Don't Put Me In, Coach (6 page)

As I told him that it wasn’t a big deal because I actually planned on shaving it anyway and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet, Greg walked by sporting a ferocious beard that made my beard look like Sidney Crosby’s wispy excuse for facial hair. When I pointed to Greg with a confused look on my face, Coach Matta laughed and said, “Well, he’s Greg Oden. You understand, right?” I shook my head in amazement at the blatant favoritism, laughed, walked to
the court, started stretching for practice, and proceeded to ralph for the next two hours because I was so out of shape.

The next day was our first game of the season against VMI, and while Greg couldn’t play because he was recovering from wrist surgery (he sat out our first seven games), Ohio State fans were obviously less concerned with Greg’s wrist and more concerned with whether or not I’d be suiting up. That’s because it was rumored throughout the day that there was a chance I couldn’t play in the game since our equipment guy wasn’t completely sure he’d get my jersey shipped from Nike in time, even though he had it express-delivered. Seriously.

I was all sorts of nervous, not only because I wanted to dress for the game but also because I knew it would be a huge letdown for my family to see me on the bench in street clothes after driving three hours to Columbus, not to mention driving themselves into a frenzy for the previous 48 hours over the thought of me playing college basketball for a Big Ten team. But in the end there was nothing to worry about because our equipment guy got the jersey from UPS in the early afternoon and finished stitching my name and number onto it with a few hours to spare (which I’m sure was much to the dismay of all the seventh-graders in attendance who were hoping he would be in such a hurry to get my jersey done that he’d forget to include the “U” in my last name). Crisis averted.

When the game finally started, it was the most mentally draining experience of my life. At any given moment, I was either pinching myself because I was living out a dream I’d had since I was five, or I was trying to get prepared to go in because I was naive and thought that Coach Matta might have been dumb enough to play me significant minutes for whatever reason. As I sat on the bench and watched us match VMI’s up-tempo style of play, led by the nation’s leading scorer in Reggie Williams (who now plays for the Charlotte Bobcats), my palms started sweating at the thought of possibly having to play. After all, the key to success against VMI is to have a team full of good ballhandlers in excellent physical condition (coincidentally, that’s also the key to running a successful
brothel), and those were two of my biggest weaknesses on a basketball court. In other words, the fact that disaster was inevitable was weighing heavily on my mind.

As the game progressed I realized that I wasn’t going to see the court unless we got a big lead, thanks largely in part to an assistant coach telling me during a time-out, “You aren’t going to see the court unless we get a big lead.” This was originally a huge relief for me, but it didn’t take long for us to build an insurmountable lead and make me start sweating bullets again. Then, with the game completely out of hand and only a few minutes left, Coach Matta finally gave me the nod and put me out of my misery.

I checked in with three minutes remaining, which was about 2 minutes and 45 seconds more than my body was physically prepared for, and said a quick prayer in which I asked God to not let me make an ass out of myself. Luckily, thanks to a little help from my adrenaline, the first two minutes went by in a flash. But when a VMI player shot a three in the last minute of play and the rebound fell into my hands, time seemed to stand still. I looked up to see a wide-open court ahead and did the only thing I thought made sense in that situation—I put my head down, started dribbling, and ran as fast as I could toward our basket. I didn’t exactly have a plan, but since I was incredibly slow I knew I’d have plenty of time to figure it out.

Ultimately, I decided to try to score, most likely because I assumed the shot clock was about to run out after it took me an eternity to dribble down the court, and went up for a layup at the exact moment a VMI defender apparently wondered if he could shove his fist up my nose. I missed the layup, but since I was hammered, a foul was called and I was awarded two free throws. In that moment, I realized that I hadn’t given the situation enough thought, as having thousands of people focus solely on me while I shot free throws was the last thing my battered nerves needed. But since I didn’t have the wherewithal to fake an injury and let someone else shoot the free throws for me, I had no choice but to suck it up.

