately knew that I was behind it. Later that day, when we were back at our apartment, I told Danny that it could have been a lot worse and shared with him some of Keller’s gems. This seemed to upset him more, but he also realized that he pretty much had no choice but to just laugh at this point.

A few weeks later, once Danny thought this incident had blown over, I shared the story with a couple of guys in our student section before one of our home games. They thought it was hilarious, and when our next home game rolled around they told me they had a surprise in store. When that particular game was in its waning moments and we had a big lead, I made eye contact with the guys in the student section and raised my eyebrows, as if to say,
Where is this surprise?

They each gave me a head nod, reached underneath their seats, pulled out sombreros, ponchos, and fake mustaches, and proceeded to chant “Los Dos Amigos! Los Dos Amigos!” until Danny and I checked in. (They continued this routine for the rest of the season.) I absolutely lost it on the bench as I pointed them out to Danny. Nobody else in the crowd and nobody else on our team had any idea what the costumes or chants were for, but that didn’t matter. Danny knew, and there’s no doubt in my mind that deep down it bugged him at least a little bit. And that’s really what’s important.

Following our loss at Minnesota, we went on the road to play sixth-ranked Purdue at their place. Purdue was the cream of the Big Ten crop at that point in the season while, as previously mentioned, we were just 1–3 in conference play going into this game. It felt like this was the biggest game of the year since an upset would put us back on track and do wonders for our confidence, and a blowout loss (which was entirely plausible) would all but eliminate any chance we had at winning the Big Ten title.

In the first half, Purdue played just like they were the best team
in the conference, and one of the best in the country, as they rode the back of Robbie Hummel’s 29 first-half points and torched our zone defense en route to a 12-point halftime lead. But in the second half, we switched out of our zone and went with the more conventional man-to-man defense, which initially didn’t make much difference because they held on to a double-digit lead throughout most of the second half. But with 7:30 left in the game and a 13-point deficit staring us in the face, we finally decided to play with a sense of urgency, which quickly proved to be what we had been missing all along.

On offense we decided to just give the ball to The Villain and get the hell out of the way, which was something we also should have probably done sooner, because he absolutely exploded and singlehandedly got us back in it when he scored every point during a 10–0 run that tied the game with 2:30 remaining. When Purdue called time-out, Coach Matta gave his “Their assholes are tight!” speech again, only this time he was absolutely right—Purdue’s assholes were most certainly tight. We made a few clutch plays in the game’s waning moments, and Purdue let a few opportunities slip away, and when the final buzzer sounded, the scoreboard showed a four-point advantage in our favor.

This was a monumental win for us because, less than a week after The Villain returned from a serious injury, we beat the sixth-ranked team in the country and perennial favorite to win the Big Ten title on their home court, which restored our confidence and revived our season. We had finally fully integrated The Villain back into the rotation, and we were now ready to make the rest of the Big Ten our collective bitch. Nothing was going to stand in our way. Well, nothing except another integral player on our team going down with a career-ending injury.

THIRTY-SEVEN

I
originally hurt my left shoulder sometime around Thanksgiving, when Dallas did a swim move to get around me as I was fronting him in the post and he dropped his elbow on my shoulder and made it pop. (Yes, Dallas was responsible for both the foot injury during my junior year that forced me to sit out for 12 weeks and the shoulder injury during my senior year that ended my career.) Being the warrior that I am, I toughed it out for a couple of months and continued practicing and playing through the pain. As the calendar turned to January and approached February, though, the pain became greater and I had no choice but to approach Coach Matta in his office and ask him to reduce my playing time, which was a request that he responded to by laughing and saying, “Get the hell out of my office. I’ve got work to do.”

As my shoulder became more and more painful, we had more and more success. We got The Villain back into the lineup and bounced back from a bad start in the Big Ten season by beating Purdue at their place, getting revenge on the 16th-ranked Buzzcuts at home, and dismantling Northwestern shortly thereafter. This combination
of pain in my shoulder and success for the team resulted in me having virtually no responsibilities during our practices whatsoever. That’s because when we started playing better, our practices became shorter, which resulted in my teammates needing me to sub in for them far less often (and by that I mean pretty much not at all). Even when they would think that they needed a sub, they would remember that I had a bum shoulder and would graciously change their mind as they suddenly realized that they weren’t as tired as they originally thought.

Since I was essentially serving no purpose at all during our practices, with each passing day my feeling of invisibility on the team increased. Every now and then I would leave practice for a half-hour to take a dump and come back to find that nobody knew that I was even gone. Eventually it got to the point that every single day before practice I would hide my phone in a nearby bathroom so I could play Angry Birds or get on the internet while I took my mid-practice poop. I also made sure that these mid-practice poops would always take place right as soon as Coach Matta announced that it was time for defensive drills.

You know how girls who spend a lot of time together somehow have their periods synch up to happen at the exact same time? Well, similarly, my body somehow synched up to our practice schedule so that I had to take mammoth dumps whenever it was time for us to practice defense. And by “my body somehow synched up” what I really mean is that I acted like I had to poop and excused myself from practice, went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, and screwed around on my phone for a half-hour without so much as squeezing out a single turd.

