Mark Titus's Blog, page 10

Catching Up With Some Old Friends

I’m going to do it.  This week, I’m going to try to achieve what I’ve always assumed was impossible.  No, I’m not going to watch an entire WNBA game or try to rapidly drink a gallon of milk.  And no, I’m not going to become a vegan or try to teach Deshaun Thomas (who – by the way – might already be my favorite Ohio State athlete ever) how to pass a basketball.  And I’m certainly not going to try to memorize all of the lyrics to “Informer” or try to physically lift Evan “The Villain” Turner’s girlfriend off the ground without the help of a forklift or some sort of advanced machinery.  No, what I’m going to attempt is much more difficult than any of these things.  That’s because I’m going to try to write five blog posts in five days.  I’ll say it again in case you didn’t catch that and for whatever reason have some weird personal philosophy that prevents you from rereading things: I’m going to try to write five blog posts in five days.  Yes, I know I’m crazy for attempting to multiply my output by almost infinity and yes I’m fully aware of how dangerous this could ultimately be, which is why I took all the necessary precautions and have paramedics standing by should the unthinkable happen.

For this first blog post, I figured I’d write about my journey to Indiana this past weekend because there literally isn’t a single thing that any one of you can do to stop me.  I initially went back to Indiana to play in the Travis Smith Memorial Golf Classic in Terre Haute but ultimately ended up staying at my parents’ house in my hometown for a few days after the event just because my mom kept making me free meals.  I’ve discussed my mom’s limited cooking abilities on this blog before, so intuition would tell you that staying for a free meal cooked by her would be like getting domed up by a great white shark – while the “what” seems pretty awesome, perhaps a little more attention should be paid to the “who.” 

But despite her culinary shortcomings, the fact of the matter is that she’s really not that bad of a cook and she can certainly cook much better than I can.  And most importantly, her meals are free, which is a huge deal because there’s no denying that the best things in life are free, even if they also happen to be slightly burnt and could probably use a little more seasoning.  Anyway, after constantly stuffing my face for a few days and putting on at least five pounds, I had no choice but to flee my parents’ house and come back home to Ohio lest I develop type 2 diabetes and what would have surely been a nice set of man tits.

By the way, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that while I know this is fairly obvious and pretty much goes without saying, it’s impossible to adequately describe how glorious that first poop you take after a long weekend of gorging at your parents’ house is.  Every time I question why I visit my parents and subject myself to the self-loathing that comes with quadrupling my daily caloric intake, that post-visiting the parents poop is always there to remind me and is what ultimately makes me return time and time again.

But back to the golf outing.  Most of you probably don’t know this, but Greg Oden’s best friend since childhood, Travis Smith, died in a car accident in January of 2007, when we were in the midst of our freshman season at OSU.  Ever since then, a golf outing has been held in Travis’ hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana to honor Travis and benefit the local Boys & Girls Club.  This year, Greg financed his own personal team and asked me to be on it, most likely because I told him that I was a scratch golfer (to be fair, I thought “scratch golfer” meant that you typically get so frustrated during a round of golf that you stop keeping score and just scratch out the remainder of the scorecard). 

Since he hosts the event and can therefore do whatever he damn well pleases, Greg made sure that Team Oden had one more player than all the other teams, which was significant because we were playing a best ball scramble so our team had one more opportunity to hit a good shot than the other teams did.  I was obviously the anchor of the team but other Team Oden members included Mike Conley, Josh McRoberts, a former AAU teammate of all of ours named Reece who played pro baseball for a few years and is now going to play basketball at UIndy, and my roommate from my freshman year at OSU who played high school basketball with Mike and Greg.  Had this been a Gus Macker, we would have no doubt mushroom stamped the competition, won the thing with ease, and most likely had a celebration party at a local strip club where we would’ve let the strippers drink Hennessy out of our trophy as we did lines of coke off their breasts.  Sadly, though, this was a golf outing and not a basketball tournament, and the golfing ability of the guys on our team ranged from “atrocious” to “somewhat decent.”

