The Blind Side (11 page)

The only other coach at Briarcrest Spring Practice with any experience of college or pro sports was Sean Tuohy. Hugh Freeze had asked Sean to help out as an assistant coach—which meant his usual role as coach to the coach and unofficial Life Counselor to the players. When Sean told Leigh Anne he planned to coach football, she had laughed at the idea of it: her husband didn’t know a first down from a free throw. And it was true: the first thing Sean learned about coaching football was that you shouldn’t do it in a BMW. He came home the first day and told Leigh Anne, “I need to buy a pickup truck; I’m the only one without a pickup truck.” A few days later he bought one.

That first afternoon of spring practice, Sean rolled up in his new truck to find the players lined up and stretching. The other coaches were there already. But there was this other, highly unusual cluster of identically dressed men: college football coaches who had turned up to watch practice. They stood to one side, but you could tell them by their identical dark slacks and coaching shirts with their school’s emblem emblazoned on the chest: University of Michigan, Clemson University, University of Southern Mississippi, University of Tennessee, Florida State University. They weren’t head coaches, just assistants. But still. College coaches of any sort weren’t in the habit of coming to watch Briarcrest players. The Briarcrest football field was in the middle of nowhere and Michigan was in the middle of another nowhere. The Clemson guy mentioned to one of the Briarcrest coaches that he had driven eight hours just to be there. Few of the players had any idea, at first, why they were there. The coaches knew why, because Hugh Freeze had just told them, but they were still as surprised as the players. Carly Powers, the athletic director, said, “Big Mike hadn’t been very good. You could tell he hadn’t played before. The only thing he had going for him was his size.” Tim Long said, “I don’t know why they were there. I guess his size just got him noticed.”

The most complicated set of social rules on the planet—the rules that govern the interaction of college football coaches and high school prospects—forbade the coaches from speaking directly to a high school junior until August before his senior year. They were allowed to visit his school twice, and watch him from a distance. So the coaches made a point of not saying anything directly; they just sat off to the side and stared. “I’ll never forget it,” said Tim Long. “We did calisthenics and agility. Then board drill, right away. We’re ten minutes into it. Michael’s first up.”

The board drill—so named for the thin ten-foot-long board laid on the ground before it begins—is among the most violent drills in football. The offensive lineman takes his stance in the middle of the board and faces the defensive lineman. At the sound of the whistle, they do whatever they must to drive the other fellow off the end of the board. Facing off against Michael Oher during a football game was one thing: he was often unsure where to go, you more than likely had help from teammates, and, if you didn’t, there was plenty of room to run and hide. Getting onto the board across from him, for a fight to the death, was something else. No one on the team wanted to do it.

At length, out stepped the team’s biggest and most powerful defensive lineman, Joseph Crone. He was six two, maybe 270 pounds, and a candidate to attend college on a football scholarship. To him this new mission, going hat-on-hat with Big Mike, had the flavor of heroism. “The reason I stepped up,” said Crone, “is that I didn’t think anyone else wanted to go up against him. Because he was such a big guy.”

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,” said Crone. “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 said. “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 two players dropped into their stances, with the eyes of the SEC, the Big Ten, Conference USA, and the ACC upon them. Joseph Crone’s mind was working overtime: “I’m sitting there thinking, Man, this guy is HUGE. I got to get low on him. I got to drive my feet.”

“Best on best!” shouted Hugh Freeze, and blew his whistle.

When it was over—and it was over in a flash—the five coaches broke formation and made what appeared to be urgent private phone calls. Briarcrest athletic director Carly Powers turned to his left and found that one of the coaches, in his bid to separate himself from the others, had wandered up beside him. “He was whispering into his phone, ‘My God, you’ve got to see this!’” said Powers. The Clemson coach, Brad Scott (he was the former head football coach at the University of South Carolina), actually ran out onto the field, handed his card to Hugh Freeze, and said, “I seen all I need to see.” If Michael Oher wanted a full scholarship to Clemson, it was his. “Then,” says Tim Long, “the Clemson guy got in his car and drove eight or nine hours back home.”

