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This was printed in Sunday's New York Times. Its an excerpt from Michael Lewis ' (author of Moneyball) new book about the evolution of the Left Tackle. Lawrence Taylor isfrequently mentioned in the book as a guy who almost singlehandedly made the left tackle position the 2nd most demanded position in football, and perhaps that's why Lewis has spent so much time picking Bill's brain lately.
The Ballad of Big Mike
By MICHAEL LEWIS
Published: September 24, 2006
I. Looking for the Next Anti-Lawrence Taylor
As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent. The Briarcrest Christian School team didn’t have many black players either, and Michael Oher was black. But what made Michael Oher especially peculiar was that no one in Memphis had anything to say about him. Lemming had plenty of experience “discovering” great players. Each year he drove 50,000 to 60,000 miles and met, and grilled, between 1,500 and 2,000 high-school juniors while selecting All-American teams for ESPN and College Sports TV. He got inside their heads months before the college recruiters were allowed to shake their hands. Lemming had made some calls and found that the coaches in and around Memphis either didn’t know who Michael Oher was or didn’t think he was any good. He hadn’t made so much as the third-string all-city team. He hadn’t had his name or picture in any newspaper. Had Lemming Googled him, “Oher” would have yielded nothing on Michael. The only proof of his existence was a grainy videotape some coach had sent him out of the blue.
From the tape alone, Lemming couldn’t say how much Michael Oher had helped his team, just that he was big, fast and fantastically explosive. The last time he met a player with this awesome array of physical gifts was back in 1993, when he went to the Sizzler Steakhouse in Sandusky, Ohio, and interviewed a high-school junior working behind the counter named Orlando Pace. “Michael Oher’s athletic ability and his body — the only thing you could compare it to was Orlando Pace,” Lemming said later. “He kind of even looked like Orlando Pace. He wasn’t as polished as Orlando. But Orlando wasn’t Orlando in high school.” Pace had gone from Lemming’s All-American teams to Ohio State, where he played left tackle and won the Outland Trophy, given to the nation’s finest college lineman. In 1997, he signed the largest rookie contract in National Football League history, to play left tackle for the St. Louis Rams, and later signed an even bigger one (seven years, $52.8 million). Pace became, and remained, the team’s highest-paid player — more highly paid than the Rams’ star quarterback, Marc Bulger; the star running back, Marshall Faulk; and the star wide receiver, Isaac Bruce. He was an offensive lineman, but not just any offensive lineman. He protected the quarterback’s blind side.
When Tom Lemming walked into the football meeting room at the University of Memphis looking for Michael Oher, the ghost of Lawrence Taylor was with him. The great New York Giants linebacker of the 1980’s was the first of a series of speedy and exceptionally violent pass rushers who tilted the finances on the N.F.L.’s line of scrimmage. The players on the blind side of a right-handed quarterback — both offensive and defensive — became, on average, far more highly paid than the players on the visible side. By 2004, the five most highly paid N.F.L. left tackles were earning an average of nearly $3 million a year more than the five most highly paid right tackles and more than the five most highly paid running backs and wide receivers.
When Tom Lemming looked at left tackles, he thought in terms of others he had selected for his All-American teams who went on to be stars in the N.F.L.: Pace, Jonathan Ogden, Tony Boselli, Walter Jones. These people looked nothing like most human beings or even like the football players Lemming interviewed in the late 1970’s and 80’s. Among this population of giants, the left-tackle type still stood out. Freak of nature: when he found one of these rare beasts, that’s the phrase that popped into Lemming’s mind. When Lemming put the high-school junior Ogden on the cover of his annual prep report in 1992, Ogden was 6-foot-9 and weighed 320 pounds. (He would fill out in college.) When he did the same with Pace the next year, Pace stood 6-foot-6 and weighed 310 pounds. (And hadn’t stopped growing.) The ideal left tackle was big, but a lot of people were big. What set him apart were his more subtle specifications. He was wide in the rear and massive in the thighs: the girth of his lower body lessened the likelihood that Lawrence Taylor, or his successors, would run right over him. He had long arms: pass rushers tried to get in tight to the blocker’s body, then spin off of it, and long arms helped to keep them at bay. He had giant hands: when he grabbed a defender, it meant something.
But size alone couldn’t cope with the threat to the quarterback’s blind side, because that threat was also fast. The ideal left tackle also had great feet. Incredibly nimble and quick feet. Quick enough feet, ideally, that the prospect of racing him in a five-yard dash made the team’s running backs uneasy. He had the body control of a ballerina and the agility of a basketball player. The combination was just incredibly rare. And so, ultimately, very valuable.
By the 2004 N.F.L. season, the average N.F.L. left tackle’s salary was $5.5 million a year, and the left tackle had become the second-highest-paid position on the team, after the quarterback. In Super Bowl XL, played on Feb. 5, 2006, the highest-paid player on the field was the Seattle Seahawks’ quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck — who was just finishing the first season of a new six-year deal worth $8.2 million a year. The second-highest-paid player on the field was the man who protected Hasselbeck’s blind side, the left tackle Walter Jones, who made $7.5 million a year.
After he saw the tape of Michael Oher, Lemming tried to reach the kid by phone. He found out that his surname was pronounced “oar,” but that’s about all he learned. He was accustomed to the social lives of high-school football stars: the handlers, the harems, the informal advisers, the coaches. The kids Lemming sought to meet were not, typically, hard to find. This kid not only had no handlers; he didn’t appear to exist outside of school. He had no home; he didn’t even have a phone number. Or so said the Briarcrest Christian School when Lemming called looking for Michael Oher. Briarcrest officials were mystified by Lemming’s interest in their student, but they were also polite and finally agreed to have someone drive Michael over to the University of Memphis football facility for a face-to-face interview. “I’ll never forget when he walked into the room,” Lemming told me not long ago. “He looked like a house walking into a bigger house. He walked in the door, and he barely fit through the door.” He wasn’t just huge. He was huge in exactly the right ways. “There’s the big-blob 300-pounder, and there’s the solid kind,” Lemming went on to say. “He was the solid kind. You also see big guys, tall guys who weigh a lot, but they have thin legs. They’re fine in high school, but in college they’ll get pushed around. He was just massive everywhere.”
What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming’s 28-year career as a football scout. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him. . .and refused to speak. “He shook my hand and then didn’t say a word,” Lemming recalled. (“His hands — they were huge!”) Lemming asked a few questions; Michael Oher just kept staring right through him. And soon enough Lemming decided further interaction was pointless. Michael Oher left, and he left behind blank forms and unanswered questions. Every other high-school football player in America was dying for Lemming to invite him to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. Michael Oher had left his invitation on the table.
