The Blind Side (15 page)

Informed that he would be dealing, from his left guard position, with this linebacker coming off the edge, Ayers was at first puzzled. Then he watched tapes of Lawrence Taylor. “They said there’s this rookie linebacker who’s tearing up the league,” he told the New York Times. “I said, ‘Well, good, that’s the fullback’s problem.’ Then I took a look at him and said, ‘Well, maybe the fullback can’t get it done.’” His wife looked at tape with him. “I was scared to death that he had that assignment,” she said. “All we heard about the week before the game was this big bad Lawrence Taylor.”

On January 3, 1982, Bill Walsh drove to Candlestick Park, changed into his coaching shirt, met with the trainers and his coaches, then said a few low-key words to the players. He didn’t feel there was any point in trying to motivate them at that point; mainly he was trying to calm them down. (“Whenever I tried to give an inspirational talk before the game, the other team would score first, so I didn’t see the numbers in it.”) Then he lined up to listen to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The rain began to fall and the field became such a mess that, after the kickoff, teams of men in dark blue windbreakers ran around replacing the divots. When Joe Montana took his position under the center, the wedges of grass were still strewn around him like cheap toupees. Walsh has made no secret of his general game plan: the night before he had informed the television announcers, Pat Summerall and John Madden, that he intended to throw the ball on 17 of the first 22 plays. He knew that Parcells knew, and Parcells knew that he knew, just as Walsh knew that on most of those 17 passing plays Lawrence Taylor would be coming for Joe Montana. And if they somehow hadn’t surmised as much, Taylor would remind them, well in advance. “When Lawrence is pass-rushing,” Giants defensive back Beasley Reece said, “he telegraphs it. It’s like a cop putting sirens on top of his car. Lawrence puts a light on his helmet. His hands are flopping and his arms are swinging. He looks at the blocker the minute he attacks and destroys the blocker. Then he goes after the quarterback.”

John Ayers’s job was to look over and see if Taylor’s hands were flopping. If he saw Taylor preparing to charge, he stepped back to meet him. It was only a matter of how the carefully planned collision ended: John Ayers is the one surprise. How he turns out, Walsh thought, would determine the outcome of the game.

On the first play from scrimmage Montana drops back, and Taylor comes. For a moment the field in front of him is empty. Then, out of nowhere, a figure appears and…Pow!

It was as if Taylor had run into the side of a house. What he had run into was 270 pounds of cowboy, who trained each off season by harnessing himself to a six-foot-tall tractor tire and hauling it sideways behind him for miles around a freshly ploughed field. The training showed. On every passing play Taylor looked like a man who had gone to get his quart of vanilla ice cream only to yank on the freezer door and find it locked. “It was the first time I’d seen it,” he said. “It was the first time they’d brought the guard back to meet me. There was nothing I could do but try to run him over.” He didn’t run him over: the first pass was thrown. And the next. And the next. Watching Walsh’s offense attack Parcells’s defense was like watching a giant icicle plunging into a volcano. Steam rose, and you couldn’t tell at first whether the icicle had melted or the fire had been extinguished.

Then the air cleared. At halftime the 49ers led 24–10 and Montana had completed 15 of 22 passes for 276 yards and two touchdowns. He’d picked to pieces the NFL’s most dangerous defense. Montana once observed of Walsh’s passing attack that “if you missed perfect, you wound up with great.” He missed perfect on this day, but not by much. He threw a careless interception, and once took off from the pocket when he didn’t really need to—and was chased down from behind by Lawrence Taylor. Otherwise, he played like a kid who’d been given the answers to the test in advance. “I’d never seen us execute like that,” he said after the game. “That’s why it didn’t look tough for us. But it was. Our line was stopping them, and when I got that time, things became easy.” The threat from the blind side had, thanks to John Ayers, vanished. “I couldn’t figure out what to do with him,” said Taylor, much later.

When Bill Parcells looked up at the end of the game, the scoreboard read 38–24, but it hadn’t been as close as that. His defense hadn’t allowed 38 points in any game all season, and they were lucky to have allowed only 38 today. Parcells was appalled, at not only the outcome but the interpretation of the outcome—that the difference in the game had been Walsh’s strategy. There was no chance that some left guard was shutting down LT. “That would never have worked on a fast track,” he said. “The only reason it worked was that the field was so bad that nobody could rush the passer. It was a mud pile. It was a slow track. If that was AstroTurf that would have never worked.” And in the future, he would make damn sure it wouldn’t work even in a mud pile. Later, when he watched the tape of the game, Parcells saw the weakness of Walsh’s strategy. When Ayers dropped back, he left a hole in the middle of the line. Had the Giants blitzed a middle linebacker, he’d have had a clear path to Joe Montana. They never did. “We learned to deal with that as we went on,” said Parcells. “We blitzed [Harry] Carson and teams stopped doing that. What they eventually had to do is slide the line to Taylor. We knew that unless they were extremely gifted at the left tackle position, they would have to compensate for him.” And if they had to compensate for their left tackle, they created weakness elsewhere, and the game was half-won.