The best player on our team was definitely Mike, who goes golfing pretty much every day and typically shoots somewhere in the low to mid 80s, but I found out when I got to the course that Mike would have to leave after 9 holes because he had a flight to Arkansas to catch.  This meant that I was going to be our team’s best player for the back nine.  As you can imagine, this was less than good news for our team.  I’m not exactly a terrible golfer (typically shoot high 80s/low 90s) simply because I go so often (I would go every day if I could afford it.  In fact, my life plan looks like this: “Step 1 – Get rich. Step 2 – Golf.”), but as a general rule of thumb, it’s probably not a good thing if I’m the best on the team, regardless of what sport we’re talking about.  This particular instance was no exception.

Since we sucked so badly after Mike left (and honestly weren’t really doing that well even when Mike was with us), we decided to do something about it and fix our problems, which is to say we decided to honor one of the great historic traditions in golf and cheat like crazy so people wouldn’t mock us for being horrible golfers.  Throughout the last nine holes, each of us took multiple tee shots on each hole, we interpreted “club length relief” as “put the ball back on the fairway and cut a stroke off your score”, we treated any ball that was within 20 feet of the hole as a gimmie, and we even just blatantly wrote down a score that was in no way anywhere close to what we actually got a few times.

After most of the holes on the back nine, Josh and I contemplated what to write down on the scorecard, because we wanted to obviously get a good score but still wanted to make sure we didn’t go overboard and end up accidentally winning the thing since it would’ve been obvious that we cheated.  In the end, our final reported score was a 9-under 62, which we thought was pretty good and would’ve been enough for a top 5 finish that would’ve got the ladies all hot and bothered.  But as it turned out, even with our blatant disregarding of the rules, we still finished something like third to last and were probably made fun of by everyone. 

But not all was lost, though, because during the round Josh (who plays for the Indiana Pacers) confirmed what I had always thought was true when he essentially told me that Larry Bird (who is the Pacers’ President of Basketball Operations) is a total badass who drinks and smokes whenever he feels like it, says exactly what’s on his mind without a care in the world about who he might offend, and pretty much does whatever the f**k he wants because he’s Larry F’ing Bird. Learning this information and realizing that my idol is exactly as awesome as I hoped he would be is unquestionably a win for me, no matter where the final standings said our team finished for the day.

After the golf outing, we all decided to reject reality and have a pool party at Greg’s new house in Indy to celebrate our big win.  I showed up an hour after I was told the party was supposed to start because in my experience I’ve found that an hour is usually how long it takes for all the butt-naked hos to arrive and really get the party started.  You can call it fashionably late if you want to, but I prefer to call it “trying to time it up perfectly so I’m not stuck at a party that has a serious deficiency of butt-naked hos.”

Anyway, when I walked into Greg’s house, three things immediately stood out to me: 1) It was just Greg’s summer house that he plans on giving to his grandma because it’s not nice/big enough, and it was still nicer and bigger than any house I’ll ever own in my life, 2) A life-size sculpture of his penis was resting on the mantle above his fireplace, with the base of the shaft actually resting on the fireplace and the flaccid replica of his penis hanging down from the mantle so the tip of the penis was just a few inches from the fireplace, and 3) There wasn’t a single butt-naked ho in sight (I made up one of those three observations. I’ll let you figure out which one).  My first course of action was to bring this third observation up to Greg, as I said to him, “Greg, I’ve seen Entourage.  I know how you big shots party.  Where are the heaps of cocaine that are supposed to be randomly placed throughout the house?  Where are the people having casual sex in plain sight despite the fact that nobody at the party has any idea who they are?  Why are there not topless chicks walking around in the shallow end of your pool and kissing each other just because some horny dude at the party dared them to?  You call this a party?”  He responded by saying, “Shut up, asshole.  Do you want a beer or not?” and hitting me in the balls before he walked to the kitchen.  Touché.

Apparently this “party” was actually just a laid back get-together with less than 10 people, which was a serious buzzkill for me but probably was for the better considering that I’m scheduled to get married in less than a year.  Anyway, since the party kinda sucked by my standards, the only real reason I even bring it up is to discuss Greg’s house.  Now, the house wasn’t exactly a multimillion dollar estate with an Olympic sized pool and a guest house or anything wild like that, but it was still pretty sweet considering that it had a pool with a slide in the backyard, an upstairs and a basement,  nice new furniture throughout the house (including a brand new piano and a pool table), flat screen TVs everywhere, a sound system that could be controlled throughout the entire house, and a theater room with a huge projector screen and a couple rows of seats (and let’s not forget that this was just his summer house that he plans on giving away because it’s not cool enough).

