The Blind Side (10 page)

One of the handicaps of coaching at an evangelical Christian school is that a technical foul isn’t regarded by your own fans as a rallying cry but a spiritual transgression: you really didn’t want Briarcrest people to think that you didn’t have your passions well under control. “At Myrtle Beach,” said Harrington, “that was the closest I’ve ever come in my career to a technical foul.” He yelled at the refs for a bit and then called them, and the opposing coach, over. Pointing to the fans causing the trouble, he said, “You can take care of this problem or Big Mike can take care of this problem. And I think it’ll be a lot better for them and for you if you take care of it. Because he’s gonna clean house.” Big Mike overheard this exchange and apparently liked the sound of it. He stayed in the paint for the rest of the game, grabbed 15 rebounds and scored 27 points, and helped his team thrash a team to whom they’d been expected to lose. “I think he realized then that this kind of thing didn’t just happen in Memphis,” said Harrington. “It happened everywhere. And we were on his side.”

Then they flew home. It was when they landed at the Memphis airport that Big Mike’s chronic housing problem became a crisis. The other players all had parents to meet them. Big Tony’s girlfriend had come to pick up Steven—who was also on the team—but Mike refused to get in her car. “I’m not spending another night in that lady’s house,” he told his basketball coach. Pressed, he explained that he had overheard her talking about him on the telephone and that she had said many rude things: that he was a freeloader, that she didn’t like him in their house, that he was stupid, that he was never going to amount to anything. When the players had all gone home, Michael Oher and his basketball coach were left together in the Memphis airport. Harrington asked Big Mike where he wanted to go, and Big Mike gave him an address, and Harrington drove his emerging star into the worst neighborhood in Memphis. “Every hundred yards he said, ‘You can just let me off here, Coach. You can just let me off here.’ It was the middle of the night and I said, ‘Mike, I’m driving you to your front door.’”

After he had let Big Mike off in front of a dark and seemingly empty building, Harrington telephoned his volunteer assistant coach, Sean Tuohy. He told him the problem. “And Sean said, ‘Maybe it’s time I looked into this.’”

The next few months there was a lot to look into. Michael stayed nights in East Memphis with at least five different Briarcrest families: the Franklins, the Freezes, the Saunders, the Sparkses, the Tuohys. He somehow persuaded another black kid on the Briarcrest basketball team, Quinterio Franklin, to let him use his house as a kind of base camp. 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…thirty miles into Mississippi. “It was a trailer,” she said. From the outside she couldn’t believe there was room enough inside the place for him. She insisted on following him in, to see where he slept. There she found an old air mattress on the floor, flat as a leaf. “I blow it up every night,” he said. “But it runs out of air around midnight.”

“That’s it,” she said. “Get all your crap. You’re moving in with me.”

Crossing a new line, Michael picked up a single Glad trash bag and followed her back into the car. Right up until that moment Leigh Anne had hoped that what they and other Briarcrest families had done for Michael added up to something like a decent life. Now that she knew it didn’t, she took over the management of that life. Completely. “The first thing we did,” she said, “was have a cleansing of the clothes.”

Together they drove to every house in Memphis where Michael had stashed his clothing. Seven houses and four giant trash bags later she was staring at “this pile of crap. It was stuff people had given him. 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?’” said Sean Junior, aged nine 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 Junior had his own uses for Michael: the two would vanish for hours on end into his bedroom and play video games. Just a few months after his arrival, Leigh Anne would point to Michael and say, “That is Sean Junior’s best friend.” “He got comfortable quickly,” said Collins Tuohy, then sixteen. “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 ten-thousand-dollar 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 and it would come hurtling 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. The day 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.”

That was late February 2004. Leigh Anne sat Michael down and established some rules. She didn’t care if she ever saw his mother, and didn’t need to know her problems, but he would be required to visit her. “I’m not going to have you say that I took you away from your mother. I don’t care if you don’t want to go, you’re going.” She didn’t know who his friends were from back on the west side of Memphis but they were welcome in the house and he should bring them home. Didn’t he have anyone he grew up with who he might like to bring over? He didn’t offer up any names. “Anything you wanted to know you had to pry out of him,” she said. And so she pried. “He finally mentioned someone named Craig but this Craig never materialized.”

Sean, for his part, had long since given up interest in probing into Michael’s past, or anything else. The boy had a gift for telling people as little as possible, and also for telling them what they wanted to hear. “The right answer for Michael is the answer that puts an end to the questions,” said Sean. He finally decided that Michael had not “the slightest interest in the future or the past. He’s just trying to forget about yesterday and get to tomorrow. He’s in survival mode: completely focused on the next two minutes.” He persuaded his wife to take a more detached view of the question, who is Michael Oher? and Leigh Anne agreed, at least in principle. “What does it matter if he doesn’t know the names of his brothers and sisters,” she said, unconvincingly. “Or where he went to school. Or if he went to school.”

They decided to move forward with Michael on a need-to-know basis: if they needed to know some detail about his past, she harassed Michael until he gave her an answer. If they didn’t—and mostly they didn’t—she’d leave him alone. “It is what it is,” she said. “The past is the past.” In her big talk with Michael she told him, “We’re just going to go forward. There is nothing I can do about whatever might have happened to you before now. If it’s going to cause you problems, and you’re not going to be able to go forward without dealing with it, maybe we need to get help from someone smarter than I am.”

He just looked at her and asked, “What does that mean?”

She tried to explain about psychiatrists, but it was obvious he didn’t know what therapy meant. So she said to herself: Oh, what the hell. There’s no way he’s ever going to lie on some couch and talk about himself.

And, she half thought, his past actually didn’t matter all that much to him. “Like the way a woman blocks out childbirth,” she said, “I think he just blocked out a lot of his childhood.”

