Don't Put Me In, Coach (14 page)

NINETEEN

I
n the brief time we were teammates, the one constant with Jamar Butler was that he was never submissive to authority and pretty much just did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Simply put, I’ve never met anyone in my life who has either thought to themselves or actually said the phrase “I don’t give a shit” more than Jamar. This often made him entertaining, such as when I met him for the first time at a house party on campus during my freshman year and while we were walking from one party to another he whipped his dong out on a crowded sidewalk, pointed it to the side, and took a leak without breaking stride or even making any attempt whatsoever to conceal what he was doing. Another time he got confrontational with our director of basketball operations, Dave Egelhoff, and yelled, “Don’t come at me with that bullshit, Dave,” during a practice because Dave had apparently come at him with bullshit in the form of a report that Jamar had skipped one of his classes and thus, as a team rule, now had to run disciplinary sprints with our strength coach.

But other times I hated his defiance of authority because it
directly affected me in a negative way, such as when, after the National Championship game in 2007, he came into my hotel room, took all the alcohol from our minibar, and consequently racked up a $150 charge on our room that Danny and I had to deal with the next morning. (We didn’t have to pay for it, but we still had to convince our coaches that we weren’t the ones who were responsible for all the missing liquor, which was surprisingly more difficult than it should’ve been.) And then there was the practice leading up to the game against the Buzzcuts, when Jamar’s defiance reached unprecedented heights.

Before I get to the good part of the story, let me first set the stage. During my time at Ohio State, we typically ended practices with a mini-intrasquad scrimmage that lasted four minutes, since four minutes was theoretically the longest we’d ever have to be on the court at one time during actual games, because the built-in media timeouts occurred at four-minute intervals. 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.)

We often ended practice with just one four-minute war, but because we had a week off in between our game with Michigan and our game with the Buzzcuts and therefore didn’t need to be too concerned with resting our legs, Coach decided to raise the stakes and end practice with a best-of-three series of four-minute wars, with the losing team having to run a double suicide. After it worked so well and brought our team together so much at the SWAT obstacle course, we split into the same two teams, with the veterans on one team and the new guys on the other.

The first two four-minute wars were boring and are entirely irrelevant to the story, so I’ll just tell you that the new guys won the first and we won the second, and we’ll move on. In fact, we’ll just
advance the story all the way to the waning moments of the third and deciding four-minute war, where we found ourselves down by three with 20 seconds left. Now, if you remember the story from earlier about how Daequan snubbed me in an AAU game instead of running the play that was drawn up in the huddle, then you might be getting ahead of yourself here and think that this situation is headed in the same direction.

Instead of checking in after sitting on the bench for the entire game, this time I actually played a ton and, believe it or not, had plays drawn up for me throughout the scrimmages because I was shooting the ball so well. I had been so good, in fact, that I kind of expected the final play to go to me, but our assistant coach made the foolish decision to put the ball in Jamar’s hands instead, most likely because he was our leading scorer and senior captain and I was just some pudgy sophomore walk-on. But luckily for our coach, I was able to save his ass and absolve him of the inexcusable sin of breaking the golden rule of basketball, otherwise known as “getting the rock to the man with the hot hand.”

The assistant coach’s plan was for Jamar to wait until the clock wound down to 10 seconds, come off a ball screen, create separation from the defense, and let a three fly. And that’s
almost
what happened. The only problem, though, was that the whole creating separation thing was kinda tricky because the defense knew what was coming, so when Jamar came off of Othello’s ball screen, it provided a chance for whoever was guarding Othello to double-team Jamar. With two guys in his face, Jamar was forced to shoot a fadeaway three that never had much of a chance and clanked off the front of the rim (sound familiar?).

But since Othello’s defender had left him wide open, Othello had a clear path to the basket and grabbed the rebound with about five seconds left. His instincts kicked in, and he took a forceful dribble to power his way toward the basket for a layup, but we were down by three, so I yelled to get his attention and help him realize that a layup wouldn’t have helped us at all. It must’ve worked because he jumped, changed his mind midair, and threw a pass
across the court in my direction. I took a couple of steps to where the ball was headed, caught it, and released the shot just before the buzzer sounded.

Swish.

Duh.

After I hit the scrimmage-tying shot at the buzzer, the gym exploded in pandemonium, and by that I mean I sought out The Villain and executed the “suck it” crotch chop in his face and Othello and a few of my teammates jumped on my back in celebration. It was the biggest shot I ever made in my career at Ohio State, and even though it didn’t happen in an actual game, it didn’t make it any less significant for me because our practices were always games to me (and our games were always off days). As amazing as it was to save our team from a double suicide, even more impressive was that I managed to get Othello to forget about the plane ride from Penn State for a brief moment, as evidenced by the fact that he gave me an excited bear hug and softly whispered in my ear that he would always be my BFF. (Note: that last part might be revisionist history.) Sadly, this burying of the hatchet was short-lived because of Jamar.

To settle the tie, Coach Matta had us play an overtime period in which the first team to score five points would win. I was hoping we would settle the tie like all normal, civilized human beings settle ties: a group game of “Mercy” with the last man standing claiming the win for his team. But I guess Coach Matta’s idea seemed like a fair alternative. Anyway, we won the tip and got the ball, but we couldn’t capitalize on our first possession because Jamar got hammered on a drive to the basket and Coach Groce, who was one of our assistant coaches (the same coach who conned me into agreeing to be a manager and is now the head coach at Ohio University), decided to not call a foul. As he ran back on defense, Jamar had some words for Coach Groce (one of which started with “b” and rhymed with “bullshit”), but it was really nothing more than your standard, run-of-the-mill instance of a player cursing out a coach. Standard, that is, until less than a minute later.