As we were all sitting in the theater room, Reece asked Greg if he had any video game systems hooked up to the projector, to which Greg replied, “I have them all.”  Reece then decided he wanted to play Madden on Xbox 360 and I said I’d play against him, so Greg took a few minutes to get everything set up and then handed Reece and me some controllers.  But the controllers didn’t work because they were fresh out of the box and had never even been charged before, let alone used.  Reece and I quickly figured this out, so we walked to the closet where the video game systems were stored and we looked for the stuff we needed to charge the controllers. 

As we were looking, I noticed that all the game systems looked brand new and all the games and DVDs he had on a shelf right next to everything looked new too.  That’s when it hit me – Greg has so much f’ing money that he just thought to himself, “What does this room need? Hmm, maybe some video games”, went out and bought at least three video game systems and a bunch of games to go with, probably paid someone to hook everything up for him, and then just let them sit in this closet where he most likely had never touched any of them (as evidenced by the fact that there were still stickers on the controllers and they hadn’t been charged yet). 

When Greg walked back into the room, Reece and I had turned the TV back to Sportscenter or something.  Greg started to ask Reece why we weren’t playing Xbox, but I interrupted him because I just couldn’t help but address what was on my mind. I said, “Greg, do you ever just sit in this chair in your theater room of your summer house, push this button that makes your electric powered leather chair recline without you having to exert any effort whatsoever, watch TV on your gigantic projector screen, and think to yourself, ‘Holy shit I’m rich’?”  He stopped talking to Reece midsentence, turned his head toward me, looked me in the eye with a straight face for a few beats of silence like I was the world’s biggest dumbass, and emphatically said, “No” before he turned back and again asked Reece why we weren’t playing Xbox.  That told me everything I needed to know – this guy has more money than he can even comprehend.

Now, I know some of you are probably thinking “Congratulations, dude. You know somebody rich. Aren’t you f**king special?  Too bad you’re still a poor douche who won’t amount to anything with your own life.”  And to that I say, you’re probably right albeit kind of impolite.  The point of me telling you about Greg’s house wasn’t because I was somehow vicariously bragging through Greg or because I think I’m awesome for knowing a millionaire.  The point of that story is that Greg has more money than I could ever even spend and it kind of blows my mind to think about it and actually see it in person (since he went to the NBA, I’ve probably only seen Greg maybe 5 times a year and most of those times are at OSU’s gym or when we go out to a bar or something.  I’ve never actually been to any of his houses that he’s bought with his NBA riches until this past weekend). 

More importantly, the point of that story is that I’m now kind of beating myself up over the fact that I didn’t forge a stronger relationship with Greg when we were teammates and therefore missed out on a great opportunity to secure a spot in his entourage as one of his primary moochers. 

There’s no telling how many butt-naked hos I could’ve partied with by now.

Proud To Be An American But Even Prouder To Be A Buckeye,

Mark Titus

Club Trillion Founder

How I Feel About The Brickyard 400

Being a native of Indiana and one of the few NASCAR fans who can form an articulate sentence and can say with absolute certainty that I have never kissed my cousin, the last week of July is typically a week that I spend doing a lot of explaining to people.  That’s because the last week of July is when the Brickyard 400 is held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and is therefore the time of year that all sorts of people over here in Ohio ask me if I’m going back home for the race and then look at me like I just pulled my testicles out of my pants and rested them on their forehead when I tell them “absolutely not.” 

Part of their disbelief comes from the fact that it’s no secret that I think the Indy 500 is the single most sacred event (sporting event or otherwise) in the world and that I’ve actually ended relationships with my friends and girlfriends when they didn’t want to accompany me to the race because they claimed that it didn’t appeal to them.  I’ve made it well-known that the Indy 500 is a really big f’ing deal to me, so people assume that because I actually prefer NASCAR to the IndyCar series, I must really be pitching a tent towards the end of July because I get to watch my favorite drivers race on my favorite track just a few miles from my hometown.  After all, the Brickyard 400 is essentially just the Indy 500 for NASCAR, right? 

