Don't Put Me In, Coach (25 page)

The Lipscomb win was followed up with an absolute curb-stomping of St. Francis (Pennsylvania) in which we won by 63 and destroyed them so badly that I got to play a career-high five minutes. I also recorded another career high in that game with two shot attempts in those five minutes, but since I missed them both and in the process embarrassed myself and shamed my family, I don’t really want to talk about it. Let’s just move on.

After the St. Francis win, we beat a pretty good Florida State team at home in the ACC–Big Ten Challenge and in the process helped the Big Ten clinch a collective victory over the ACC for the first time in the 11-year history of the event. Following that, we beat Eastern Michigan by 51 to set up a top-20 matchup at Butler with our next game. But even though the box score from the Eastern Michigan win might make it seem like the game was business as usual, it was actually far from it.

That’s because, with about 12 minutes left in the first half, The Villain drove to the basket and was nudged from behind by an Eastern Michigan player as he went up for the dunk, which threw off his balance ever so slightly and caused him to lose his grip on the rim as his body swung toward the baseline. His momentum
continued to carry his feet upward until he lost his grip on the rim and let go, resulting in him plummeting to the floor and landing square on his lower back with a loud thud, kinda like how Antoine Tyler fell in
The 6th Man
. And with that, the best player in college basketball and the one guy we absolutely could not afford to lose had a broken back and was out not only for the rest of the Eastern Michigan game, but also for the foreseeable future.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: this was not good. In fact, one could argue that because he was the best player in college basketball and was directly responsible for most of our team’s success, his injury was detrimental to us because it appeared as though we weren’t going to achieve the same amount of success we would have otherwise achieved had he not broken his back.

Simply put, our team’s collective mood when Evan went down could best be summarized by the immortal dying words of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn:

“Oh, shit.”

THIRTY-FIVE

T
he first game on the schedule following The Villain’s back injury was against 20th-ranked Butler on the road. To add insult to The Villain’s injury, I often acknowledged him as either “cheesedick” or “twat lips.” And to add an unfavorable situation for our team to The Villain’s injury, Butler was really good that year and actually played in the National Championship game at the end of the season where, according to John Brenkus of Sport Science, they were only 0.5 miles per hour and 3 inches away from winning the thing. It would have been tough to beat them at their place with The Villain, so I figured we were screwed now that we were playing for the first time without a guy who literally had the ball in his hands during offensive possessions more than every other guy on the team combined. And as is usually the case with most things, I was absolutely right: we lost to Butler by eight.

After the Butler loss, we blew out Presbyterian by 30, beat Delaware State by 16, and took care of business against a decent
Cleveland State team at home to head into the Christmas break on a three-game winning streak. We hadn’t exactly rattled off three marquee wins or anything, but it was a three-game winning streak nonetheless, and it was encouraging to see us have some measure of success without The Villain. Since we were on a winning streak and there were good vibes in our locker room, and since we had over a week off in between our games because of Christmas break, I decided it was a perfect time to play a prank on one of our coaches. I targeted Coach Jeff Boals, who had joined the coaching staff from Akron right after my junior season ended, because he was undoubtedly my favorite coach. Even though I had only known him for eight months at the time, I had already gotten a good read on him and was pretty confident he would appreciate a good prank, so I asked Keller to help me come up with something.

Keller and I are both notoriously lazy, so we wanted something that would require minimal effort on our part. Ultimately, we decided to create a fake email account and send Boals a hateful email. We created a character that was supposed to be a stereotypical redneck from rural Ohio, which is another way of saying we created a character who was an uneducated racist homophobe, had tons of pent-up anger, and loved his Buckeyes probably a little too much. Since Keller is a master at writing as if he’s someone else, I let him write the bulk of the email, and I contributed basically by just giving him a handful of ideas and providing details about Coach Boals to make the email more personal.