As the ref bounced me the ball, I told myself over and over,
Just don’t airball it
, and did my best to deal with the sweat pouring from my palms. I took a deep breath, lined up the first shot, and let it go. What happened next is something I’ll never forget. As luck would have it, the ball slipped right out of my hands as I released it, missed the basket entirely, and landed a foot short of the baseline.

Just kidding. I swished both of them bitches.

And with that, my illustrious college basketball career was off to a blazing start.

EIGHT

W
e followed up our annihilation of VMI by beating Loyola Chicago and Kent State in consecutive days to win the BCA (Black Coaches and Administrators) Classic, which really wasn’t that big of a deal because everybody knows the BCA Classic is only three-fifths as prestigious a tournament as the WCA Classic. Nonetheless, winning the tournament was important to the guys on our team because, even though we had only played three games and all of our opponents were less than stellar, rattling off three straight wins with ease seemed to confirm our collective initial thought that we had a chance to be pretty special. After all, the chemistry we showed on the court was nothing more than an extension of the great team chemistry we had already established off the court.

The first time we all took notice of how well we worked together was at “The World’s Largest Pillow Fight,” which is an event held on Ohio State’s campus at the start of every academic year that has never once actually set the record as the world’s largest
pillow fight. Because of the nature of the pillow fight, most of us saw this as our first team-building test, and if that is in fact what it was, there’s no denying that we passed with flying colors. And by “passed with flying colors” I obviously mean that everyone on the basketball team and I (I hadn’t been added to the team yet) picked out a couple of nerds, ganged up on them, and beat them senseless to the point that we probably could have been arrested for attempted murder.

Sure it was alarming that to Jamar Butler, who once cracked the windshield of his own car when he punched it in a sudden fit of rage, a “pillow fight” apparently meant “wrap a tiny pillow around your knuckles and punch people in the face.” And sure it was probably not great for society that a bunch of big, strong athletes (and me) basically brutally assaulted a handful of defenseless kids, but you know what? I’m willing to look past all of that because what really mattered was that we assaulted those kids
as a team
. When Jamar noticed that Daequan was having trouble making a kid’s face bleed, he showed Daequan that he had his back by connecting a vicious right hook to the kid’s schnoz. And when Jamar failed to knock another nerd completely unconscious, Daequan returned the favor and put the kid’s lights out. Meanwhile, I filled in wherever I could and used my Ultimate Warrior Wrestling Buddy to blindside as many people as possible. It was the kind of teamwork that would have made any coach proud. And just so we’re clear, what I wrote in this paragraph is only a slight exaggeration of what actually happened.

Since Coach Matta made all the basketball players live on the same floor of the same dorm (upperclassmen included), we basically spent every second of every day together, which made it that much easier for us to build our chemistry even more. (This also made things a lot easier for the groupies, since they could just move one room over after their services were no longer needed in the original room they visited.) This might come as a surprise to some, but because we were athletes, Ohio State hooked us up and put us
in a dorm that typically housed graduate students, which is to say that it wasn’t like all the other dorms on campus in that every unit had its own bathroom, kitchen, and living room to go along with the bedroom. The upperclassmen were given individual units, but the freshmen weren’t as lucky. The four freshmen who were actually recruited to play basketball at OSU all shared the same kitchen and living room, but their dorm came with two bathrooms and each guy got his own bedroom.

I, on the other hand, was at the bottom of the totem pole and therefore had to share every room with my roommate, who, like me, was also a longtime friend of Greg and Mike and had used his relationship with them to become a manager for the basketball team. (Our dorm was still better than what every other freshman had on campus, so I can’t complain too much.) Anyway, because the four other freshmen all had full-ride scholarships and essentially were given unlimited money from the school to spend on food, and I was a walk-on who had to pay for everything out of my (parents’) own pocket, I developed a Robin Hood mentality and frequently raided their fridge and food pantry whenever they were gone. (For reasons still unknown to me, they never locked their door when they left.) Looking back, I have no idea why I kept trying to swipe food from them when all they usually ever had in their dorm was orange soda, Sour Skittles, and hot sauce, but I guess that just goes to show how dire my financial situation really was.