Second Down Ready to go after his freshman season as the starting left tackle for the Ole Miss Rebels.
What never crossed Tom Lemming’s mind was that the player he would soon rank the No. 1 offensive lineman in the nation, and perhaps the finest left-tackle prospect since Orlando Pace, hadn’t the faintest notion of who Lemming was or why he was asking him all these questions. For that matter, he didn’t even think of himself as a football player. And he had never played left tackle in his life.
II. School of Hard Knocks, West Memphis Branch
When the file on Michael Oher from the Memphis City Schools hit his desk in the summer of 2002, Steve Simpson, the principal of Briarcrest Christian School, was frankly incredulous. The boy, now 16, had a measured I.Q. of 80, which put him in mankind’s ninth percentile. An aptitude test he took in eighth grade measured his “ability to learn” and placed him in the sixth percentile. The numbers looked like misprints: in a rich white private school like Briarcrest, you never saw single-digit numbers under the column marked “percentile.” Of course, logically, you knew such people must exist; for someone to be in the 99th percentile, someone else had to be in the first. But you didn’t expect to meet them at the Briarcrest Christian School. Academically, Briarcrest might not be the most ambitious school. It spent more time and energy directing its students to Jesus Christ than to Harvard. But the students all went on to college. And they all had at least an average I.Q.
In his first nine years of school, Michael Oher was enrolled in 11 different institutions, and that included a gap of 18 months, around age 10, when he apparently did not attend school at all. Either that or the public schools were so indifferent to his presence that they neglected to register it formally. Not that Oher actually showed up at the schools where he was enrolled. Even when he received credit for attending, he was sensationally absent: 46 days of a single term of his first-grade year, for instance. His first first-grade year, that is; Michael Oher repeated first grade. He repeated second grade, too. And yet the school system presented these early years as the most accomplished of his academic career. They claimed that right through the fourth grade he was performing at “grade level.” How could they know when, according to these transcripts, he hadn’t even attended the third grade?
Simpson, who had spent 30-plus years in area public schools, including 29 in Memphis, knew what everyone who had even a brief brush with the Memphis public schools knew: they passed kids up to the next grade because they found it too much trouble to flunk them. They functioned as an assembly line churning out products never meant to be market-tested. At several schools, Michael Oher had been given F’s in reading his first term and C’s the second term, which allowed him to finish the school year with D’s — they were giving him grades just to get rid of him. And get rid of him they did: seldom did the child return to the school that passed him. The year before Simpson got his file, Michael Oher passed ninth grade at a high school called Westwood. According to his transcripts, he missed 50 days of school that year. Fifty days! At Briarcrest, the rule was that if a student misses 15 days of any class, he has to repeat the class no matter his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D’s to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade-point average the student would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.
If there was a less promising academic record, Simpson hadn’t seen it. Simpson guessed, rightly, that the Briarcrest Christian School hadn’t seen anything like Michael Oher either. Simpson and others in the Briarcrest community would eventually learn that Michael’s father had been shot and killed and tossed off a bridge, that his mother was addicted to crack cocaine and that his life experience was so narrow that he might as well have spent his first 16 years inside a closet. And yet here was his application, in the summer of 2002, courtesy of the Briarcrest football coach, Hugh Freeze, who offered with it this wildly implausible story: Big Mike, as he was called, was essentially homeless and so had made an art of sleeping on whatever floor the ghetto would provide for him. He crashed for a stretch on the floor of an inner-city character named Tony Henderson, who at nearly 400 pounds himself was known simply as Big Tony. Big Tony’s mom had died and as her dying wish asked Tony to enroll his son Steven Payne at a “Christian school.” Big Tony had figured that as long as he was taking Steven, he might as well take Big Mike, too.
But Big Mike wasn’t like Steven. Steven had a father and a bed and a decent school transcript. He could cope with a conversation. Big Mike, in company, seemed as lost as a Martian stumbling out of a crash landing. Simpson had tried to shake his hand. “He didn’t know how to do it,” he says. “I had to show him how to shake hands.” Every question Simpson put to Big Mike elicited a barely audible mumble. “I don’t know if ‘docile’ is the right word,” Simpson says.
The disposition of Michael Oher’s application to Briarcrest was Steve Simpson’s decision, and normally he would have had no trouble making it: an emphatic rejection. Beneath the Briarcrest coat of arms was the motto: Decidedly Academic, Distinctly Christian. Michael Oher was, it seemed to Simpson, neither. But this was only Simpson’s second year at Briarcrest, and its football coach, Freeze, had phoned Simpson’s boss, the school president, a football fan, and made his pitch: This wasn’t a thing you did for the Briarcrest football team, Freeze said; this was a thing you did because it was right! Briarcrest was this kid’s last chance! The president in turn phoned Simpson and told him that if he felt right with it, he could admit the kid.
Simpson thought it over and said, Sorry. They would take Steven, but there was just no chance Michael Oher could cut it in the 10th grade; the fourth grade might be a stretch. But the pressure from the football coach, coupled with a little twinge inside his own heart, led Simpson to reject the applicant gently. He granted a single concession: if Michael Oher enrolled in a home-study program and performed at a high level for a semester, Briarcrest would admit him the following semester. Since there wasn’t much chance any program would pass him, Simpson suspected that he would never hear from the football coach, or Michael Oher, again.
He was wrong. Two months later — six weeks into the 2002-03 school year — his phone rang. It was Big Tony. It was a sad sight, Big Tony said, watching Big Mike stare at these books sent to him by the Gateway Christian School, which he had enrolled in, without any ability to make heads or tails of them. Big Tony didn’t have the time or the energy to work with him. Big Mike was trying so hard but getting nowhere, and it was too late for him to enroll in a public school. What should they do now?
That’s when Simpson realized he had made a mistake. In effect, he had removed a child from the public-school system. He had tried to handle this problem the easy way, for him, and it backfired. After a sleepless night, he called Michael Oher — apparently still sleeping on Big Tony’s floor — and said, “We are going to take a chance on you, but you’re not going to play ball.” No basketball, no football — he couldn’t even sing in the choir until he proved to the school that he could handle the work. Michael didn’t say much at all in response, but that didn’t matter to Simpson. “My conscience would be clear if we gave him a chance,” he says. His thoughts turned to the teachers: how would he explain this mess to them?
III. A Very Big and Very Blank Slate
Jennifer Graves had run Briarcrest’s program for students with special needs for nine years. “I decided early on in my life,” she says, “that Christ was calling me to work with the kids who did not have it so easy.” But her mission took on a different and less hopeful tone when in the fall of 2002 this huge black kid was dumped in her lap. She, too, had seen the file on Michael Oher that had come over from the public school system. After the transcript came the child himself, accompanied by Simpson. “He said, ‘This is Michael Oher, and you’ll be working with him,”’ Graves recalls.
