Don't Put Me In, Coach (15 page)

Even though we were still considered to be on the bubble after the Wisconsin loss, I was pretty sure that after blowing that game we had virtually no shot at making the NCAA Tournament. We were 17–10 and had four games left in the regular season, with three against ranked teams and two on the road. Sure playing ranked teams and road games provided us with some great opportunities to play our way back into the tournament with some quality wins, but with all of these games coming on the heels of the Jamar debacle, it was pretty obvious to me that there was a better chance of finding an astrophysicist in an AND1 Mixtape Tour audience than there was of us coming together as a team to make one last push for the tournament. But then again, every sports movie ever made revolves around a player or team achieving the impossible, so could it be that all that had happened throughout the year was just the setup for us to circle the wagons and make an unbelievable and dramatic run at the end of the season?

The answer is no. No, it couldn’t.

We followed up the Wisconsin loss with a three-point loss at 12th-ranked Indiana that was really only close because Indiana’s coach, Kelvin Sampson, had resigned less than a week earlier and Indiana was in just as much disarray as we were. Again, it was an understandable loss considering Indiana was a highly ranked team playing at home, but in order to make the tournament, at some
point you need to actually pull out the wins in these games. You also need to make sure that if you’re in the midst of a three-game losing streak toward the end of the season (and it’s the second three-game losing streak of the year), you don’t get blown out by 14 to an unranked Minnesota team in your next game, which is exactly what we did after the IU loss. And even though we eventually somehow closed out the regular season with a couple big wins against 15th-ranked Purdue and 18th-ranked Michigan State, it appeared as if the damage had already been done.

Unfortunately, that suspicion was confirmed in our next game, as a loss to Michigan State in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament prompted Joe Lunardi to tell us to prepare our anus for Selection Sunday because there was no way in hell we were getting a bid to the NCAA Tournament.

TWENTY

I
f there’s one thing I learned during my four years of playing college basketball, it’s that—with the exception of his affinity for wearing turtlenecks underneath his blazers—Joe Lunardi never makes a wrong decision in March. Never. The dude predicts who will make the NCAA Tournament every year a lot like Mark May predicts Ohio State football games, with the only real differences being that he substitutes terrible predictions for predictions that always turn out to be right, he doesn’t show bias against a team that he’s been butt-hurt over for the last 30 years, he actually knows what he’s talking about, and he isn’t a complete and utter douche. Anyway, the freshmen on our team were unaware of Lunardi’s brilliance and foolishly thought he could be wrong in thinking that we wouldn’t make the tournament. But I knew better.

We were 19–13 with a 3–9 record against ranked teams, our best player quit the team for two days without any real repercussions, our second-best player (Kosta) was an outcast, and our third-best player (The Villain) was crazy enough to try to start a fight with a
walk-on over a bounce pass. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, no team with all of those things on their résumé had ever made the NCAA Tournament in the history of college basketball. And it wasn’t in the cards for us to be the first, because when we gathered in the locker room to watch CBS’s
NCAA Tournament Selection Show
, Greg Gumbel confirmed the inevitable—we didn’t make the NCAA Tournament and would have to settle for the NIT instead.

As a consolation, we were given the number-one overall seed in the NIT, which was basically another way of saying that we had the best mediocre season of any team in the country. For our first game, we drew North Carolina–Asheville, led by Kenny George, who stood seven feet seven inches tall, weighed 370 pounds, and very well may have had a bigger penis than I did. But in the end, his penis did him no good in our game, as we cruised to an 18-point win in which I got to play in the final minute and do a whole lot of nothing. Our win over Asheville sent us to the second round, where we blew out Cal in a game that was played in St. John Arena (the old gym on Ohio State’s campus) because I’m pretty sure our arena (Schottenstein Center) was being used for a monster truck rally. The change in venues did nothing to deter my performance, though, as I was able to again stand in the corner and not even touch the ball as I watched the final half-minute of the game tick off the clock.