Hugh Freeze was as impressed, and surprised, as anyone: it could have been a training film. Big Mike had picked up 270 pounds and dealt with them as he might have dealt with thin air. “Joseph was a man. And Michael treated him like he was a hundred-pound weakling. And Joseph fought him! Those first two steps—they were as quick as any running back’s. And when that body hits you, it’s just an amazing force. And once he’s on you, you can’t get off of him. He kept his ol’ back flat and just rose up as he took Joseph down the field.”

Sean, who had been standing off to one side, walked over to Joseph and patted him on the helmet: he felt sorry for the kid. (“He just smashed me,” said Crone. “I was like, ‘God, that wasn’t a fun experience.’”) Sean knew one of the assistant coaches, Rip Scherer of Southern Miss—he’d once been the head football coach at the University of Memphis. Southern Miss was the poor cousin in this gathering of representatives from elite college football teams. Scherer, looking a little low, now walked over to Sean and said, “Well, we’re obviously not going to be able to sign him. Who else you got?” In a single play Michael Oher had established himself as too rich for the blood of Southern Miss. “It was strange that day,” said Tim Long. “His moment came and he was on. It was like he’d always been that good.”

After that, the coaches came in platoons. Arkansas, Notre Dame, Ole Miss, Miami, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, Ohio State, and on and on. First, they were merely assistant coaches, but the assistant coaches would get on their cell phones—“no, you have to come see this”—and the top brass would dutifully materialize. “It got so I couldn’t wait to get to practice to see who was there that day,” said Tim Long. “You get there late and someone would say, ‘Oops, you just missed Bob Stoops.’” (Stoops is the head football coach of the University of Oklahoma.) One afternoon the Briarcrest players and coaches looked up and saw the strange sight of Tennessee’s most famous coach, Phil Fulmer, from the University of Tennessee, not walking but running to their practice. If ever there was a body not designed to move at speed it was Fulmer’s. “I’d seen Phil Fulmer on TV,” said Joseph Crone, who knew the moment he saw Fulmer that he was in for yet another unpleasant board drill. “But I’d never seen him in person.” Fulmer had been in Memphis for a speech, and was meant to be on a plane back to Knoxville. Before he’d boarded, his recruiter had called and told him about this once-in-a-lifetime sight, and Fulmer decided he’d rather miss his flight. Then he drove the twenty miles out to the Briarcrest field—and parked in the wrong lot. “It’s a hundred and fifty degrees,” recalls Tim Long. “And there’s Phil Fulmer racing across the parking lot. He’s running down this dirt road. He gets there huffing and puffing, and says, ‘I was told I need to see this for myself.’”

Fulmer watched Michael Oher for half an hour and then turned to Long and said, “He’s the best in the nation.” Which is what USA Today was about to say—thanks largely to Tom Lemming. In the middle of spring practice, Michael Oher became a pre-season First Team High School All-American. From that moment on, Hugh Freeze had to give up pretty much everything he was doing, and retire to his office to deal with the long line of college football coaches who wanted to spend quality time at the Briarcrest Christian School. “I feel there wasn’t a coach in the country who did not call or come in person,” he said. “Washington, Oregon, Oregon State. I mean, these people were calling from everywhere and asking, ‘Coach, do we have a shot?’ All spring practice I had one college head coach in my office, and another waiting outside.” When the coaches weren’t at practice, they were stalking the hallways of Briarcrest. “The best way I can describe it,” said Joseph Crone, “is it was like a group of vultures trying to get their prey.”