She took him around and placed him in the middle of every classroom. “By sixth period of the first day everyone knew who he was,” she says. “And he hadn’t said a word.” It was a matter of days before the reports poured in from the teachers, every last one of them asking the same question of her that she asked of Simpson: why had Briarcrest let this kid in? “Big Mike had no conception of what real school was about,” she says. “He’d never have his books with him, didn’t speak in class, nothing. He had no academic background, no foundation at all.”
Michael Oher was only a few weeks into his tenure at the Briarcrest Christian School before several teachers suggested he should be on his way out. He wasn’t merely failing tests; he wasn’t even starting them. The only honest grade to give him in his academic subjects was zero.
The situation appeared hopeless and humiliating for all concerned. Word of the new student’s various failures inevitably reached Simpson, who also began to sense the dimensions of the void in the child’s life experiences. He didn’t know what an ocean was or a bird’s nest or the tooth fairy. He couldn’t very well be taught 10th-grade biology if he had no clue what was meant by the word cell, and he couldn’t very well get through 10th-grade English if he had never heard of a verb or a noun. It was as if he had materialized on the planet as an overgrown 16-year-old. Jennifer Graves had the same misgivings: the boy reminded her of a story she had read in a psychology journal about a child who had been locked away inside a closet for years. “That child didn’t even have tactile sense,” she says, “but it felt like the same sort of thing. Big Mike was a blank slate.”
IV. A Rich White Family Takes an Interest
When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym — watching the practice of a basketball team he wasn’t allowed to play on — he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.
Sean was an American success story: he had come from nothing and made himself rich. He was a star point guard at Ole Miss, drafted by the New Jersey Nets. And while he didn’t make it in the National Basketball Association, he took his preternatural court sense into the business world and made his fortune — sort of. He owned a chain of 60 Taco Bells, KFC’s and Long John Silver restaurants, along with a mountain of debt. If everything broke right, he might soon be worth as much as $50 million. If everything did not, he could always call games on the radio for the N.B.A.’s Grizzlies, which he had been doing since they arrived in Memphis in 2001. What Atlanta was to the American South, Sean Tuohy was to the white Southern male. Prosperous. Forever upgrading the trappings of his existence. Happy to exchange his past at a deep discount for a piece of the future.
It wasn’t enough. The restaurants ran themselves; the Grizzlies gig was a night job; church was on Sundays. He needed a bit more action in his life. And he now had all the time in the world for what he still loved more than anything: hanging around school gyms and acting as a kind of consultant to the coaches at the Briarcrest Christian School in their dealings with their players. Like every other parent and student at Briarcrest, Sean had been born again, but his interest in the poor jocks might have run even deeper than his religious belief. Sean was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interested in opera singers or a Jesuit scholar in debaters. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. “What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,” he told me once, “was what not to do: beat up a kid. It’s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.”
Sean was 42 years old. His hairline had receded, but not quite to the point where you could call him bald, and his stomach had expanded, but not quite to the point where you could call him fat. He was keenly interested in social status — his own and other people’s — but not in the way of the Old South. Not long after he became a figure in Memphis — a putatively rich businessman who had his own jet and was the radio voice of the Memphis Grizzlies — he had feelers from the Memphis Country Club. He didn’t encourage them because, as he puts it: “I don’t hang with the blues. I’d rather go to a high-school football game on Friday night than go to a country club and drink four Scotches and complain about my wife.” He delighted in the sight of people moving up in the world. Country clubs were all about staying in one place.
When he introduced himself to Big Mike, Sean was already knee-deep in the various problems and crises of the few black students at the Briarcrest Christian School. Sean’s daughter Collins, a sophomore at Briarcrest and on her way to becoming the Tennessee state champion in the pole vault, occasioned almost constant exposure to them: she was on the track team; they were on the track team. Collins had mentioned Big Mike to him. When she tried to pass him on the stairwell, she said, she had to back up to the top because she couldn’t fit past him. Without uttering a peep, he had become the talk of the school.
She said everyone was frightened of him at first, until they realized that he was far more terrified of them. Sean had seen Big Mike around the school three or four times. He had noticed that he wore the same clothes every day: cutoff blue jeans and an oversize T-shirt. Now he saw him in the stands and thought, I’ll bet he’s hungry. Sean walked over and said, “You don’t know me, but we have more in common than you might think.”
Michael Oher stared intently at his feet.
“What did you have to eat for lunch today?” Sean asked.
“In the cafeteria,” the kid said.
“I didn’t ask where you ate,” Sean said. “I asked what you ate.”
“Had a few things,” the kid said.
Sure you did, thought Sean. He asked if he needed money for lunch, and Mike said, “I don’t need any money.”
The next day, Sean went to the Briarcrest accounting department and arranged for Michael Oher to have a standing account at the lunch checkout counter. He had done the same for several of the poorer black kids who had come to Briarcrest. In a couple of cases, he had, in effect, paid their tuition by giving money to a school fund earmarked for scholarships for those who couldn’t afford tuition. “That was my only connection with Michael,” he said later. “Lunch.”
Sean left it at lunch, and at lunch it might have ended. But a few weeks afterward, the Briarcrest Christian School took its Thanksgiving break. On a cold and blustery morning, Sean and his wife, Leigh Anne, were driving down one of the main boulevards of East Memphis when just ahead of them a huge black male stepped off the bus. He was dressed in the same pair of cutoffs and T-shirt he always wore. Sean pointed him out to his wife and said: “That kid I was telling you about — that’s him. Big Mike.”
“But he’s wearing shorts,” she said.
“Uh-huh. He always wears those.”
“Sean, it’s snowing!”
And so it was. At Leigh Anne’s insistence, they pulled over. Sean reintroduced himself to Michael and then introduced Michael to Leigh Anne.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To basketball practice,” Michael said.
“Michael, you don’t have basketball practice,” Sean said.
“I know,” the boy said. “But they got heat there.”
Sean didn’t understand that one.
“It’s nice and warm in that gym,” the boy said.
As they drove off, Sean looked over and saw tears streaming down Leigh Anne’s face. And he thought, Uh-oh, my wife’s about to take over.
The next day in the afternoon, Leigh Anne left her business — she had her own interior-decorating firm — turned up at Briarcrest, picked up Michael and took off with him. A few hours later, Sean’s cellphone rang. His wife was on the other end.
“Do you know how big a 58-long jacket is?” she asked.
“How big?”
“Not big enough.”