The answer is of course not, stupid.  Much like Disney’s Doug and a deep fried hand job, the Brickyard 400 is a perfect example of how it’s entirely possible to put two otherwise great things together and create something far worse than the individual parts.

Let me first say that my disdain for the Brickyard 400 doesn’t come from me being some sort of traditionalist who hates the fact that the 500 isn’t the only race run on the sacred IMS track anymore, which is how some people in Indy felt when the Brickyard first started in 1994.  I’m perfectly fine with the idea of there being another race at IMS.  Hell, I’d be fine with there being a race every weekend at IMS so long as they all featured quality racing and a crazy party.  But that’s where the Brickyard 400 falls short and is really why I have such an issue with it – the racing sucks and the party is even worse.  On the surface, it seems like the Brickyard 400 has all the necessary elements to make for an awesome experience, but it only takes one trip to the Indy 500 and one trip to the Brickyard 400 to notice the vast difference and get the overwhelming feeling that, like a dry college campus or a prude supermodel, there are serious problems that completely outweigh any and all positives.

First let’s tackle the racing.  Now, I don’t pretend to be a racing expert and even though I’ve been watching NASCAR for as long as I can remember, I admittedly have no idea what the hell the commentators are talking about most of the time because my knowledge of the terminology is pretty limited.  Truth be told, I probably know more about elephants than I do racing strategy or the anatomy of cars in general (here’s proof: elephants have up to six sets of teeth in their lifetime and once their sixth set falls out, they die from starvation because they can no longer eat.  Also, did you know that if you just went to your local zoo and picked out any elephant at random, removed all of its organs including its trunk, and laid them all end-to-end on the ground, you would certainly get arrested and would probably spend a significant amount of time in prison?).

But despite my shortcomings in car knowledge, I am able to tell if what I am watching is boring or not.  Of course, some would argue that all racing is boring because it’s nothing more than a bunch of left turns.  And yet others would argue that this is all a moot point anyway because when I go to the IMS, I typically sit in the infield and don’t watch any of the race at all because I’m too busy slamming back a case of Bud heavies while trying to get trashy chicks to show me their goods.  But I’ve been to enough of these races to know how to pay attention to both the race and the Tweety Bird tattoo on the breast of some chain smoking lady in a tube top, so really that’s an invalid argument.  Besides, I went to a bunch of races before I turned 10 and started drinking and trying to get girls to flash me, and even back then I could tell that the Brickyard 400 just wasn’t getting the job done.

The fatal flaw with the Brickyard 400 is that the track simply wasn’t built for NASCAR cars.  Again, I don’t know much about car engineering or the science behind racetracks and whatnot, but even a Michigan fan could figure out pretty quickly that IMS has relatively no banking.  This lack of banking means that most of the entertainment at IMS comes from watching cars fight physics and try to make a turn going 200+ mph without much help from the track itself, which might be boring to watch on TV but I assure you is pretty nuts to see in person for the first time (and really every time).  This fighting of physics is exactly what the founders of the IMS wanted, seeing as how they built the track in 1909 primarily as a way to test the limits of high performance cars (fun fact: the guy who was in charge of building the track thought that cars wouldn’t be able to go any faster than 120 mph around IMS, so the fact that the modern day cars run at almost double that speed during the Indy 500 is pretty remarkable).

Anyway, my point is that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built and exists for one reason – to see how fast cars can go around it.  It was a track built to test speed and the Indy 500 does just that, which is why that particular race is so entertaining.  The cars are literally going as fast as the physics will allow them and if the drivers make even a fraction of a mistake, it could cost them a win (JR Hildebrand on the final turn this year) or in some cases – God forbid – even their lives.

The Brickyard 400, on the other hand, doesn’t provide that balls to the wall speed that the 500 does because NASCAR cars are built entirely differently.  NASCAR races, relatively speaking, are often predicated more on physicality than speed (at Indy, NASCAR cars average about 50 mph less than the open wheel cars do), so when they race on a track like IMS that was built solely to test speed, they go relatively slowly through the turns and the race turns out to essentially just be a parade of what appear to be elaborately painted refrigerators.  Plus, throw in the fact that NASCAR guys like to bump each other and IMS is most certainly not a track for bumping, and it makes things even worse because all that bumping results in a lot of crashes and caution flags (when people say they like crashes, what they really mean is they like seeing fiery crashes where the car rolls a few times and looks completely decimated when it’s all said and done.  Most crashes, though, are entirely unexciting and just drag out the race and make it even more boring).  Throw all of these factors together and what you’ve got is a race that can’t even sniff the jock of the Indy 500.