Twenty seconds after not getting the foul called for him, Jamar was floored by a blatant moving screen set by Kosta to free up whoever it was Jamar was defending. Again, Coach Groce swallowed his whistle and told Jamar to get up while whoever Jamar was guarding sank a wide-open three. And again Jamar wasn’t exactly thrilled with not getting a foul called in his favor. As he got up off the ground, he yelled, “That’s fucking bullshit,” directly at Coach Groce while slowly dribbling the ball back up the court.

This was the last straw for Groce. He chimed back with “What’s that, Jamar?” even though he had obviously heard Jamar the first time.

Jamar walked toward Groce and emphatically repeated himself. “That’s fucking bullshit and you know it.”

With things rapidly escalating out of control, Groce did the only thing he really could’ve done in that situation—he called a technical foul on Jamar and threatened to call a second if Jamar didn’t calm down.

As I’m sure you could have guessed, neither the first tech nor the threat of a second had any effect whatsoever on Jamar, as evidenced by the fact that he straight up told Groce: “I don’t give a fuck about your technicals.”

Groce decided to test how true this statement was and rang Jamar up for a second tech, and actually said, “You’re outta here!” as he did that hand motion umpires do when they eject guys from baseball games.

Once again, this did nothing to deter Jamar. He told Groce he didn’t care if he was ejected because he didn’t want to be there anyway, and he started back to the locker room, sprinkling in another handful of nasty curse words. But before he could get off the court, Groce, honest to God, called a third technical foul on Jamar, despite the fact that Jamar had already been “ejected” and had already received the maximum number of techs one player can get in a single game. This third tech triggered yet another outburst from Jamar, which was really nothing more than a bunch of
F-bombs capped off with him telling Groce to “suck my dick” as he finally made his way to the locker room.

Unable to just let it go without getting the last word, Groce—I kid you not—called a fourth tech on Jamar, and in doing so broke the record set by Ted Valentine, who rang up Bob Knight for a then-unprecedented three techs in a game between Indiana and Illinois in 1998. By now, most of the guys on the team and even Coach Matta couldn’t hold back the laughter, thanks to the combination of Jamar’s anger management issues and Groce’s serious commitment to staying in character as a referee instead of embracing his role as assistant coach and attempting to diffuse the problem. But I didn’t laugh for long because once the dust settled, the new guys were granted eight free throws as a result of Jamar’s four techs and only had to hit two of the eight to clinch the win. They made the first two they shot, my team ran a double suicide, and just like that the biggest shot of my Ohio State career was made entirely irrelevant (since, ya know, it was such a relevant shot before all of that happened).

In all honesty, if the Bananas in Pajamas would have somehow teleported themselves to our arena, walked out to midcourt, started 69ing, and then finished each other off with a couple rusty trombones before sprouting wings and flying away, I still don’t think I would have been as genuinely shocked as I was when all this went down. Jamar had a history of being stubborn with authority, but never would I have thought he’d get borderline violent with one of our coaches just because he didn’t get a couple fouls called for him. (In his defense, they really were inexcusably bad no-calls.) That in and of itself was pretty crazy, and then Coach Groce took it to another level by not only refusing to break character as a referee (he was like those Pioneer Village people from
South Park
who were a little too committed to acting like it was 1864), but also calling a laughable number of technical fouls as if imaginary techs in an intrasquad scrimmage that was closed to the public were really going to calm Jamar down. (I like to think that before he called each
of his last three techs, Groce thought to himself,
This time it
has to
work
.) But most incredible of all, Jamar’s tirade erased the greatest on-court accomplishment of my Ohio State career and the one thing I thought was going to help squash Othello’s beef with me. And all of this happened in a matter of minutes. I was speechless.

I guess Jamar’s outburst was inevitable considering that he announced on a daily basis in the locker room how many days were left until his career at Ohio State was finally over. Plus, after being able to regularly challenge authority without consequence, it was only a matter of time before he tested his limit and everything boiled over. Obviously a lot of the blame lies with Jamar, but it should also be noted that throughout the season our coaches enabled his defiant behavior more than those
Family Feud
contestants who enable their teammates’ stupidity by saying “Good answer” when their teammate responds to “Name a U.S. president” with “Chicken nuggets.”

He truly did get away with anything he wanted all season, so when he was a no-show for practice the next two days (he eventually came to practice three days after the incident and went about his business as if nothing ever happened and he hadn’t literally walked out on his teammates) and was only punished by being forced to sit out the first four minutes of the Wisconsin game, well, let’s just say I wasn’t too surprised. After all, because we were on the bubble for an NCAA Tournament berth, the game against the Buzzcuts was a must-win for us, and it was clear that we had no shot of winning without Jamar. So we basically sold our souls by giving him a slap on the wrist even though he probably should have been suspended for at least one game if not kicked off the team altogether, and then we looked even worse when we still lost to the Buzzcuts by five.

The truth is that the only reason I complain about Jamar is because I’m jealous. I’ve always thought he was a good guy underneath his tough exterior, and he certainly was always nice to me when he probably could have justifiably punched me in the throat on a few occasions. Sure we were never best friends, but I did go to
his wedding in 2008, and should I get invited, I’ll definitely go to his second, third, and even fourth weddings too. Like I said, other than killing my moment of glory in practice, my only issue with him was that I was jealous that he could essentially quit the team for two days after telling one of our coaches to F off and go on and on about how badly he wanted to leave, and only be punished with a four-minute suspension (and, of course, four technical fouls in practice). Meanwhile, when I simply (and respectfully, I might add) called my high school coach an asshole after he asked me for my honest opinion, I had to sit out the entire first half of one of our biggest games of the year and lost my chance at going to Harvard. It just wasn’t fair.