Don't Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey From The End Of The Bench To The End Of The Bench

by Mark Titus

“You ready to go in?” he asked. I momentarily froze. I took a deep breath, looked up at him, and said: “Nah, I’m good.”

People who have the least to do with the success of a team often have the most to say about it.

For those who don’t know, the Amateur Athletic Union oversees tournaments all over the country for amateur athletes in a variety of sports. But in basketball circles, “AAU” is basically just another way of saying “club basketball,” as the fundamental idea behind AAU teams is that they are made up of the best players from several towns and even states, as opposed to teammates coming from just one town.

When I started playing AAU in 1997, it wasn’t nearly as huge as it is now—some kids today would rather play AAU during the summer than play for their school teams—but it was still a good opportunity for me to test my skills against the best.

“if he’s black play back and if he’s white play tight” philosophy, which is unquestionably the greatest defensive strategy in the history of basketball (although it’s not exactly clear on how to guard Latinos, Asians, or Native Americans).

(Our starting five of Mike Conley, Eric Gordon, Daequan Cook, Josh McRoberts, and Greg Oden are all in the NBA and are all either playing huge roles for their teams or have had full-body pictures of themselves wearing nothing but a do-rag leaked on the internet.)

Simply put, I’m only on this earth for a short period of time, and I’d rather spend that time being happy than stressing out over dumb things like “having a job” or “paying child support.”

“I play real sports. I’m not trying to be the best at exercising.”

After all, it’s common knowledge that calling your coach an asshole to his face is at least a seven on a scale from one to Spreewell.

All it takes is being born abnormally big, hitting puberty before everyone else your age, and taking a liking to basketball because you are so huge.

From there, you have to dominate local rec leagues to the point that refs feel the need to screw you over, and then consequently turn to AAU basketball in hopes of finding better competition.

the two-time national champion San Francisco Dons, who everyone knows as the alma mater of NBA great Bill Russell but very few people know as the alma mater of NBA not-as-great Bill Cartwright.

Tyler Hansbrough, was the Tim Tebow of college basketball (which is my way of saying that he was portrayed as the greatest college basketball player of all time in the history of the world ever).

Florida suddenly kicked it into high gear, beat us like we were an NFL wife, and consequently made the game a bigger letdown than Saved by the Bell: The College Years.

As I walked to the scorer’s table to check into the game, Coach Matta could tell I was nervous, so he stood up from his chair and called me over to him. He then put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and waited a second before he said, “Don’t fuck this up,” and returned to his seat. Pretty sound advice, really.

If I had to describe the Final Four in only thirteen words, this is what I’d say: it’s essentially just a weeklong circus with a few basketball games thrown in.

“All right, guys, let’s go ahead and start our usual post-practice routine. Everyone drop your drawers to your ankles and let’s get this circle-jerk going.”

We came so close to achieving something I had dreamed about my entire life, but we were stopped short by a team featuring a guy whose ponytail looked like a wad of pubes.

Then he said something to Danny that is the best advice I’ve ever heard in my life: “It’s only a game. Stop crying like a little bitch.”

The way I see it, just about everything in life has a built-in punishment for when things are taken too far and enjoyed in excess.

I actually do believe it’s possible to have too much fun and bad things happen when that “fun threshold” is reached.

Coach Matta was obsessed with getting us to play as hard and as well as we possibly could for four minutes at a time, and he approached every game with the mind-set that we were actually playing 10 four-minute games, or “four-minute wars,” as he liked to call them. (It always bugged me that he didn’t call them “four-minute battles,” since the analogy would work much better if you treated the entire game as a war and each of the 10 segments as battles, but whatever.)

I changed my goal so I wouldn’t technically fail. (It’s a very popular strategy among us underachievers.)

I do not think I like you very much. —Zisis Sarikopoulos, my teammate from 2008 to 2010, 10 minutes after we first met

I was a bit of an anomaly at Ohio State in that I was one of the few college basketball players in history who preferred country to rap music. And by “country” I mean the countriest of country (George Strait, Tracy Lawrence, Alan Jackson, etc.), not that pop-country stuff that’s popular today (like Taylor Swift, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, etc.). In other words, I don’t think my taste in music could’ve been any more opposite than the rest of my teammates.

I guess we were playing an offensive and racially insensitive game. But it’s okay if I was being racist, because Will returned the favor by frequently making fun of white people to me. And everyone knows that combating racism with even more racism always works, so it’s totally fine.

Despite what you might think, the truth is that a large majority of us don’t have an ounce of racism in our bodies, which is exactly why the N-word is so awkward for us. (If we were racist, we’d just freely use it without regard for anything or anyone.)

I know exactly how blessed I am to have had the opportunities I did, and I’ll forever be grateful to Coach Matta, everyone at Ohio State, and the passion of the Buckeye faithful for making it all possible. I truly will cherish every second of my four years at OSU and look back on that time with the fondest of memories, because I can say these two things with absolute certainty: there’s no place on Earth like Ohio State. And Michigan still sucks.