Leigh Anne Tuohy grew up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but shed them for another — and could not tell you exactly how it happened, except to say, “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color.” Her father, a United States marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. The moment the courts ordered the Memphis City Schools integrated in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she became a student in its first year. “I was raised in a very racist household,” she says. Yet by the time Michael Oher arrived at Briarcrest, Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t see anything odd or even awkward in taking him in hand. This child was new; he had no clothes; he had no warm place to stay over Thanksgiving. For Lord’s sake, he was walking to school in the snow in shorts, when school was out of session, on the off chance he could get into the gym and keep warm. Of course she took him out and bought him some clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before and would do it again. “God gives people money to see how you’re going to handle it,” she says. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.
V. Troubles Adjusting
Coach Freeze recalls the moment he realized that Big Mike was not any ordinary giant: a football practice at which this new boy, who had just been admitted on academic probation, had no purpose. Big Mike just wandered onto the field, picked up a huge tackling dummy — the thing weighed at least 50 pounds — and took off with it at high speed. “Did you see that — did you see the way that kid moved?” Freeze asked another coach. “He ran with that dummy like it weighed nothing.” Freeze’s next thought was that he had misjudged the boy’s mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. “That’s when I had them weigh him,” Freeze says. “One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.” The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later told was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow — delightfully beefy for a high-school sophomore. Especially one who could run. “I didn’t know whether he could play,” Freeze says now. “But I knew this: we didn’t have anyone like him on campus.”
For his first year it didn’t matter. He failed his classes and didn’t play anything. As far as the Briarcrest teachers could determine, he didn’t have a thought or a fact or an idea in his head. But then almost by accident they figured out that he needed to be tested orally, whereupon he proved to them that he deserved high D’s instead of low F’s. It wasn’t clear that he was going to acquire enough credits to graduate with his class, but Simpson and Graves stopped thinking they were going to send him back out on the streets, and they let him play sports. He joined the basketball team at the end of his sophomore year and soon afterward the track-and-field team (throwing the discus and putting the shot). In his junior year he finally got onto the football field.
The problem there, at first, resembled his problems in the classroom. He had no foundation, no idea what he was meant to do as a member of a team. He said he had played football his freshman year at Westwood, but there was no sign of it in his performance. When Freeze saw how fast he could move, he pegged him as a defensive tackle. And so for the first six games of the 2003 season, he played defense. He wasn’t any worse than his replacement, but he wasn’t much better either. One of his more talented teammates, Joseph Crone, thought Big Mike’s main contribution came before the game, when the opposing team stumbled out of its locker room or bus and took the measure of the Briarcrest Christian School. “They’d see all of us,” Crone says, “and then they’d see Mike and say, ‘Oh, God.”’
But during the games he seemed confused. When he wasn’t confused, he was reluctant. Passive, almost. This was the last thing Freeze expected. Freeze didn’t know much about Michael Oher’s past, but he knew enough to assume that his player had some kind of miserable childhood in the worst part of West Memphis. A miserable childhood in the worst part of West Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense: it made you angry; it made you aggressive; it made you want to tear someone’s head off. The N.F.L. was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood.
The trouble with Michael Oher as a football player was the trouble with Ferdinand as a bull: he didn’t exhibit the anger of his breed. He was just a sweet kid who didn’t particularly care to hit anybody. Or as Freeze puts it: “He just wasn’t aggressive. His mentality was not a defensive player’s mentality.”
VI. Finding a New Home
That fall, in 2003, Michael spent his nights with at least five different Briarcrest families — including the Tuohys — but most nights he spent with Quinterio Franklin, a teammate at Briarcrest. One night after a track meet, Michael was left without a ride home, and Leigh Anne offered to take him wherever he wanted to go. “Terio’s,” he said, and off they went. . .30 miles into Mississippi. “It was a trailer,” she says. She couldn’t believe there was room enough inside the place for him. She insisted on following him in to see where he slept. He showed her his old air mattress on the floor. It was flat as a pancake. “I blow it up every night,” he said. “But it runs out of air around midnight.”
“That’s it,” she said. She told him to gather up all his stuff. “You’re moving in with me.”
With that, he picked up a single Glad trash bag and followed her back into the car. Right up to that moment Leigh Anne hoped that what they and other Briarcrest families had done for Michael added up to something like a decent life. Now she knew it didn’t. She took over the management of that life. Completely. “The first thing we did,” she says, “was have a cleansing of the clothes.”
Together they drove to every house in Memphis where Michael had stashed his clothing. Five houses and four giant trash bags later, she was staring at a pile of his belongings. “It was stuff people had given him,” she says. “Most of it still had the tags on it. Stuff he would never wear. I mean, there were polo shirts with little penguins on them.” For the next couple of weeks, Michael slept on the Tuohys’ sofa, and no one in the family stated the obvious: this was Michael Oher’s new home and probably would be for a long time. He was, in effect, a third child. “When I first saw him, I was like, ‘Who the heck is this big black guy?”’ says Sean Jr., who was 8 at the time. “But Dad just said this was a kid we were trying to help out, and so I just said all right.” Sean Jr. had his own uses for Michael: the two would vanish for hours on end into the bedroom and play video games. Just a few months after his arrival, Leigh Anne would point to Michael and say, “That is Sean Jr.’s best friend.” His sister, Collins, says he became comfortable quickly: “When he kept staying and staying, Mom asked him if he wanted to move in. He said, ‘I don’t think I want to leave.’ That’s when Mom went out and bought the dresser and the bed.”
After she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do — “it was ruining my $10,000 couch” — but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or if it did, it might collapse in the middle of the night, and he might crash through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day, Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. When the futon arrived, she showed it to Michael and said, “That’s your bed.” And he said, “That’s my bed?” And she said, “That’s your bed.” And he just stared at it a bit and said, “This is the first time I ever had my own bed.”
After a while, out stepped Joseph Crone, the team’s biggest and most powerful defensive lineman. He was 6-foot-2, maybe 270 pounds, and a candidate to attend college on a football scholarship. To him, this new mission, going helmet to helmet with Big Mike, had the flavor of heroism. “The reason I stepped up,” Crone says, “is that I didn’t think anyone else wanted to go up against him. Because he was such a big guy.”
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Crone still didn’t think of Michael Oher as an exceptional football player. But if he hadn’t been a force on the field, Crone thought, it was only because he had no idea what he was supposed to do there. And Crone noticed that he had improved the past season and by the final game looked very good indeed. “He was figuring it out,” Crone says. “How to move his feet, where to put his hands. How to get onto people so they couldn’t get away.” But even if Big Mike had no idea what he was doing on a football field, Crone found him an awesome physical specimen. He had a picture in his mind of the few opposing players who had made the mistake of being fallen upon by Big Mike. “They looked like pressed pennies,” he says. “They’d get up, and their backs would be one giant grass stain. I couldn’t imagine being on the other side of the ball going against Mike.” Now, by default, he was.
