Don't Put Me In, Coach (11 page)

For example, if you eat too much, you’ll get fat. If you have too much sex, you’ll most likely get an STD or an unwanted pregnancy. If you drink too much alcohol, you’ll either vomit or go home with a fugly chick that you’ll regret in the morning. And if you are attracted to a girl just a little too much, and you stand in the shrubs just outside of her house with your pants at your ankles and watch
her every move through her living room window, you’ll most likely go to jail or at the very least get a restraining order slapped on you. (Some chicks just can’t appreciate a true gentlemanly gesture.)

In my case, I was having too much fun with basketball. In my first year of college, I lucked my way onto a Big Ten basketball team, I lucked my way into a scholarship (I forgot to mention that the basketball program had extra full-ride scholarships, so they gave me one that would’ve otherwise gone to waste), and I lucked my way into a front-row seat to one of the more thrilling NCAA Tournament runs in history that culminated in a trip to the Final Four and a shot at the National Championship.

In a single season I had been able to do things that most people—even most
Division I basketball players
—would never have the opportunity to do. Quite simply, things were too good to be true for me, and my world needed to balance itself out and somehow bring me back down to earth. But, you might be asking, with the exception of being kicked off the team, what could possibly bring you down from the high that must have came from going to the Final Four with your childhood friends? Answer: Evan “The Villain” Turner, that’s what.

After my magical freshman season ended with us coming up just a little short against Florida in the National Championship, the only three guys at Ohio State I had known before I enrolled at the school (Greg, Mike, and Daequan) all chose to forgo their final three years of eligibility and enter the NBA draft. For Mike and Greg, this was a pretty obvious decision—the “draft stock” for both guys was as high as it was ever going to be after they both played out of their minds throughout the NCAA Tournament. And while I originally thought that Daequan, who was our sixth man and averaged only 10 points per game, was crazy for leaving early, I changed my mind after I found in his dorm a five-page paper he had written for a class that had a big red “0%” at the top of it and a note from his professor on the back page that read, “It’s obvious that you didn’t read the book and had no understanding of what was expected with this assignment. Your entire paper discusses
things that are irrelevant for this assignment and this class. Please come to my office sometime this week.”

I still can’t believe the professor dropped the ball on a perfect opportunity to quote
Billy Madison
: “What you have just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in the English department is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.” But I digress. What I’m trying to say here is, Daequan wasn’t exactly suited for higher education and it was probably a good idea for him to enter the workforce as soon as he possibly could.

When those guys left, not only did I lose a few friends, but I also lost my security blanket. I was comfortable busting my teammates’ balls throughout my freshman year because I was friends with the two best players on the team and figured that was enough to get me a free pass. In no way was this true (I got a “free pass” because my teammates were laid back), but it didn’t matter because that’s how I thought. So when those three guys left, I initially kept to myself and tried to figure out how I fit in with my new team.

The combination of isolating myself in the locker room, being the only guy on the team who didn’t live in the dorm (I had a one-bedroom apartment five miles off campus), and being kind of antisocial to begin with took its toll. Instead of going out with some of the guys on the team after practices, most nights I’d lock myself in my apartment, stare into a mirror, and remind myself that I was a loser with no friends. (I wish I was joking.) After a few months of this, my mom finally got through to me and convinced me to try to “start being yourself again.” I gave her advice some thought and realized she was right—I needed to go back to doing the things that made my freshman year so awesome, even if my old friends weren’t around anymore. Thus, the next day at practice I went back to being my old self by finding ways to pick on the freshmen on our team, which was a group that included a guy by the name of Evan Turner.

Other than Evan, the freshmen on our team during my sophomore season were Jon Diebler, Dallas Lauderdale, Kosta Koufos, and Eric Wallace. And while I made fun of every one of them pretty much every day, Evan was by far my favorite target because he made it incredibly easy to get under his skin. When I made fun of Jon for looking like McLovin and being pigeon-toed, he laughed about it and made fun of me for having a muffin top. When I made fun of Dallas for wearing a neon-green undershirt with a brown hoodie for a week straight, he took it as a compliment. When I made fun of Kosta for sticking his chest out and looking at himself in the mirror when we lifted weights, well, he didn’t pay attention to me because he was too busy sticking his chest out and looking at himself in the mirror. And when I made fun of Eric for being even more socially awkward than I was, he wouldn’t say anything and would just smile and give me a high-five before walking away.

None of those guys ever got too worked up over anything I said because they knew it was just all in good fun. But Evan was different. How was he different, you ask? Put it this way: you know how after your Little League baseball games everyone would ride in the back of a pickup truck to Dairy Queen and your coach would deliver bad news by telling you that you were only allowed to spend two dollars each? If you answered no, I weep for your deprived childhood. But if you answered yes, you surely remember how the cool kids would pool their money together and get a Treatzza Pizza that they’d split three ways. And how the not as cool yet still perfectly normal kids would just get an ice cream cone, a couple of Dilly Bars, or a Peanut Buster Parfait, or whatever. Well, Evan was like that one doucher little kid in the group who spent his money on a Mr. f’ingMisty and a small order of fries. I trust you now have a solid understanding of just how weird Evan was.

When Evan came to Ohio State, he had a huge chip on his shoulder and his mind made up that everyone was trying to either piss him off or keep him from playing in the NBA. In his defense, I eventually did make it my goal to try to piss him off every day, but that wasn’t until a couple years later, so there was no real excuse
for his initial paranoia. But whatever the case, from the moment he set foot on campus he was the epitome of a guy who couldn’t take a joke.