After a few weeks of this, I decided to go for what I thought would be the mother lode of all “see if they notice I’m gone” stunts. Despite what the wording in that last sentence might have led you to believe, I wasn’t planning on committing suicide and I wasn’t planning on fleeing the country unannounced, but I was instead planning to see if I could sit in the press box at the top of our arena and watch one of our practices.

On a day that wasn’t particularly different from any other, I put on my practice gear and went onto our main floor to warm up just like I did every other day for practice. Once our warm-up was complete and our pre-practice shooting drills were done, I continued my daily routine and walked over to the sideline of the court and sat on the scorer’s table while the real players did whatever it was they did on the court. After about five minutes of catching my breath, I decided to make my move.

I walked down the sideline toward the end of the court where the rest of the team was practicing, turned at the baseline, walked right in front of Coach Matta and an assistant coach, and pointed myself toward the tunnel that would take me to the elevator. As soon as I stepped off the temporary wooden court that had been laid down in the arena and stepped onto the permanent concrete, I felt a rush of anxiety come over me as I thought for sure someone would notice me and ask where I was going, especially since the restrooms were the complete opposite direction and there was no reason why I should have been walking toward that particular tunnel.

But then I remembered that I was nonexistent during practice and assured myself that nobody would even know I was gone. Once I made it to the elevator, I breathed a sigh of relief, rode the thing to the top of the arena, and sat in the press box high above the court on which our ongoing practice was taking place. When practice was about to end about an hour later, I rode the elevator back down and walked confidently back to my spot by the scorer’s table with the kind of strut that only a guy who regularly thinks to himself,
Yeah, I run shit
, would walk with. Five minutes later, Coach Matta announced that the practice was over and asked everyone to “bring it in.” And with that, I completed the easiest and single most relaxing basketball practice of my life.

After the practice, I joined the guys in the locker room and asked if anyone knew that I was gone. Obviously none of them had noticed (other than Danny, whom I had told I was going up
to the press box right as I started walking toward the elevator), so I asked the same question of the managers, and they all had the same response. Determined to see if I really did go entirely unnoticed, I found Coach Boals by the coaches’ locker room and asked him if any of the coaches had noticed I had left practice and sat up in the press box for pretty much the entirety of the practice. He told me that none of the coaches would notice if I got butt naked and started doing cartwheels on the sideline during practice, so of course they didn’t notice that I left. Touché.

A few days later, I mentioned to Coach Matta during a team meal what I had done, and he just laughed and said, “That doesn’t surprise me.” Not that I needed it, but right then and there it was confirmed that I could in fact get away with anything I wanted both on and off the basketball court. I’m pretty sure every other coach in the country would’ve kicked my ass off the team within seconds of finding out about my shenanigans (and Bob Knight would’ve probably castrated me), yet Coach Matta thought it was funny.

A couple days after my press box incident, I woke up to go to class (perhaps this was my big mistake) and could barely move my left shoulder. I hadn’t necessarily reinjured it, but I had tweaked it a few times since the original injury, and it seemed as though all those tweaks had finally caught up to me. When I told Vince that I could barely move my shoulder, he made me go get an MRI with our team doctor, who looked over the results and informed me that I had torn my labrum. Vince had originally diagnosed my injury as that very thing months before just from using his super athletic trainer intuition, but we had decided to just do some rehab and hope the shoulder improved on its own since we assumed it wasn’t that bad of a tear.

But the MRI showed that it actually was a significant tear and wasn’t going to improve on its own anytime soon, meaning surgery was all but inevitable. Our doctor informed me that a labrum repair surgery would put me out for at least six months. Since it was
the tail end of January at the time, this meant I wouldn’t be able to even start rehabbing my shoulder until July, which would’ve been four months after our season and my career ended.

As the doctor broke this news to me, my eyes welled up with tears from the combination of pain in my shoulder and knowing that my career had abruptly ended. Overcome with the emotion of the moment, I looked him in the eye and said, “Doc, I ain’t going out like no bitch.”

He responded, “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” so I explained to him that I wanted to postpone the surgery so I could put on the Ohio State jersey one last time for my senior night. He said he was cool with that idea, but warned me that there was no way I could practice or play until then, so I would have to wear street clothes on the bench for the rest of the season. Bummer.

And so it was settled—except for the one encore appearance for my senior night, my career at Ohio State, and thus my basketball career in its entirety, was over. Although, to be fair, since I was a walk-on, it was debatable as to whether my career ever actually started in the first place.

THIRTY-EIGHT

W
e went on the road for my first game in street clothes and took on 12th-ranked West Virginia right in the heart of where incest, coonskin caps, and John Denver songs run rampant. We came into the game ranked just 25th, but we were playing our best basketball of the season at the time and were realistically much better than the 25th-best team in America. This seemed especially true when we jumped out to a big lead in the first half and led by 12 at halftime. But the second half was a different story: West Virginia opened up with a 10–0 run before ultimately taking the lead and never looking back.