Of course, this is just my theory that I’ve established solely through years of observation.  I don’t have stats to back me up and I certainly don’t have any real knowledge of racing whatsoever, so there’s a good chance my explanation is way off.  Either way, the fact of the matter is that the racing at the Brickyard 400 just isn’t that exciting.  Regardless of why, there’s no denying that it’s pretty boring when compared to the 500.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s move on to the real issue – the partying (or more accurately, the lack thereof).  There are really only four words needed to explain why the Indy 500 party scene makes the Brickyard 400 party scene look like a Sunday morning trip to church with your grandparents – general admission infield tickets.  I’ve written about this before, but the infield at the Indy 500 is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life (and yes, I’ve been to the Kentucky Derby), primarily because I’ve seen just about anything you can imagine short of rape and murder.  I’ve seen people having sex (I’ve even seen what appeared to be a 3-way), I’ve seen people doing hardcore drugs, and I’ve seen a woman try to piss in a busy men’s restroom by removing her jean shorts, propping her foot up to get a better angle, and pointing her vajeen toward the community urinal tub (admit it – you’re jealous).  It might be a typical Tuesday afternoon for Charlie Sheen, but for average people like you and me the infield at the 500 is mind-blowingly wild.

Why is the Indy 500 infield so rowdy, you ask? It’s simple – because it’s stupidly cheap and you can damn near bring anything into the track that you can carry.  This is really what separates it from the Kentucky Derby infield in my mind (not to mention the fact that horse racing can lick auto racing’s chode), since Derby infield tickets are more expensive and you can’t bring in outside food or drinks.  You can get a ticket for the Indy 500 infield for $30 and bring in a huge cooler full of food and beer (or if you’re like The Villain, stuff to make Cosmos).  Hell, for the 2010 race, I brought two kegs into the infield and tapped those bitches about 100 yards away from the track (it’s the only major sporting event I can think of that you can legally bring your own personal kegs to).  It’s essentially just a BYOB party with a $30 cover charge that 150,000 people are invited to and literally lasts all day, so there’s really no excuse for it not to be the most bitchingest party in America each and every year.

The Brickyard 400, though, doesn’t have these coveted general admission infield tickets.  I’ll say it again, this time using bold text to help emphasize what I’m saying: the Brickyard 400 does not have general admission infield tickets.  If that confuses the hell out of you and makes you think whoever is in charge of this decision should be immediately fired, you now have something in common with every 18-34 year old (white) male in the greater Indianapolis area. 

Now, it should be noted that you can buy a regular ticket with an actual seat assigned to it for the Brickyard 400 and walk into the infield and watch the race from there, but that completely defeats the purpose of the infield ticket.  Regular tickets aren’t as cheap as the infield tickets would be, so the poor white trash people that can afford to come party at the Indy 500 (and are typically the rowdiest people at the track) don’t show up for the 400.  As a result, the infield for the Brickyard basically just consists of legitimate race fans who have no interest in partying and just want to sit closer to the track to enhance their experience, college kids who think they’re cool because they’re drinking beer at a race at IMS and don’t know that the Brickyard is the JV race, and middle class people who don’t completely hate their lives like the poor people do and therefore don’t turn to drugs and alcohol as a way of coping with their failures.  So yeah, the party kinda sucks.

Basically, here’s the ultimate problem: In my opinion, the only way to make the Brickyard 400 as awesome as it should be and to make it a must-attend event is to sell the infield tickets.  But they won’t start selling infield tickets any time soon because they don’t even come close to selling all the normal tickets, so they’re obviously going to focus more on trying to figure out a way to get more people to buy the relatively expensive seat-assigned tickets because those tickets bring in more money for them than the infield tickets do.  But they’re never going to sell out of the normal tickets until the quality of racing improves.  But the quality of racing won’t improve because the track simply isn’t a good fit for those cars.  So really, the way I see it, the only way to improve the overall event is to completely change the type of cars NASCAR uses.  Obviously this can’t happen, which is why the Brickyard 400 seems like it’s on track (pun absolutely intended) to be a perpetual letdown.