So when I decided that it was time for me to “start being myself again,” Evan didn’t take too kindly to any jokes I made at his expense. Being the asshole that I am, I took his reactions as an open invitation to make him a target until he learned to lighten up and realize that his teammates had his back and wanted the team to be just as successful as he did. This only added fuel to fire and led to Evan and me becoming sworn enemies. We butted heads for the better part of three years, and by the time our tenure as teammates was eventually through, Evan had tried to fight me no less than three times and actually threw punches on one of those occasions.

FIFTEEN

I
f you were to ask any of the guys on the 2007–2008 Ohio State men’s basketball team what the feeling in the locker room was like in the months leading up to the start of the season, my guess is that every one of them would tell you that an obvious schism existed. (Okay, so most of the guys probably wouldn’t know what “schism” means and would’ve just described the locker room as a nonviolent version of the East Coast–West Coast rap feud or the Bloods and Crips, but you get the idea.) The year before we had successfully integrated a high-profile group of freshman recruits with the veterans of the team, but this time around was a different story. Because of our run to the National Championship game, the new crop of freshmen felt a sense of entitlement and expected to be the focal point of the team and just cruise to the Final Four like the freshmen before them had. This immaturity offended us older guys, and we took pride in putting them in their place when they refused to acknowledge that we knew more about what it takes to win in college basketball than they did.

Perhaps the most telling sign that we couldn’t work together as
a team was when we returned to The World’s Largest Pillow Fight at the start of the school year. Instead of obliterating our undersized classmates like the year before, we were overpowered to the point that Kyle was hit in the face so hard with a pillow by some random kid that one of his eyes literally watered for the next 72 hours. It was obvious that leadership was sorely lacking, and as a sophomore walk-on, I didn’t feel I was in a position to step up and bring the team together, so I just sat back and watched the madness unfold.

The coaches eventually picked up on the rift and organized a trip to a local SWAT team obstacle course just a few weeks before practice was set to start as a way to help with the team-building process. This obstacle course was used by the real Columbus SWAT team for their training and consisted of running, jumping, ziplining, climbing, crawling, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and all sorts of other things I was terrible at, which kind of made me wonder if the coaches were trying to run me off the team. I should mention that compounding the problem of me being unathletic and a little overweight was the fact that I had swollen testicles because I was still recovering from a surgery I had over the summer to fix a varicocele in my sack. And by “I should mention,” I mean that I should keep that information to myself because it’s incredibly personal and embarrassing, and writing about it in my book is proof that I obviously have no self-respect.

Nonetheless, even though my nutsack was honest to God the size of a softball, my urologist had cleared me for physical activity because he claimed that I had fully healed from my surgery. (He and I clearly had different definitions of “fully healed.”) Since swollen balls apparently weren’t a legitimate excuse to sit out, I had no choice but to suck it up and do my best to get through the obstacle course, which I found out right away would be more challenging than I could have ever anticipated.

When we arrived at the SWAT facility, a group of cops greeted us and told us to split into two teams for a competition to see who could get through the obstacle course the quickest. Now, common sense would say we should have mixed the teams up so that freshmen
and veterans were both on each team, which explains why we did the exact opposite. One group was comprised of the seven guys who had been on the team the year before, while the other group was made up of the six new guys.

The veterans decided to go first so we could set the tone and then taunt the younger guys as they went through the course, and we also decided that our weakest guy (from the standpoint of who would take the longest to get through the course) should start us off so the stronger guys could clip his heels and motivate him to move faster. As you could probably guess, thanks to the shot put in my pants, I was that guy.

“The first thing you gotta do,” one cop said as he pointed to a 20-foot log suspended eight feet in the air, “is climb up onto that and shift your way across. If you’re strong enough, just hang off the side and move across it like you would on monkey bars. If you’ve got good enough balance, you can run across it. But if you lose your grip or fall off, you’ve got to start over. That’s why pretty much all of us agree that the best method is to straddle it and just scoot backwards the entire way.” Seeing as how I wasn’t strong and I had terrible balance, this meant my only choice was to use the straddling method. With a ballsack the size of an orange. Awesome.

After what seemed like 30 minutes of scooting and sarcastically yelling “I ain’t no bitch!” for no reason in particular, I ended the most painful experience of my life and made it across the log. Once I conquered that first obstacle, the rest of the course was a breeze, which is to say that the rest of the course didn’t directly involve me putting a ton of pressure on my swollen testicles as I dragged them across a log. In the end, even though we had to overcome my genital problem and we had one more person in our group, the veterans still beat the new guys by over 10 minutes, which led to trash-talking by both groups and only made matters worse. By the time we all made it back to our gym, showered, and went home, the veterans and new guys probably had more animosity for each other than when the day started. So yeah, I’d say the whole team-building thing kinda backfired.

A couple of weeks later, we played our first exhibition game against Ashland on Halloween night and won by 29, which gave us all sorts of false confidence. After all, just one season earlier we had played in the Division I National Championship game while Ashland went 16–12 in Division II, so there really wasn’t any reason for us to be pounding our chests. Our overconfidence came back to bite us in the second and final exhibition of the season a week later against Findlay, when the combination of thinking we were better than what we actually were and the increasing lack of unity on our team made the game a memorable one for all the wrong reasons.

Although, like Ashland, Findlay was a Division II team, they had gone 28–5 the year before and had most of their team back, making them the favorites to win the D-II National Championship that year (which they ultimately did en route to a 36–0 season). But our guys apparently thought all D-II teams were created equal and didn’t see Findlay as a serious threat. This proved to be a terrible decision because Findlay and their slew of upperclassmen ended up beating our mess of a team by two points on our home court. So to recap, seven months after coming within one game of being crowned the best team in Division I college basketball, we suddenly weren’t even the best team in Division II.