The Ballad of Big Mike
By MICHAEL LEWIS
Published: September 24, 2006
I. Looking for the Next Anti-Lawrence Taylor
As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent. The Briarcrest Christian School team didn’t have many black players either, and Michael Oher was black. But what made Michael Oher especially peculiar was that no one in Memphis had anything to say about him. Lemming had plenty of experience “discovering” great players. Each year he drove 50,000 to 60,000 miles and met, and grilled, between 1,500 and 2,000 high-school juniors while selecting All-American teams for ESPN and College Sports TV. He got inside their heads months before the college recruiters were allowed to shake their hands. Lemming had made some calls and found that the coaches in and around Memphis either didn’t know who Michael Oher was or didn’t think he was any good. He hadn’t made so much as the third-string all-city team. He hadn’t had his name or picture in any newspaper. Had Lemming Googled him, “Oher” would have yielded nothing on Michael. The only proof of his existence was a grainy videotape some coach had sent him out of the blue.
From the tape alone, Lemming couldn’t say how much Michael Oher had helped his team, just that he was big, fast and fantastically explosive. The last time he met a player with this awesome array of physical gifts was back in 1993, when he went to the Sizzler Steakhouse in Sandusky, Ohio, and interviewed a high-school junior working behind the counter named Orlando Pace. “Michael Oher’s athletic ability and his body — the only thing you could compare it to was Orlando Pace,” Lemming said later. “He kind of even looked like Orlando Pace. He wasn’t as polished as Orlando. But Orlando wasn’t Orlando in high school.” Pace had gone from Lemming’s All-American teams to Ohio State, where he played left tackle and won the Outland Trophy, given to the nation’s finest college lineman. In 1997, he signed the largest rookie contract in National Football League history, to play left tackle for the St. Louis Rams, and later signed an even bigger one (seven years, $52.8 million). Pace became, and remained, the team’s highest-paid player — more highly paid than the Rams’ star quarterback, Marc Bulger; the star running back, Marshall Faulk; and the star wide receiver, Isaac Bruce. He was an offensive lineman, but not just any offensive lineman. He protected the quarterback’s blind side.
When Tom Lemming walked into the football meeting room at the University of Memphis looking for Michael Oher, the ghost of Lawrence Taylor was with him. The great New York Giants linebacker of the 1980’s was the first of a series of speedy and exceptionally violent pass rushers who tilted the finances on the N.F.L.’s line of scrimmage. The players on the blind side of a right-handed quarterback — both offensive and defensive — became, on average, far more highly paid than the players on the visible side. By 2004, the five most highly paid N.F.L. left tackles were earning an average of nearly $3 million a year more than the five most highly paid right tackles and more than the five most highly paid running backs and wide receivers.
When Tom Lemming looked at left tackles, he thought in terms of others he had selected for his All-American teams who went on to be stars in the N.F.L.: Pace, Jonathan Ogden, Tony Boselli, Walter Jones. These people looked nothing like most human beings or even like the football players Lemming interviewed in the late 1970’s and 80’s. Among this population of giants, the left-tackle type still stood out. Freak of nature: when he found one of these rare beasts, that’s the phrase that popped into Lemming’s mind. When Lemming put the high-school junior Ogden on the cover of his annual prep report in 1992, Ogden was 6-foot-9 and weighed 320 pounds. (He would fill out in college.) When he did the same with Pace the next year, Pace stood 6-foot-6 and weighed 310 pounds. (And hadn’t stopped growing.) The ideal left tackle was big, but a lot of people were big. What set him apart were his more subtle specifications. He was wide in the rear and massive in the thighs: the girth of his lower body lessened the likelihood that Lawrence Taylor, or his successors, would run right over him. He had long arms: pass rushers tried to get in tight to the blocker’s body, then spin off of it, and long arms helped to keep them at bay. He had giant hands: when he grabbed a defender, it meant something.
But size alone couldn’t cope with the threat to the quarterback’s blind side, because that threat was also fast. The ideal left tackle also had great feet. Incredibly nimble and quick feet. Quick enough feet, ideally, that the prospect of racing him in a five-yard dash made the team’s running backs uneasy. He had the body control of a ballerina and the agility of a basketball player. The combination was just incredibly rare. And so, ultimately, very valuable.
By the 2004 N.F.L. season, the average N.F.L. left tackle’s salary was $5.5 million a year, and the left tackle had become the second-highest-paid position on the team, after the quarterback. In Super Bowl XL, played on Feb. 5, 2006, the highest-paid player on the field was the Seattle Seahawks’ quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck — who was just finishing the first season of a new six-year deal worth $8.2 million a year. The second-highest-paid player on the field was the man who protected Hasselbeck’s blind side, the left tackle Walter Jones, who made $7.5 million a year.
After he saw the tape of Michael Oher, Lemming tried to reach the kid by phone. He found out that his surname was pronounced “oar,” but that’s about all he learned. He was accustomed to the social lives of high-school football stars: the handlers, the harems, the informal advisers, the coaches. The kids Lemming sought to meet were not, typically, hard to find. This kid not only had no handlers; he didn’t appear to exist outside of school. He had no home; he didn’t even have a phone number. Or so said the Briarcrest Christian School when Lemming called looking for Michael Oher. Briarcrest officials were mystified by Lemming’s interest in their student, but they were also polite and finally agreed to have someone drive Michael over to the University of Memphis football facility for a face-to-face interview. “I’ll never forget when he walked into the room,” Lemming told me not long ago. “He looked like a house walking into a bigger house. He walked in the door, and he barely fit through the door.” He wasn’t just huge. He was huge in exactly the right ways. “There’s the big-blob 300-pounder, and there’s the solid kind,” Lemming went on to say. “He was the solid kind. You also see big guys, tall guys who weigh a lot, but they have thin legs. They’re fine in high school, but in college they’ll get pushed around. He was just massive everywhere.”
What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming’s 28-year career as a football scout. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him. . .and refused to speak. “He shook my hand and then didn’t say a word,” Lemming recalled. (“His hands — they were huge!”) Lemming asked a few questions; Michael Oher just kept staring right through him. And soon enough Lemming decided further interaction was pointless. Michael Oher left, and he left behind blank forms and unanswered questions. Every other high-school football player in America was dying for Lemming to invite him to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. Michael Oher had left his invitation on the table.
Second Down Ready to go after his freshman season as the starting left tackle for the Ole Miss Rebels.
