How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Mark Titus is a renegade of college basketball. He checks into games just to play for a minute. And he once entered the NBA draft just to be kicked out.
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Titus, a senior and the 12th man on the Ohio State University basketball team, is the founder and main author of the blog Club Trillion (clubtrillion.com). The blog, which has had more than 1.8 million visitors since its creation 13 months ago, serves as a forum for Titus to write about what life is like for a benchwarmer in an elite college basketball program. The blog's name comes from the rare occasion in which Titus gets into a game. On such occasions, his box score line reads 1-0-0-0 ... or what Titus calls "getting a Trillion."
Titus' comical writing is showcased in stories about how he tries to avoid getting a rebound in order to keep his "Trillion" alive or how many "warm-up board slaps" he pulled off in layup lines before the game.
Club Trillion started during Titus' junior season following a conversation he had with his father reminiscing about his career.
"We realized that I had a lot of unique opportunities to do things that not everyone gets to do [like play AAU basketball with NBA players Greg Oden and Mike Conley Jr.], and that since I had this unique perspective I should tell people these stories," he said.
And while his caricature of himself on Club Trillion greatly exaggerates his futility as a basketball player (Titus is 6-foot-4 and was recruited by Harvard), his voice as a benchwarmer has struck a chord with college basketball fans across the country.
"Take anybody in the world, and at one point they are average at something. Everybody at some point has been a benchwarmer," Titus said, adding that "people can read the blog and see themselves in me."
Club Trillion first surfaced on the radar after ESPN's Bill Simmons had Titus as a guest on his podcast last December. However, Titus and Club Trillion truly became a national story last April when the NBA kicked him out of its draft because, according to Titus, he "was making a mockery out of the process." While Titus had declared it to be a joke and was planning on removing his name prior to the draft, the national attention that the story gained escalated his fame.
On the Ohio State campus, Titus has turned into a quasi-celebrity. He said random people will go up to him and tell him how much they love the blog. Students make Club Trillion T-shirts and wear them to OSU games. The crowd even boos when Titus grabs a rebound and ruins his Trillion.
"It's the perfect amount of fame," Titus said. "It makes you feel good about yourself."
"No idea," he said. "Right now I'm just living in the moment."
Titus, a marketing major, refuses to look at himself as a writer.
"I'm just a guy who likes to have fun and entertain," he said. "I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't know, maybe someone like Mark Cuban will draft me and sign me to a $10 contract just to blog about the experiences of being an NBA bench warmer."
Titus may just be the most interesting athlete in college basketball.