Sean had a different take: Michael’s mind was finely calibrated to get from one day to the next. Whatever had happened to him in the past he couldn’t afford to dwell on it. He couldn’t afford to be angry, or bitter. “Michael’s gift,” Sean said, “is that the Good Lord gave him the ability to forget. He’s mad at no one and doesn’t really care what happened. His story might be sad, but he’s not sad.”

But even if they had decided not to interrogate him, there was nothing that said she couldn’t notice the little tics and quirks about him. Information took many forms and both Leigh Anne and Sean had a talent for acquiring it. When they stopped in at the Taco Bell just around the corner, for instance, Michael would order more food than he wanted. The next morning Sean would open the refrigerator and find the coagulated, extra Mexican pizza. “He was in the habit of guaranteeing himself an extra meal,” said Sean. “I had to explain that he didn’t need to do that. That he could get it whenever he wanted it. He said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Michael, I own the restaurant. You can go over there any time you want and eat for free.’” But the habit was hard to break. Sean would see him come into the house, extra free Mexican pizza in hand, and “it was like he would catch himself. He’d come in with the extra pizza and see me and go, ‘Oh, man, I forgot.’” Collins noticed, “He hoarded everything: food, clothes, money. He’d get stuff and he’d hide it away.” It was as if he didn’t actually believe that this free stuff would remain free.

There were tiny revelations that had Leigh Anne upset for days, for what they implied about his childhood. She took Michael with her and Sean Junior to a Barnes & Noble. As they walked through the store, Sean Junior spotted Where the Wild Things Are and said, “Look, Mom, you used to read that to me when I was little.” To which Michael replied, in the most detached tone, “I’ve never had anyone read me a book.”

There were also things about him that caused Leigh Anne and Sean to think of him as an even deeper mystery. He refused to wear clothes that, in his opinion, didn’t match. He refused to wear clothes that had even a spot on them. He ironed his T-shirt; and if he wore the same T-shirt every day, he ironed it every morning. “That ain’t a socioeconomic issue,” said Sean. “That’s a where-the-hell-did-that-come-from? issue.” Sean had him out one day, buying basketball sneakers for himself. He asked Michael if he’d like a pair and Michael said, sniffily, he didn’t like the colors on display. “I said, ‘Michael you have none. How can you turn down shoes when you don’t have shoes?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t want those unless they have it with the blue stripe.’ ‘For someone who has no shoes you’re pretty damn picky about what shoes you get.’” When they finally found the sneaker shoe color that Michael liked, they had another argument about his shoe size. Michael refused to wear the size 15 shoes that the salesman proved he needed. He insisted that he wore a size 14, and so it was size 14 shoes Sean bought for him, even though it meant a bit of pain when he walked.

Around the house he was a neat freak. Leigh Anne ran a tight ship and within weeks it was clear that Michael was the only member of the crew who passed muster. “You might drop your underwear on the floor,” said Sean, “but one minute later they’d be gone. They might have wound up in the silverware drawer but they were not on the floor.” Michael’s were the only underwear never dropped. Collins, who was the same age as Michael, had never made her bed in her life and, no matter how often her mother hollered at her, never would. Michael not only made his bed, he removed the sheets from the futon, folded them, and returned the thing to its couchlike state. Every day, without exception. “It was like God made a child just for us,” said Sean. “Sports for me, neat for Leigh Anne.”

From the moment Michael moved in with them, Sean began to stew on his future. (“Because I figured I was going to have to pay for it.”) Michael was approaching the end of his junior year in high school, and while they hadn’t seen his transcripts, they knew his grades were poor. Since Myrtle Beach he’d been good enough on the basketball team that Sean thought he might be able to play at a small college. “And I figured if he wasn’t, I could make him good enough,” said Sean. At six five he wasn’t tall enough to be a post player in major college basketball but he might make it in Division II. Sean had contacts in college basketball all over the South. He began to write letters on Michael’s behalf to coaches at small schools—Murray State, Austin Peay. He had Leigh Anne go out and sign up Michael for every summer basketball camp she could find.

Then Hugh Freeze called Michael and said that this guy who wrote scouting reports on high school football players was coming through town and had agreed, on Hugh’s recommendation, to see him. Accustomed to just doing what he was told around Briarcrest, Michael jumped in the passenger seat of a teammate’s car and allowed himself to be driven to the University of Memphis. He sat through fifteen long minutes of this strange little guy’s questions without the faintest interest in the encounter. “I just wanted him to stop talking so I could leave,” he said later. Under Michael’s mute gaze, Tom Lemming finally stopped talking. Michael left the forms Lemming gave him, unfilled. And that, Michael thought, was that.

Only it wasn’t. Lemming’s private scouting report was sent to the head coach at more than one hundred Division I college football programs and so more than one hundred head college football coaches learned that this kid in Memphis, whom no one had ever heard of, was the most striking left tackle talent he’d seen since he first met Orlando Pace. And Orlando Pace was now being paid $10 million a year to play left tackle for the St. Louis Rams. It was only a week or so after Lemming’s report went out that the Briarcrest Saints football team met for two weeks of spring practice. Hugh Freeze was there, of course, as he was the head coach and ran the practices. Tim Long was there, too, because he coached the offensive line. Like several of the coaches, Long was a Briarcrest parent, but was also a six five, 300-pound former left tackle at the University of Memphis, and a fifth-round draft pick of the Minnesota Vikings. At first sight, Long had been awed by Michael Oher’s raw ability. “When I first saw him,” he said, “I thought: this guy is going to make us all famous.” But then he’d coached him in the final games of his junior year, after Michael was moved to right tackle on the offensive line, and Long wondered why he wasn’t a better player. One game he had pulled Michael out and sat him on the bench because he thought the team was better off playing another guy.