A perfect way to pass the time during the tournament’s endless TV timeouts.
A walk-on leverages fortuitous friendships and a quick wit to enjoy the ride of a lifetime.
Overly enthusiastic, towel-waving benchwarmers are a staple of March Madness; they are not, however, media magnets. Grantland.com’s Titus, a walk-on at Ohio State University from 2006 to 2010, proved an exception when his “Club Trillion” blog—so named for the box-score line a seldom-used player logs when he plays but accumulates no countable statistics—became a national sensation. A solid high-school player who could have garnered scholarship offers from smaller schools, the author decided instead to follow some of his megastar AAU teammates—including future NBA players Greg Oden, Mike Conley and Daequan Cook—to OSU for the chance to experience college life at a major university. A gig as a student manager led to a role as a walk-on player when the coaching staff needed an injury replacement. Emboldened by his friendship with Oden, OSU’s marquee player, he became the team’s resident prankster, initially content to confine his hijinks to the locker room—until his junior year, when he began blogging about his antics, drawing attention from a local newspaper and, later, the notice of ESPN’s Bill Simmons, Titus’ idol and one of the most popular sportswriters in the country. An appearance on Simmons’ podcast led to an explosion in Club Trillion’s popularity, making him nearly as well known as teammate and national player of the year Evan “The Villain” Turner (so dubbed by Titus after several confrontations between the two). The application of the blog’s crude-yet-clever shtick to a book-length chronicle of Titus’ four years at OSU wears thin in later chapters, but the unique combination of snort-inducing hilarity and insider perspective makes this required reading for younger (or just perpetually immature) hoop heads.
A perfect way to pass the time during the tournament’s endless TV timeouts.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53510-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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