They were predatory by nature but they often came just to say they had seen it, in the spirit of tourists making their first trip to the Grand Canyon. The people at Briarcrest had trouble thinking of themselves as an athletic tourist attraction, and they had their own curiosities. Carly Powers asked one of the coaches: “What makes Michael so good?” And his answer was: “He’s a freak of nature.” Steve Simpson had one of the coaches in his office and took the occasion to ask, “What has you all so excited?” “He said you just don’t see kids who are that big and that athletic.” Two of the SEC head coaches told Tim Long that Michael Oher was the best offensive lineman they had ever seen. All but one of them would take away only memories, but even these, to some, were worth the trip. “The first time I saw Mike,” said Stacey Searles, who coached the offensive line at LSU, “he was in a three-on-three Oklahoma Drill. He was just dominating people. I’d seen him from a distance and thought, ‘Wow, that’s a good-looking kid.’ He has as much strength and size and agility and power as any lineman I’d ever seen. Then I got closer and said, Oh my. He was a freak of nature—for somebody to be that big, that powerful, that fast, and that talented. Every two or three years there is a kid who jumps out at you, and he was that kid.”

Tim Long, who had been a star in high school, and in college, and had played in the NFL, had never seen anything like it. Sean Tuohy, who had been the most highly recruited basketball player in the state of Louisiana his senior year in high school, had never seen anything like it. Sean was mystified: “I was under the impression Michael sucked at football,” he said. “I was trying to get him a basketball scholarship.” Now he’d nip into Briarcrest for one reason or another and couldn’t get to where he was going without hitting some big-time college football recruiter. One day he walks into Hugh Freeze’s office just in time to hear Hugh tell the coach from the University of Missouri, “I don’t want to be this way, but you got no shot at him. You’re wasting your time here.” Another time he’d squeezed a few minutes out of Hugh’s schedule to meet to discuss some personal business—probably how to cover the tuition of one of the black players—when the football recruiter from the University of Florida barged in.

“I want to see Oher,” he said. He pronounced it like the airport. “O-Hair.”

“It’s not O-Hair,” said Sean. “It’s Oher. Like a boat oar.”

As it was against the rules for the recruiters to speak to Michael before the start of his senior year, the Florida guy was literally there just to see Michael. Hugh told the Florida guy that Michael was in class, but he could go down and see him when class let out. Just before the bell rang, the three men—Hugh, Sean, the Florida guy—set out down the hallways in the direction of the classroom. The Florida guy was scrolling through the messages on his BlackBerry when the bell rang, and the door opened in front of him—and so he didn’t see Michael until he was right on top of him. When he looked up, Michael was two feet away: a wall of a human being. The Florida guy actually gave this little jump and a horror-movie gasp: Uuuuuu!

He’d seen Michael Oher. “That’s when he started dialing,” said Sean. “He was dialing so fast.” Like the others, he knew he couldn’t say a word to Michael; but he had seen him. With Michael just looking on, patiently, the Florida guy turned to Hugh Freeze and said, “You tell Michael Oher that the University of Florida is very interested in offering him a football scholarship.” Then he walked away but not so far that Sean couldn’t hear him, as he hissed into his cell phone: “Coach, you have got to come see this guy. No, you have to come see this guy.” Reduced by NCAA regulations to a single sense, the coaches fetishized that sense. “Once you saw him on the hoof,” said Kurt Roper, who led the Ole Miss recruiting effort at first, “you said…‘Wow! This guy passes the look test. This guy looks like a big-time SEC lineman. And he’s a junior in high school.’” Ole Miss had just sent a pair of offensive linemen to the NFL: Chris Spencer, a first-round draft pick of the Seattle Seahawks, and Marcus Johnson, a second-round pick of the Minnesota Vikings. And yet Roper had never seen a lineman of Michael Oher’s caliber. “He was by far the best guy I’d ever seen,” he said.

The frenzy over the player who would become the most highly sought after offensive lineman in the nation had begun, and it had only just begun. And no one had a very clear idea of who he was, where he came from, who his parents were—or even, truth be told, if he was a very good football player. Within two weeks Michael was both as famous and as unknown as a high school football player can be. There wasn’t an offensive line coach in the country who wasn’t aware of him, and a lot of the head coaches of the bigger football schools had seen him in the flesh. And yet the most basic details of his life were a mystery. One day in spring practice he made this point, inadvertently. He finished yet another board drill, flattened poor Joseph Crone yet again, and went down on one knee, and just stayed there. He was usually the first up and around, jumping on the balls of his feet, like a man half his size. Sean walked over to him.