And let’s not kid ourselves.  Even though I said earlier that I wouldn’t mind there being a race at IMS every weekend, that doesn’t mean that all of the races there should be treated equally.  Regardless of the quality of racing or the party scene, the Indy 500 is in a class on its own just because of the history associated with it, and there’s legitimately no way in hell the Brickyard could ever come close to being as big of a deal to the people of Indianapolis (the Brickyard is like the NIT final four – just because it’s being held at a historic venue doesn’t make it a big deal).  That in and of itself is enough for some to think that it’s sacrilege to go to IMS for a race at any time other than Memorial Day weekend because the experience is borderline laughable and it makes the Indy 500 feel less special (another reason why the Indy 500 rules – Memorial Day is a built in recovery day for the day after the race). 

For as long as I can remember, I haven’t been included in that group, but with each passing year it seems like I’m getting closer and closer to feeling the exact same way.

It goes without saying that you should feel free to call me out on anything I screwed up.  As I said earlier, everything I just wrote is based on nothing more than my own personal experience, which typically means I’m embarrassingly wrong.  So if I was way off with my reasoning for why the Brickyard just isn’t what it seems like it could be, by all means send me an email and put me in my place.  If your email has enough vitriol in it, we might even become pen pals.

Proud To Be An American But Even Prouder To Be A Buckeye,

Mark Titus

Club Trillion Founder

My New Hero

After taking a couple of months off from blogging, let me first say that it’s good to be back and that I promise I  thought about you every single second I was gone.  Some of you have speculated that I suddenly stopped blogging because I was overwhelmed with the masses of people calling for my head for something I didn’t think was that big of a deal, but the truth is that I actually was a little bit behind schedule with my book and had to stop blogging so I could get my ass in gear and finish the thing (which, I’m proud to say, I eventually did finish one day earlier than was expected of me). 

But even if finishing the book wasn’t the real reason why I stopped blogging, I don’t want to live in the past and revisit the outrage that I caused.  What’s done is done and talking about it now won’t change anything.  Besides, I’ve made it perfectly clear dozens of times: she told me she was 19 and even had an ID to prove it (it looked pretty real to me).  How could I have possibly known she was actually 15?  I never would have touched her had I known her real age and that’s the honest-to-God truth, so everyone just please move on.

Speaking of sex, am I the only one who hears someone say “I’ll try anything once” as they dive into the appetizer sampler platter or go to take a sip of a new beer, and immediately get grossed out over the thought of what “I’ll try anything once” insinuates about their sex lives?  I am? Ok, cool.  Good to know.

Even though this has nothing to do with anything I’ve previously written and this terrible transition is probably doing more to widen and less to bridge the gap between the two vastly different topics, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that Michael McCary is a new personal hero of mine and very well could be the biggest badass this world has ever seen.  Who is Michael McCary, you ask?  Well, the fellas probably just know him as the guy in Boyz II Men with the deep voice, but the females no doubt remember him as the guy who gave your vagina a boner every time he chimed in on a Boyz II Men song.  But even though he’s got an undeniably sexy voice that I’m not ashamed to admit once made my private parts tingle (although, to be fair, this happened at a dance when I was in 7th grade, so there’s a good chance my wiener moved more because I had two fistfuls of babe butt in my hands and less because Michael McCary was lubing my ears with his baritone), his voice isn’t what makes him a personal hero of mine.  No, it’s so much more than that.

The first and most obvious admirable trait about Michael McCary is that he was a member of the greatest boy band ever.  Now, some of you might point to the Backstreet Boys or ‘N Sync or the New Kids as better boy bands, but that’s only because you’re either a woman (who was once a stupid and malleable little girl) or a racist white dude who can’t appreciate awesome black boy bands like Boyz II Men, Jagged Edge, and 112 (personally, LFO was always my favorite white boy band anyway).  The fact of the matter is that despite what the sales numbers say, Boyz II Men have more #1 songs than the New Kids, Backstreet Boys, and ‘N Sync combined, which is evidence that they made far better music.  Plus, pretty much every music video they ever made is a complete and flawless representation of just how awesome the 90s were, and should therefore be displayed in some sort of museum somewhere.