Our third-round game was back in the Schottenstein Center against Dayton in front of a capacity crowd with a trip to the NIT semifinals at Madison Square Garden in New York City on the line. (You bet your ass I just used nine prepositions in a single sentence.) Because Dayton is just an hour’s drive from Columbus, the Flyers brought a ton of fans with them and really fed off that huge block of support as they completely outplayed us in the first half and took a one-point lead into halftime. But in the second half, we came out like our dicks were on fire, took complete control of the game, and ballooned our lead to as many as 18 points before ultimately winning by 11. Other than the fact that it sent us back to the Big Apple for the second time that season, what made this game so
memorable for me was that it marked the one and only time during my college career in which I talked trash on the court during an actual game.

I checked in for the game’s final minute and fully expected to go through the motions as usual and just run out the clock. But Dayton had other ideas. After making a shot with 53 seconds left to cut our lead to 13, they applied a full-court press and put me in the uncomfortable position of having to actually exert effort on the court, which was a concept that was pretty foreign to me at that point of the season. Dayton’s fans and the commentators most likely thought it was inspiring to see the Flyers not give up and keep playing hard until the final buzzer, but my grandmother taught me a couple of different words for it—hogwash and phooey.

I felt like I needed to express my displeasure to the Dayton player who was tightly guarding me 90 feet from the basket despite the game being all but over, and did so by saying, “Listen, guy. I’m a walk-on, we’re blowing you out, and there’s less than a minute left to play. Face it—this game is over. So in the words of Ludacris, ‘Get back, motherfucker. You don’t know me like that.’ ”

I thought I had made an emphatic point, but the Dayton guy wasn’t interested and told me to “shut up, bitch.”

I said okay, jogged to the other end of the court so my teammates wouldn’t pass to me, and in doing so hung them out to dry because my absence in the backcourt made it harder for them to break the press. Sure it may have been selfish, but it also prevented me from having to dribble up the court while under heavy pressure. I regret nothing.

Beating Dayton earned us the right to play Ole Miss in the NIT semifinals in New York City, which is coincidentally where our season essentially started. But unlike our last trip to the Big Apple, we won our first game of the trip by beating Ole Miss without too much trouble, which set up a game against UMass in the championship for all the NIT marbles. In the other semifinal game, UMass had beat Florida, and in doing so they killed the possibility of us playing the Gators in the NIT championship just one year after
playing them in the National Championship, which would have been the first time such a thing had ever happened.

UMass used the same up-tempo attack and high-pressure defense against us that they used to beat Florida, and in the first half we had just as much trouble with their frenetic pace as Florida did. We were out-rebounded, out-hustled, and most importantly, outscored, as UMass’s lead swelled to double digits with just four minutes left in the first half. We ultimately got the lead down to five at halftime, but even still, we were clearly the better team and should have been having our way with them.

Throughout most of the NIT, our guys seemed disinterested on the court because the NIT was a pointless tournament. And they were able to get away with this because we were so much better than the other teams we played that we didn’t have to play 100 percent to beat them. Well, this time around, UMass wasn’t exactly a pushover like some of the other teams we played were. So to get through to my teammates and get them to play as well as they should have been playing, I decided to give them a pep talk in the locker room at halftime.

“With the exception of genocide and pedophilia, do you guys know what’s worse than playing in the NIT? Losing in the NIT! So get your heads out of your asses, stop feeling sorry for yourselves, and go out there and play like you and I know you’re capable of!”

I kind of expected all the guys to jump to their feet, burst into a mosh, tear down our locker room door on their way out to the court, and then proceed to figuratively set UMass on fire and rape all their virgins en route to the NIT Championship. Instead, Coach Matta turned to me and said, “Mark, sit your ass down and don’t ever interrupt me while I’m addressing the team again.” So yeah, not exactly the reaction I had anticipated.