What never crossed Tom Lemming’s mind was that the player he would soon rank the No. 1 offensive lineman in the nation, and perhaps the finest left-tackle prospect since Orlando Pace, hadn’t the faintest notion of who Lemming was or why he was asking him all these questions. For that matter, he didn’t even think of himself as a football player. And he had never played left tackle in his life.
II. School of Hard Knocks, West Memphis Branch
When the file on Michael Oher from the Memphis City Schools hit his desk in the summer of 2002, Steve Simpson, the principal of Briarcrest Christian School, was frankly incredulous. The boy, now 16, had a measured I.Q. of 80, which put him in mankind’s ninth percentile. An aptitude test he took in eighth grade measured his “ability to learn” and placed him in the sixth percentile. The numbers looked like misprints: in a rich white private school like Briarcrest, you never saw single-digit numbers under the column marked “percentile.” Of course, logically, you knew such people must exist; for someone to be in the 99th percentile, someone else had to be in the first. But you didn’t expect to meet them at the Briarcrest Christian School. Academically, Briarcrest might not be the most ambitious school. It spent more time and energy directing its students to Jesus Christ than to Harvard. But the students all went on to college. And they all had at least an average I.Q.
In his first nine years of school, Michael Oher was enrolled in 11 different institutions, and that included a gap of 18 months, around age 10, when he apparently did not attend school at all. Either that or the public schools were so indifferent to his presence that they neglected to register it formally. Not that Oher actually showed up at the schools where he was enrolled. Even when he received credit for attending, he was sensationally absent: 46 days of a single term of his first-grade year, for instance. His first first-grade year, that is; Michael Oher repeated first grade. He repeated second grade, too. And yet the school system presented these early years as the most accomplished of his academic career. They claimed that right through the fourth grade he was performing at “grade level.” How could they know when, according to these transcripts, he hadn’t even attended the third grade?
Simpson, who had spent 30-plus years in area public schools, including 29 in Memphis, knew what everyone who had even a brief brush with the Memphis public schools knew: they passed kids up to the next grade because they found it too much trouble to flunk them. They functioned as an assembly line churning out products never meant to be market-tested. At several schools, Michael Oher had been given F’s in reading his first term and C’s the second term, which allowed him to finish the school year with D’s — they were giving him grades just to get rid of him. And get rid of him they did: seldom did the child return to the school that passed him. The year before Simpson got his file, Michael Oher passed ninth grade at a high school called Westwood. According to his transcripts, he missed 50 days of school that year. Fifty days! At Briarcrest, the rule was that if a student misses 15 days of any class, he has to repeat the class no matter his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D’s to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade-point average the student would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.
If there was a less promising academic record, Simpson hadn’t seen it. Simpson guessed, rightly, that the Briarcrest Christian School hadn’t seen anything like Michael Oher either. Simpson and others in the Briarcrest community would eventually learn that Michael’s father had been shot and killed and tossed off a bridge, that his mother was addicted to crack cocaine and that his life experience was so narrow that he might as well have spent his first 16 years inside a closet. And yet here was his application, in the summer of 2002, courtesy of the Briarcrest football coach, Hugh Freeze, who offered with it this wildly implausible story: Big Mike, as he was called, was essentially homeless and so had made an art of sleeping on whatever floor the ghetto would provide for him. He crashed for a stretch on the floor of an inner-city character named Tony Henderson, who at nearly 400 pounds himself was known simply as Big Tony. Big Tony’s mom had died and as her dying wish asked Tony to enroll his son Steven Payne at a “Christian school.” Big Tony had figured that as long as he was taking Steven, he might as well take Big Mike, too.
But Big Mike wasn’t like Steven. Steven had a father and a bed and a decent school transcript. He could cope with a conversation. Big Mike, in company, seemed as lost as a Martian stumbling out of a crash landing. Simpson had tried to shake his hand. “He didn’t know how to do it,” he says. “I had to show him how to shake hands.” Every question Simpson put to Big Mike elicited a barely audible mumble. “I don’t know if ‘docile’ is the right word,” Simpson says.
The disposition of Michael Oher’s application to Briarcrest was Steve Simpson’s decision, and normally he would have had no trouble making it: an emphatic rejection. Beneath the Briarcrest coat of arms was the motto: Decidedly Academic, Distinctly Christian. Michael Oher was, it seemed to Simpson, neither. But this was only Simpson’s second year at Briarcrest, and its football coach, Freeze, had phoned Simpson’s boss, the school president, a football fan, and made his pitch: This wasn’t a thing you did for the Briarcrest football team, Freeze said; this was a thing you did because it was right! Briarcrest was this kid’s last chance! The president in turn phoned Simpson and told him that if he felt right with it, he could admit the kid.
Simpson thought it over and said, Sorry. They would take Steven, but there was just no chance Michael Oher could cut it in the 10th grade; the fourth grade might be a stretch. But the pressure from the football coach, coupled with a little twinge inside his own heart, led Simpson to reject the applicant gently. He granted a single concession: if Michael Oher enrolled in a home-study program and performed at a high level for a semester, Briarcrest would admit him the following semester. Since there wasn’t much chance any program would pass him, Simpson suspected that he would never hear from the football coach, or Michael Oher, again.
He was wrong. Two months later — six weeks into the 2002-03 school year — his phone rang. It was Big Tony. It was a sad sight, Big Tony said, watching Big Mike stare at these books sent to him by the Gateway Christian School, which he had enrolled in, without any ability to make heads or tails of them. Big Tony didn’t have the time or the energy to work with him. Big Mike was trying so hard but getting nowhere, and it was too late for him to enroll in a public school. What should they do now?
That’s when Simpson realized he had made a mistake. In effect, he had removed a child from the public-school system. He had tried to handle this problem the easy way, for him, and it backfired. After a sleepless night, he called Michael Oher — apparently still sleeping on Big Tony’s floor — and said, “We are going to take a chance on you, but you’re not going to play ball.” No basketball, no football — he couldn’t even sing in the choir until he proved to the school that he could handle the work. Michael didn’t say much at all in response, but that didn’t matter to Simpson. “My conscience would be clear if we gave him a chance,” he says. His thoughts turned to the teachers: how would he explain this mess to them?
III. A Very Big and Very Blank Slate
Jennifer Graves had run Briarcrest’s program for students with special needs for nine years. “I decided early on in my life,” she says, “that Christ was calling me to work with the kids who did not have it so easy.” But her mission took on a different and less hopeful tone when in the fall of 2002 this huge black kid was dumped in her lap. She, too, had seen the file on Michael Oher that had come over from the public school system. After the transcript came the child himself, accompanied by Simpson. “He said, ‘This is Michael Oher, and you’ll be working with him,”’ Graves recalls.