(Please keep in mind as you read it that we were playing a character and chose to make our character racist and homophobic only because we wanted him to come across as hateful, which we thought would make the prank more effective since it would give the email a threatening tone. If, for whatever reason, you do get offended, you’ll have to take your complaint to Keller, since he’s the one who wrote it. But if you aren’t offended and think it’s funny, give me credit since I’m the one who wrote it.)

Listen here, you four-eyed fuck.

I made the mistake of going to an Ohio State basketball game and the program that my fucking girlfriend made me buy had some glasses wearing doofus on the front cover. After discovering that this liberal fucking state doesn’t sell beer at the games, I took to reading the program. Lo and behold, the loser I saw on the front turned out to be you, Mr. Bowls. Could there be a bigger fucking pansy on this planet than you? Honestly, you were wearing a pink shirt. Unless you have breast cancer, stop wearing such faggy colors. The last time I checked, my Buckeyes’ colors were Scarlet and Gray, not Scarlet and Gay. It’s complete horseshit that the legacy of this fine university is being tarnished by some nearsighted poopdick.

A bigger fucking travesty than the decision to hire some jizz fiend who walks on the treadmill so his sweat doesn’t mess up his gelled hair is to leave #34 on the bench. That guy is on fucking fire every single time in warm-ups. I honestly watched that badass make 3-pointer after 3-pointer only to be banished to the bench because douchetards like you feel threatened by his ability. Just cause you and your bum ACL can’t check the man with the hot hand doesn’t mean you should keep him on the bench when he could be lighting up the arena for 50+ a night, you jealous dick. Seriously, if you can’t get on board with #34 getting buckets all over random black kids, then I question your love for America. And to think, every time he doesn’t get to go nothing but net from 25 feet away, you’re taking away an opportunity for the girls in the crowd to get their titties hard about the guy. So you’re not only a douche, but a cockblocking homo as well.

In conclusion, you should be fucking fired, and that Mark Titus guy is the key to the Buckeyes winning the title. Take the dong out of your mouth, and put that fucking
guy in the game, or you’ll be sorry. I figured a gay nerd with glasses as thick as yours would be able to see talent when that’s close in front of your face. Guess not, you fucking moron.

Best regards,
Dale R. “Woody” Thornton III

Because Dale “Woody” Thornton kept making references to playing me more, we were sure that Boals would figure out that I was behind the prank. But somehow he didn’t make the connection. At practice the next day he approached me and asked if I knew some guy named Dale, which prompted me to laugh and ask him if he enjoyed the email. Confusion spread across his face as if he was trying to figure out how I knew about the email, leading me to believe that he was trying to counter-prank me. I reluctantly bit on the bait and explained that I was responsible for the email, and his face lit up.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “I thought some redneck wanted to kill me.”

I still wasn’t buying that he didn’t know I was behind the email. He insisted that he didn’t and even offered proof. “You can even go talk to Debbie [the secretary in the basketball office who is by all accounts a nice, wholesome lady]. All of the coaches’ emails go to her first, and she forwards us the ones she thinks we need to read. She told me I got some hate mail, so I asked her to send it to me. We both read it and thought it was hilarious, but we were sure it was real.”

After he told me this, I was initially pumped that my prank had worked, but I quickly changed my feeling when I realized what exactly he had said. The fact that Debbie was the first to read the email probably makes the story funnier and better, so I’m cool with it now, but in that moment I couldn’t have been more embarrassed. I darted up to her office, apologized a thousand times, told her I honestly didn’t think anybody but Boals would read it, and tried to explain to her that she was just collateral damage. She seemed to
accept my apology, but the tone in her voice and her body language told me that she did so only so I would leave her office and just stop talking about it altogether. Whoops.

Perhaps Boals should have taken Dale’s advice and found a way to play me more in our next game at Wisconsin, because the substitution pattern we did use certainly didn’t work. After the first eight minutes of the game went back and forth, the Buzzcuts jumped out to a big lead to close the first half and never looked back, as they ended up beating us by 22, which was our worst loss of the season. Since it was my last trip to Madison, the loss meant that the Kohl Center was the only Big Ten arena that I never won in, which was especially upsetting since I knew we would have most likely won had The Villain been healthy.