After a few months of stealing food that I didn’t even like, I got a pleasant surprise when I found over half of a large pizza in the fridge one day, figured that would be my dinner for the evening, and decided to take the entire box back to my room. (Yeah, I know stealing food like that is a dick move, but I rationalized it by convincing myself that I was pulling a prank on them. It made sense to me at the time.) But as I took a few steps out of the kitchen and toward their front door, Greg came out of his bedroom and caught me red-handed. Before I could utter a word, he turned back to his room and yelled, “Aw hell naw! You’re a dead man!” I looked down at the box, saw Greg’s name written on it, and instantly realized
he was going back to his room to get his Nerf gun. Yes, you read that right—his Nerf gun.

You see, Greg carried this Nerf gun with him pretty much everywhere he went and would shoot guys on the team with it whenever he felt we were out of line. He thought of himself as the leader of our team and felt it was his duty to keep everyone under control, which he apparently thought could best be accomplished with help from a children’s toy. The “bullets” of the gun were Styrofoam darts with suction cups attached to the ends, but after Greg got drunk with power and started shooting people for no reason in particular, it got annoying real fast.

Anybody who has a son or has babysat a toddler boy knows what I’m talking about. Sure it doesn’t hurt, but it only takes one instance of having a dart suctioned to your forehead because Greg/the toddler came out of nowhere and shot you in the face while you were trying to watch TV for that damn Nerf gun to piss you off. Well, I reached my boiling point with him and his Nerf gun when that exact thing happened to me. He quickly figured out how much I hated that thing and decided to annoy me with it even more. (I would’ve done the exact same thing if I were him, so I can’t really blame him.) The Nerf gun was my nemesis and he knew it. This is why I had no doubt in my mind what he was doing when he headed back to his room.

I shot out of their dorm with pizza in hand and Greg and his Nerf gun on my heels. As I was running down the hallway back to my room, I dropped the pizza on the floor for no other reason than I was trying to use the same strategy that those bad guys use in movies when they create an obstacle/diversion by tipping over trash cans as the cops are chasing them through an alley. This was a terrible idea and in no way worked like I thought it would. Undaunted, I continued my sprint toward my dorm, busted open my door, and made a beeline for my bathroom. After months of regularly eating whatever it was Ohio State’s cafeterias tried to pass off as food, this was a procedure I had rehearsed many times before, and all that practice helped me gain a little ground on Greg.
Right as Greg followed my trail and came through the front door of my dorm, I stepped into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind me to lock him out.

In an act of desperation, Greg shot a dart at me before I could get the door all the way closed, but he missed and the dart ended up in the bathroom with me. I knew Greg wouldn’t mind waiting it out, and I knew as soon as I opened the bathroom door I’d be faced with a barrage of darts, so it was clear to me that my only way out was to do something so drastic it would cause a ceasefire. In other words, my only choice was to suction that dart I had with me to my nuts.

I unzipped the fly of my jeans and let my boys breathe, and then put a little water on the suction cup of the dart to make it stick to my sack. With my nads hanging out of the fly of my jeans and the dart solidly latched onto them, I opened the door and told Greg if he wanted his dart back he’d have to grab it himself. He was so appalled at the sight of one of his darts fastened to my junk that he lowered his gun and admitted defeat. And with that, I had achieved the impossible: I killed Greg’s desire to use his beloved Nerf gun.

After I eventually removed the dart and put my testes back in my pants, Greg and I laughed off the incident and watched some TV. Five minutes later, when whatever show we were watching went to commercial, Greg grabbed his Nerf gun and asked, “How many darts do you think I can get stuck to the TV?” I told him there was no way he could get five of the six darts to stick on the TV screen because the suction cups on the darts didn’t work very well, to which he simply replied, “You’re on.”

He gathered all of his darts, made them all point the same direction, bunched them up in his fist, and ran his tongue over each and every one of them to improve their suction. I decided to wait for him to finishing licking the darts before I reminded him that one of them had just been attached to my scrotum, and once I did, he tried to convince me that that particular dart wasn’t in his hand. But when he looked down and saw that he was holding all six darts, he realized that he couldn’t deny the truth any longer.