She took him around and placed him in the middle of every classroom. “By sixth period of the first day everyone knew who he was,” she says. “And he hadn’t said a word.” It was a matter of days before the reports poured in from the teachers, every last one of them asking the same question of her that she asked of Simpson: why had Briarcrest let this kid in? “Big Mike had no conception of what real school was about,” she says. “He’d never have his books with him, didn’t speak in class, nothing. He had no academic background, no foundation at all.”
Michael Oher was only a few weeks into his tenure at the Briarcrest Christian School before several teachers suggested he should be on his way out. He wasn’t merely failing tests; he wasn’t even starting them. The only honest grade to give him in his academic subjects was zero.
The situation appeared hopeless and humiliating for all concerned. Word of the new student’s various failures inevitably reached Simpson, who also began to sense the dimensions of the void in the child’s life experiences. He didn’t know what an ocean was or a bird’s nest or the tooth fairy. He couldn’t very well be taught 10th-grade biology if he had no clue what was meant by the word cell, and he couldn’t very well get through 10th-grade English if he had never heard of a verb or a noun. It was as if he had materialized on the planet as an overgrown 16-year-old. Jennifer Graves had the same misgivings: the boy reminded her of a story she had read in a psychology journal about a child who had been locked away inside a closet for years. “That child didn’t even have tactile sense,” she says, “but it felt like the same sort of thing. Big Mike was a blank slate.”
IV. A Rich White Family Takes an Interest
When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym — watching the practice of a basketball team he wasn’t allowed to play on — he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.
Sean was an American success story: he had come from nothing and made himself rich. He was a star point guard at Ole Miss, drafted by the New Jersey Nets. And while he didn’t make it in the National Basketball Association, he took his preternatural court sense into the business world and made his fortune — sort of. He owned a chain of 60 Taco Bells, KFC’s and Long John Silver restaurants, along with a mountain of debt. If everything broke right, he might soon be worth as much as $50 million. If everything did not, he could always call games on the radio for the N.B.A.’s Grizzlies, which he had been doing since they arrived in Memphis in 2001. What Atlanta was to the American South, Sean Tuohy was to the white Southern male. Prosperous. Forever upgrading the trappings of his existence. Happy to exchange his past at a deep discount for a piece of the future.
It wasn’t enough. The restaurants ran themselves; the Grizzlies gig was a night job; church was on Sundays. He needed a bit more action in his life. And he now had all the time in the world for what he still loved more than anything: hanging around school gyms and acting as a kind of consultant to the coaches at the Briarcrest Christian School in their dealings with their players. Like every other parent and student at Briarcrest, Sean had been born again, but his interest in the poor jocks might have run even deeper than his religious belief. Sean was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interested in opera singers or a Jesuit scholar in debaters. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. “What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,” he told me once, “was what not to do: beat up a kid. It’s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.”
Sean was 42 years old. His hairline had receded, but not quite to the point where you could call him bald, and his stomach had expanded, but not quite to the point where you could call him fat. He was keenly interested in social status — his own and other people’s — but not in the way of the Old South. Not long after he became a figure in Memphis — a putatively rich businessman who had his own jet and was the radio voice of the Memphis Grizzlies — he had feelers from the Memphis Country Club. He didn’t encourage them because, as he puts it: “I don’t hang with the blues. I’d rather go to a high-school football game on Friday night than go to a country club and drink four Scotches and complain about my wife.” He delighted in the sight of people moving up in the world. Country clubs were all about staying in one place.
When he introduced himself to Big Mike, Sean was already knee-deep in the various problems and crises of the few black students at the Briarcrest Christian School. Sean’s daughter Collins, a sophomore at Briarcrest and on her way to becoming the Tennessee state champion in the pole vault, occasioned almost constant exposure to them: she was on the track team; they were on the track team. Collins had mentioned Big Mike to him. When she tried to pass him on the stairwell, she said, she had to back up to the top because she couldn’t fit past him. Without uttering a peep, he had become the talk of the school.
She said everyone was frightened of him at first, until they realized that he was far more terrified of them. Sean had seen Big Mike around the school three or four times. He had noticed that he wore the same clothes every day: cutoff blue jeans and an oversize T-shirt. Now he saw him in the stands and thought, I’ll bet he’s hungry. Sean walked over and said, “You don’t know me, but we have more in common than you might think.”
Michael Oher stared intently at his feet.
“What did you have to eat for lunch today?” Sean asked.
“In the cafeteria,” the kid said.
“I didn’t ask where you ate,” Sean said. “I asked what you ate.”
“Had a few things,” the kid said.
Sure you did, thought Sean. He asked if he needed money for lunch, and Mike said, “I don’t need any money.”
The next day, Sean went to the Briarcrest accounting department and arranged for Michael Oher to have a standing account at the lunch checkout counter. He had done the same for several of the poorer black kids who had come to Briarcrest. In a couple of cases, he had, in effect, paid their tuition by giving money to a school fund earmarked for scholarships for those who couldn’t afford tuition. “That was my only connection with Michael,” he said later. “Lunch.”
Sean left it at lunch, and at lunch it might have ended. But a few weeks afterward, the Briarcrest Christian School took its Thanksgiving break. On a cold and blustery morning, Sean and his wife, Leigh Anne, were driving down one of the main boulevards of East Memphis when just ahead of them a huge black male stepped off the bus. He was dressed in the same pair of cutoffs and T-shirt he always wore. Sean pointed him out to his wife and said: “That kid I was telling you about — that’s him. Big Mike.”
“But he’s wearing shorts,” she said.
“Uh-huh. He always wears those.”
“Sean, it’s snowing!”
And so it was. At Leigh Anne’s insistence, they pulled over. Sean reintroduced himself to Michael and then introduced Michael to Leigh Anne.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To basketball practice,” Michael said.
“Michael, you don’t have basketball practice,” Sean said.
“I know,” the boy said. “But they got heat there.”
Sean didn’t understand that one.
“It’s nice and warm in that gym,” the boy said.
As they drove off, Sean looked over and saw tears streaming down Leigh Anne’s face. And he thought, Uh-oh, my wife’s about to take over.
The next day in the afternoon, Leigh Anne left her business — she had her own interior-decorating firm — turned up at Briarcrest, picked up Michael and took off with him. A few hours later, Sean’s cellphone rang. His wife was on the other end.
“Do you know how big a 58-long jacket is?” she asked.
“How big?”
“Not big enough.”