Even though my speech wasn’t well received by Coach Matta, my words apparently came in loud and clear to our players, because we went on a tear in the second half, took the lead within the first two and a half minutes, and never looked back. UMass actually tied the game with about six minutes left, but the game
was never in doubt once I saw the fire in our players’ eyes right after my pep talk. Thanks to my uplifting words, when the final buzzer ultimately sounded, the scoreboard showed a seven-point advantage in our favor. We were National (Invitation Tournament) Champions.

We spilled onto the court to celebrate, but most of the guys were confused about how excited they were supposed to be. I mean, sure we won the tournament, but at the end of the day it was the NIT and being the best team in the NIT is like being the most attractive Michigan cheerleader or being Canadian. (I really do love you, Canada.) This didn’t matter to me, though, because I could see the bigger picture. Beating UMass on that night allowed me to join the likes of George Mikan, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Ralph Sampson, and Reggie Miller on the list of guys who have won a National (Invitation Tournament) Championship. And that is what’s really important—being able to find ways to loosely associate myself with some of the game’s greats. No matter where I go or what I do with the rest of my life, I will always share that common bond with these guys, and I will always be a National (Invitation Tournament) Champion. And nobody will ever be able to take that from me.

Well, nobody except the NCAA, who will most likely vacate all four of my years at Ohio State once they find out that I was on all sorts of illicit drugs during my entire career, ranging from anabolic steroids to Adonis DNA. But let’s keep that our little secret.

PART FOUR

I don’t even know what that is, nor do I care
.

—Coach Matta, when asked for his thoughts on my blog

TWENTY-ONE

A
funny thing happened in between my sophomore and junior seasons at Ohio State, provided that you have a sick sense of humor and think that somebody realizing that their childhood dream is unattainable is a funny thing. Even though everything I’ve written up to this point would lead you to believe otherwise, the truth is that I actually did take basketball seriously during my first two years in college and I did want to play in the games. But I wanted to play on my terms, which is to say I wanted to play when the game was still in the balance instead of being the human victory cigar that capped off blowout wins.

I screwed around a lot off the court, sure, but during practices I busted my ass and took it just as seriously as everyone else because I wanted to work my way into more playing time. (Okay, I’ll admit it was hard for me to write that sentence with a straight face—I really did work hard in practice, but saying I busted my ass and worked as hard as everyone else is probably a slight exaggeration.) Deep down on the inside, I wanted to be a part of the regular rotation of guys and actually play in the first half, but on the outside I
masked everything by joking around in the locker room and being way too cool to play hard when I checked in for the final minute of games.

After playing AAU with Greg, Mike, and Daequan for so many years and being regularly called upon to make significant contributions (did I mention that I led the team in scoring a few times? I did? Oh, well this is just another reminder then), I figured that once I walked-on at Ohio State, I would bust my ass and eventually get to play at least a handful of minutes in each game after a few years. My lifelong goal had always been to actually play for a Big Ten basketball team, not to just sit on the bench, so I owed it to myself to give it a legitimate chance. What I failed to consider, though, was that I never actually had any semblance of a chance, no matter how hard or how well I would’ve played in practice. This was confirmed when Coach Matta admitted to me after I graduated that he would never play a walk-on over a scholarship player under any circumstances ever. (This would’ve been great information to have when I originally walked-on instead of a month after I was done playing.)

Still, I didn’t need to hear him actually admit that he’d never play me because within my first two years it was already obvious that Coach Matta had told my childhood dream and lifelong goal to lick his butthole. In my first two seasons, my status on the team remained entirely unchanged. Actually it got worse, since we had more guys on the team my sophomore season and thus I dropped from 11th man to 12th man on the hypothetical depth chart. And so, when two years of giving it my all and playing the best basketball I had ever and will ever play in my life didn’t get me anywhere, I decided to change my focus, just have fun, and stop giving anything that could even remotely be interpreted as a shit.