But being in Boyz II Men on its own isn’t enough to be a hero of mine, or else all the guys in the group would be on the list.  What sets McCary apart is that not only was in Boyz II Men, but he was the benchwarmer of the group and has a long history of putting up trillions in their songs.  Allow me to explain.

Michael McCary was consistently the only guy in Boyz II Men to not have a solo singing part in their songs and would instead usually just pop in every now and then and either drop a quick line or provide some bass backup by echoing whatever one of the other dudes just said (like in “One Sweet Day”, “Motown Philly”, and “4 Seasons of Loneliness”).  Not only that, but there were also the rare occasions such as in “On Bended Knee” and “End of The Road” when he’d tell singing to suck it and just start talking towards the end of the songs, and would use his smooth deep voice to persuade the chick that was the inspiration for the song to essentially just shut up and take off her panties because all the time spent arguing was boning time going to waste. 

In those last two songs especially, I like to think that the other three guys in the group spent the entire song effectively getting their point across to whichever beautiful baby they were singing to (fun fact: one of the dudes was singing to Lisa Turtle in “On Bended Knee.” Fun fact #2: real life Lisa Turtle dated real life Zack Morris and was once engaged to Martin Lawrence), and McCary came in at the end to essentially be the icing on the cake and human victory cigar, not entirely unlike the walk-on benchwarmer at the end of games.  He’s unquestionably the least heralded and least appreciated guy in the group, but even though there have been tons of guys that have also fit this description in other bands, nobody did it as smoothly as Michael McCary. 

Put it this way: I like to think that guys like Chris Kirkpatrick and Howie Dorough represent the douchey walk-ons who lose their minds cheering on the bench after routine plays and run out onto the court when timeouts are called so they can chest bump the real players.  These are the kinds of guys who desperately want to fit in with the team and want to be more involved, so they bust their asses in practice and follow their teammates everywhere off the court in hopes that they’ll eventually be accepted.  And then there’s Michael McCary, who I like to think is more like me.  He’s perfectly fine with his limited action and doesn’t give a Michigan whether or not he fits in with the rest of the team or whether or not he’s fully appreciated because he knows he’s got game and he doesn’t feel obligated to prove it to anybody.  So he just kicks back and relaxes until he gets called upon to contribute, at which point he steps in and makes it rain with his soothing baritone voice that, much like my silky smooth J, could charm the pants off even the most prudish of women.

But if all that still isn’t enough for you to appreciate why he’s my new personal hero, consider this picture taken from the “End of The Road” video:

In case you can’t tell what’s going on here, Michael McCary is rocking a hi-top fade, sitting on a rock as waves splash around him, holding onto a cane for no apparent reason, and resting his foot on the rock so his legs spread and the ladies can get a decent look at his man meat.  If it weren’t for the fact that he’s 16 years older than me and some would argue doesn’t really look like me, I’d be fully convinced that he and I were twins who were separated at birth.  I trust you now understand why I look up to the guy so much.

Now that I’ve finished my book, the next step is to obviously figure out how I can give out as many free copies to the Trillion Man March as possible.  I still have to iron out some details with my publisher (apparently they have financial motive to sell as many books as possible at the highest possible price?!?), but my idea right now is to hold what I’m tentatively calling “Context Contests.”  The idea behind these contests is that I would post on the blog a single sentence taken directly from my book, give the TMM no context whatsoever, and then have you write a short story (no more than a few hundred words) either explaining how I arrived at that sentence or figure out a way to include the sentence in the story.  From there, I would give out free books to whoever provided the best/funniest/most ridiculous submissions.

If I do, in fact, get the ok to give out free books, I will obviously sign all the ones I give out.  But I’ll take it even one step further and also get some of my former teammates to sign on the page of the book in which I wrote a story about them.  Like I said, I still have to iron everything out with the publisher, but in the meantime stay tuned.  At the very least, I’ll definitely give out a few free books out of my own pocket and some CLUB TRIL shirts and  CLUB TRIL mesh shorts too.  I’ll keep you posted.

One last thing: A lot of you have asked, but as of right now I don’t know the exact date the book is going to be released.  I was told we’re going to most likely shoot for February or March, but it could be sooner than that. I’ll let you know when I find out for sure.

Proud To Be An American But Even Prouder To Be A Buckeye,

Mark Titus

Club Trillion Founder