Leigh Anne Tuohy grew up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but shed them for another — and could not tell you exactly how it happened, except to say, “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color.” Her father, a United States marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. The moment the courts ordered the Memphis City Schools integrated in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she became a student in its first year. “I was raised in a very racist household,” she says. Yet by the time Michael Oher arrived at Briarcrest, Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t see anything odd or even awkward in taking him in hand. This child was new; he had no clothes; he had no warm place to stay over Thanksgiving. For Lord’s sake, he was walking to school in the snow in shorts, when school was out of session, on the off chance he could get into the gym and keep warm. Of course she took him out and bought him some clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before and would do it again. “God gives people money to see how you’re going to handle it,” she says. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.
V. Troubles Adjusting
Coach Freeze recalls the moment he realized that Big Mike was not any ordinary giant: a football practice at which this new boy, who had just been admitted on academic probation, had no purpose. Big Mike just wandered onto the field, picked up a huge tackling dummy — the thing weighed at least 50 pounds — and took off with it at high speed. “Did you see that — did you see the way that kid moved?” Freeze asked another coach. “He ran with that dummy like it weighed nothing.” Freeze’s next thought was that he had misjudged the boy’s mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. “That’s when I had them weigh him,” Freeze says. “One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.” The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later told was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow — delightfully beefy for a high-school sophomore. Especially one who could run. “I didn’t know whether he could play,” Freeze says now. “But I knew this: we didn’t have anyone like him on campus.”
For his first year it didn’t matter. He failed his classes and didn’t play anything. As far as the Briarcrest teachers could determine, he didn’t have a thought or a fact or an idea in his head. But then almost by accident they figured out that he needed to be tested orally, whereupon he proved to them that he deserved high D’s instead of low F’s. It wasn’t clear that he was going to acquire enough credits to graduate with his class, but Simpson and Graves stopped thinking they were going to send him back out on the streets, and they let him play sports. He joined the basketball team at the end of his sophomore year and soon afterward the track-and-field team (throwing the discus and putting the shot). In his junior year he finally got onto the football field.
The problem there, at first, resembled his problems in the classroom. He had no foundation, no idea what he was meant to do as a member of a team. He said he had played football his freshman year at Westwood, but there was no sign of it in his performance. When Freeze saw how fast he could move, he pegged him as a defensive tackle. And so for the first six games of the 2003 season, he played defense. He wasn’t any worse than his replacement, but he wasn’t much better either. One of his more talented teammates, Joseph Crone, thought Big Mike’s main contribution came before the game, when the opposing team stumbled out of its locker room or bus and took the measure of the Briarcrest Christian School. “They’d see all of us,” Crone says, “and then they’d see Mike and say, ‘Oh, God.”’
But during the games he seemed confused. When he wasn’t confused, he was reluctant. Passive, almost. This was the last thing Freeze expected. Freeze didn’t know much about Michael Oher’s past, but he knew enough to assume that his player had some kind of miserable childhood in the worst part of West Memphis. A miserable childhood in the worst part of West Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense: it made you angry; it made you aggressive; it made you want to tear someone’s head off. The N.F.L. was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood.
The trouble with Michael Oher as a football player was the trouble with Ferdinand as a bull: he didn’t exhibit the anger of his breed. He was just a sweet kid who didn’t particularly care to hit anybody. Or as Freeze puts it: “He just wasn’t aggressive. His mentality was not a defensive player’s mentality.”
VI. Finding a New Home
That fall, in 2003, Michael spent his nights with at least five different Briarcrest families — including the Tuohys — but most nights he spent with Quinterio Franklin, a teammate at Briarcrest. One night after a track meet, Michael was left without a ride home, and Leigh Anne offered to take him wherever he wanted to go. “Terio’s,” he said, and off they went. . .30 miles into Mississippi. “It was a trailer,” she says. She couldn’t believe there was room enough inside the place for him. She insisted on following him in to see where he slept. He showed her his old air mattress on the floor. It was flat as a pancake. “I blow it up every night,” he said. “But it runs out of air around midnight.”
“That’s it,” she said. She told him to gather up all his stuff. “You’re moving in with me.”
With that, he picked up a single Glad trash bag and followed her back into the car. Right up to that moment Leigh Anne hoped that what they and other Briarcrest families had done for Michael added up to something like a decent life. Now she knew it didn’t. She took over the management of that life. Completely. “The first thing we did,” she says, “was have a cleansing of the clothes.”
Together they drove to every house in Memphis where Michael had stashed his clothing. Five houses and four giant trash bags later, she was staring at a pile of his belongings. “It was stuff people had given him,” she says. “Most of it still had the tags on it. Stuff he would never wear. I mean, there were polo shirts with little penguins on them.” For the next couple of weeks, Michael slept on the Tuohys’ sofa, and no one in the family stated the obvious: this was Michael Oher’s new home and probably would be for a long time. He was, in effect, a third child. “When I first saw him, I was like, ‘Who the heck is this big black guy?”’ says Sean Jr., who was 8 at the time. “But Dad just said this was a kid we were trying to help out, and so I just said all right.” Sean Jr. had his own uses for Michael: the two would vanish for hours on end into the bedroom and play video games. Just a few months after his arrival, Leigh Anne would point to Michael and say, “That is Sean Jr.’s best friend.” His sister, Collins, says he became comfortable quickly: “When he kept staying and staying, Mom asked him if he wanted to move in. He said, ‘I don’t think I want to leave.’ That’s when Mom went out and bought the dresser and the bed.”
After she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do — “it was ruining my $10,000 couch” — but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or if it did, it might collapse in the middle of the night, and he might crash through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day, Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. When the futon arrived, she showed it to Michael and said, “That’s your bed.” And he said, “That’s my bed?” And she said, “That’s your bed.” And he just stared at it a bit and said, “This is the first time I ever had my own bed.”
After a while, out stepped Joseph Crone, the team’s biggest and most powerful defensive lineman. He was 6-foot-2, maybe 270 pounds, and a candidate to attend college on a football scholarship. To him, this new mission, going helmet to helmet with Big Mike, had the flavor of heroism. “The reason I stepped up,” Crone says, “is that I didn’t think anyone else wanted to go up against him. Because he was such a big guy.”
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Crone still didn’t think of Michael Oher as an exceptional football player. But if he hadn’t been a force on the field, Crone thought, it was only because he had no idea what he was supposed to do there. And Crone noticed that he had improved the past season and by the final game looked very good indeed. “He was figuring it out,” Crone says. “How to move his feet, where to put his hands. How to get onto people so they couldn’t get away.” But even if Big Mike had no idea what he was doing on a football field, Crone found him an awesome physical specimen. He had a picture in his mind of the few opposing players who had made the mistake of being fallen upon by Big Mike. “They looked like pressed pennies,” he says. “They’d get up, and their backs would be one giant grass stain. I couldn’t imagine being on the other side of the ball going against Mike.” Now, by default, he was.
She wasn’t born again, and she didn’t often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, “We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!”
