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SG Mark "The Shark" Titus (Official Thread)

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Mark gets a lot of press for his antics, but he hasn't gotten a mention yet for what he's doing to help. As you can read in this post, he was able to work out a deal with the compliance office so that he could help a local charity by selling Club Trillion shirts.

In just over 2 weeks, they have sold over 450 shirts, which brings in well over $11,000 dollars. To date, they have raised enough money to sponsor more than 120 children during the Christmas season (twitter).

Well done, Mark. :bow:

A Kid Again charity
 
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Something Mark humbly hasn't mentioned is that he has been leaving 2 tickets to every week night game to A Kid Again so the kids in the charity can take in the game up close and experience something they wouldn't normally get to experience. There's no fake enthusiasm on Mark's part...he's invested in this idea completely. It's nice to know that buy donating to the charity you're contributing to a great cause and a great person.
 
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December 24, 2009
Merry Christmas and Turner's new year
Pete Thamel of The New York Times was in town for a couple of days this week to work on a story on the most famous walk-on in team history, Mark Titus. It's scheduled to run Sunday in the Times, one day after my own feature on Titus and fellow walk-on Danny Peters will be the cover story in the BuckeyeXtra section of The Dispatch. The Titus-Peters story will be available online Friday.
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Bob Baptist, posted on December 24, 2009
http://www.buckeyeplanet.com/forum/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=669105
 
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A Last Man Off the Bench Rides a Blog to Stardom
By PETE THAMEL
Published: December 26, 2009

COLUMBUS, Ohio — As a second grader, when the Ohio State basketball player Mark Titus wrote a poem for Mother’s Day, he decided to needle his mom with a precocious show of sarcasm. “My mother needs NordicTrack, she wears XXL, she needs to call 1-800-94-JENNY,” he wrote, mortifying his teacher.

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Greg Sailor for The New York Times
Mark Titus, Ohio State basketball bench warmer and online sensation.

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Greg Sailor for The New York Times
Mark Titus, second from left, rarely plays in Ohio State's games, but students in opposing arenas often chant his name.

But when the teacher called home to Laura Titus about her son’s “inappropriate behavior,” Mom just laughed. “I just thought, that’s Mark,” she said.

Titus is smart enough that he was recruited to play basketball at Harvard and missed one question on the math section of the SAT. He is bizarre enough that he spent spring break of his senior year of high school attending WrestleMania XXII dressed up, with his best friend, Andy Keller, as the 1980s tag-team duo the Rockers. They also attended a live taping of Jerry Springer’s talk show.

Those smarts and verve have helped make Titus one of the popular players in college basketball, a mind-boggling anomaly given that he is a little-used walk-on with a career high of 3 points.

His Club Trillion blog — clubtrillion.blogspot.com — chronicles “Life Views from the End of the Bench” and has been visited by more than 1.9 million people in a little more than a year.

He is so popular that student sections in opposing arenas hold up signs and chant his name, and the Ohio State star Evan Turner admits that Titus is the most popular player on the team.

“I still remember vividly the day I had 500 total blog hits,” Titus said over breakfast recently. “To me, that was a huge deal. I never could have dreamed it would be like it is now.”

A trillion is basketball slang for a player entering the game and not recording any statistic other than minutes. That leaves the box score with 12 zeros, or a trillion, and Titus’s followers are known as the Trillion Man March. (People have actually booed him for getting a rebound and ruining his potential trillion.)

Titus has more than 5,900 followers on Twitter, nearly 2,000 more than those of North Carolina’s Ed Davis, who projects as a top pick in the N.B.A. draft. Titus has also reached the maximum number of friends on Facebook, a little less than 5,000. Titus also sold more than 860 T-Shirts, which has raised more than $10,000 for the charity A Kid Again.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/sports/ncaabasketball/27blogger.html

December 26, 2009
A Blogger and a Trailblazer?
By PETE THAMEL

COLUMBUS, Ohio ? The problem with writing a story about someone as intelligent and funny as Mark Titus is that there?s an excess of good material.

(I wasn?t able to squeeze in the story of him visiting Minnesota quarterback Sage Rosenfels, a fan of the Club Trillion blog, during Vikings camp. The trip was highlighted by a night out that included Vikings defensive end Jared Allen tapping girls on the nose as they walked by him at the bar. ?That made the trip,? Titus said. ?It was awesome.?)

On a more serious note, Titus is the author of the wildly popular Club Trillion blog, which has been visited by more than 1.9 million people and turned him into a cult figure both in the Big Ten and around the country. He?s also raised more than $10,000 by selling T-shirts to benefit the charity ?A Kid Again,? which allows kids with serious illnesses to feel like ?a kid again.?
And one thing we discussed in depth was more athletes in the future using blogs, Twitter and Facebook to get out their message and skipping the so-called traditional news media. (Like, um, me.)

?I do see athletes being the main source and cutting out the middle man of the reporter,? Titus said. ?I guess reporters want dumb athletes. If you get athletes who can write, I can totally see them doing that.?

Titus wants to make one thing clear. He?s very self-deprecating and doesn?t consider himself an athlete of the caliber who would have the need to bypass the traditional news media. But he could see why athletes would want to skip that step.

?I think that is what it?s starting to come to,? he said, using his watching of SportCcenter and hearing them reference players? Twitter feeds as an example. ?I don?t think of myself as that. I don?t think of myself as an athlete, in that regard. I don?t really think about be being on the cusp of the push towards that.?
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A Blogger and a Trailblazer? - The Quad Blog - NYTimes.com
 
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Best line of the NY Times article:

?For what it?s worth,? Matta recalled Titus telling him as the starters took the floor, ?I got five fouls to give.? Titus then pointed at the end of the bench and said, ?I?ll be right down here if you need me.?
 
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New blog up. This never gets old!!

Club Trillion

Walk-ons at Ohio State only play in blowout wins and based on previous visits to Wisconsin, I knew a blowout win was highly unlikely. This is why I designated the game to be what is referred to in the walk-on community at tOSU as a ?pants game.?
At first thought, ?pants game? sounds like something the Michigan football team plays during their training camp as a way to get to know each other better, which very well could be the case. (I?m guessing it starts when Rich Rod walks into the meeting room on the first day of camp, turns off the lights, and says ?I wanna play a game? in Jigsaw?s voice from Saw.)
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