Nonetheless, we had a chance to bounce back from the Wisconsin loss by playing at Michigan a few days later. But not having The Villain proved to be costly yet again, as Michigan used a late run to beat us by nine. Again, it was frustrating to know that we probably would have also beat Michigan had The Villain been healthy, but it was even more frustrating to know that since The Villain hurt his back against Eastern Michigan, whose campus is just 15 minutes away from Michigan’s campus, and since we played Michigan just a couple weeks after Eastern Michigan, I was pretty confident that Michigan had asked Eastern Michigan to do them a favor and take out The Villain because they’re a bunch of cheating asshole bastards.

But that’s just my theory. Whether I’m right or wrong, at the end of the day we were 0–2 in the Big Ten and had lost half of our last six games. We needed either to figure out how to play without The Villain or to cross our fingers and hope he made a miraculous recovery and saved our season before it was too late.

THIRTY-SIX

D
espite being told that he’d be out for at least eight weeks, The Villain made a miraculous recovery and saved our season before it was too late after just four and a half weeks. In his first game back, he started and played just half the game against Indiana at home, and while he only scored eight points and pulled down just four rebounds, we didn’t really need much from him because Indiana sucked donkey balls.

After we blew the Hoosiers out by 25, we went on the road and lost to a relatively good Minnesota team by nine. Against Indiana, our chemistry imbalance wasn’t a huge deal because Indiana was awful, but our inability to get The Villain fully integrated back into the team proved much more costly against a good team like Minnesota. Whatever the case, we dropped to just 1–3 in the Big Ten, which was good enough for eighth place in the conference. After having our sights set on winning the Big Ten title at the start of the season, four games into conference play it seemed as if we’d be lucky to even finish in the top half of the standings.

Shortly after the Minnesota game, I was approached by the
Ohio State SID, who told me that a reporter with OSU’s student newspaper,
The Lantern
, wanted to talk to me for an article he was writing about the basketball managers. Since Danny and I both started our careers at Ohio State as managers, he wanted to ask us how our role on the team had changed and what our relationship was like with the current managers. I told him that I’d be willing to do the interview, mostly because I’m a media whore and I’m always flattered when people want to interview me, but Danny said he didn’t want to talk to the reporter.

That’s because ever since Danny walked-on, he did whatever he could to distance himself from his past as a manager. (He had been a manager for a full year before he walked-on.) For whatever reason, it was a point of pride for him that he had a jersey to wear during the games (rightfully so) and was therefore—in his mind—a real part of the team now, so he didn’t like revisiting the fact that he used to be a manager and would actually get offended when people reminded him of his managerial past. So, naturally, I would use the fact that he got upset so easily against him whenever the opportunity would arise. Such as now.

I called the number our SID gave me and talked to the reporter for about five minutes. When the interview was over, the reporter said, “Thanks for taking time to do this, but can I ask one more favor? Is there any way you can get me Danny Peters’s number? I’m trying to talk to him for this article, but I’m having a hard time getting a hold of him.”

To buy myself time to figure out how I wanted to attack this, I told the guy that I would absolutely give him Danny’s number, but that since it was in my phone I’d have to hang up on him and just text him the number in a few minutes. He said he was cool with that, so we both hung up, and I racked my brain for a couple of minutes before it hit me that I really only had one option.

I quickly called Keller and as soon as he answered the phone, I said, “Keller! Do you want to be Danny?”

He responded, “Of course I don’t.”

“I don’t mean it as a hypothetical question. Listen, a reporter
from
The Lantern
just interviewed me and said he wants to interview Danny too, but Danny has made it clear that he doesn’t want to do the interview. I told the
Lantern
guy that I’d give him Danny’s number, but I’m thinking I should give him your number and you should act like Danny when he calls.”