After the game Bill Walsh smiled sheepishly and told the television audience that he had suspected the game was won the minute he saw that his offense could throw the ball. The next week, in an NFC Championship game far more famous than this one, his team will beat the Dallas Cowboys. Two weeks later, with the lowest payroll in the NFL, they will win the Super Bowl. People wanted proof that this offense worked: he’d taken a team that had been 2–14 two years before to a championship. Q.E.D. But it was here, after they beat the Giants, and dealt with Lawrence Taylor and all that he implied, that Walsh came to a pair of conclusions about his football team. The first was that he needed to find himself a player like Lawrence Taylor to terrorize opposing quarterbacks. The second was that he needed to use his first pick of the next amateur draft to find a left tackle because, as Bill Parcells observed, the only way to handle this monster coming off the edge without disrupting the rhythm of the new passing attack was to have a left tackle with the physical ability to deal with him. The old left tackle was coming to the end of his natural life. Dan Audick was crushed when he lost his job after winning a Super Bowl, but he understood: the left tackle was no longer going to be just another lineman. In some ways he wouldn’t be a lineman at all but a highly skilled player who happened never to get his hands on the ball. Bill Walsh had made the quarterback a lot more valuable, and so the man who protected the quarterback was going to be a whole lot more valuable, too. Whoever he was, he was going to have to be special. The old idea was about to die.

But it lived for this one last day. On this final day there was no need to compensate for Lawrence Taylor. John Ayers acted as an impenetrable wall between Taylor and his quarterback right to the end of the game. “My husband loved Joe Montana,” said Laurel Ayers. “He was not going to let Joe Montana get hit by Lawrence Taylor, or get hurt.” It was Taylor who finally relented. “It was obvious,” said the 49ers’ line coach, Bob McKittrick, right after the game. “You could see how frustrated Taylor was getting out there as the game progressed. I don’t want to put him down, but he was quitting out there.” Ayers, on the other hand, was a profile in toughness and pass-blocking technique. He was, for that one moment, the critical component of Bill Walsh’s passing attack, and hardly a soul in Candlestick Park noticed. He was a reminder that what sets football apart from other sports is that what you don’t see is often the most important thing. What John Ayers was doing seemed routine. But to the few who knew, and watched, it was a thing of beauty.

The ball is snapped and John Ayers sees Taylor coming, and slides quickly back one step and to his left. And as he slides, he steps to meet his future. He’s stepping into 1985, when the turf will be fast and he won’t be able to deal with Lawrence Taylor…. Another quick step, back and left, and it’s 1986, and he’s injured and on the sidelines when the Giants send Joe Montana to the hospital and the 49ers home on the way to their own Super Bowl victory…. A third quick step and he crouches like one power forward denying another access to the hoop. But now it’s 1987 and Coach Bill Walsh is advising John Ayers to retire. Ayers ignores the advice and then learns that Walsh won’t invite him back to training camp…. He takes his final quick step back and left and times his blow, to stop dead in his tracks the most terrifying force ever launched at an NFL quarterback. “I don’t think I’ve ever played against a football player who had more drive and intensity to get to the quarterback,” John Ayers will say, after it’s all over, and he’s been given the game ball by his teammates. “It was almost like he was possessed.”…But now it’s 1995, and John Ayers has just died of cancer, at forty-two, and left behind a wife and two children. Joe Montana charters a plane to fly a dozen teammates to Amarillo, Texas, to serve as pallbearers. At the funeral of John Ayers the letter of tribute from Bill Walsh is read aloud.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER SIX

The Blind Side

INVENTING MICHAEL

BY THE TIME the Briarcrest Christian School Saints opened their 2004 season, Michael Oher had spent four months growing accustomed to the idea that he was a football star. He’d been featured in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, attended summer camps for elite football prospects at LSU, Ole Miss, North Carolina State, and the University of Oklahoma, and turned down invitations to summer at another fifty or so Division I football programs. He’d received more than a thousand letters from college football programs, and many dozens of Federal Express packages—and so he had learned, among other things, that when the letter came by FedEx it contained the offer of a full scholarship. The only major football school that hadn’t offered him a full scholarship was Penn State. He’d received, additionally, four months of frantic private tutoring from both his head coach Hugh Freeze and his offensive line coach Tim Long, who had been drafted in 1985 by the Minnesota Vikings to play left tackle. (Injuries cut short Long’s NFL career. He played pre-season games with the Vikings, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Indianapolis Colts, and just three regular season games, in 1987, with the 49ers.) In practices before the first game, Sean Tuohy thought Michael looked like a different football player—which is to say he almost looked as if he knew what he was doing. “Tim doesn’t take any credit for it,” said Sean, “but something he said to him changed everything. He showed him how to use his hands.”

The technique Long taught Michael was called “getting fit.” A lineman the size and power of Michel Oher needed only to get his hands on his defender to ruin his day. He was so strong, and his hands so big, that there was no opponent—certainly not in high school, probably not even in college—who, once hooked, could wriggle free. It was of course illegal for an offensive lineman to grab a defender broadly, sumo-style; the lineman had to master the art of grabbing narrowly, of keeping his hands in close, and seizing his opponent near the breastplate of his shoulder pads. That’s what Tim Long taught Michael Oher to do: get fit. “Fire to fit,” became Hugh Freeze’s mantra: fire off the line of scrimmage and get fit on the defender before he knows what’s hit him.

The college football coaches of America had taken one look at Michael Oher and had seen a future NFL left tackle. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy had their doubts. Michael had wandered into their lives, moved into their home, and quickly become entirely dependent on them. He was meant to be a football player but, until everyone started telling him he was a star football player, he had shown hardly any interest in football. When he’d been thrown into games during his junior year, he had spent most of his time wandering around the field in search of someone to fall over. He’d looked completely lost, and passive. The left tackle might be the one guy on the field whose job was to reduce the level of violence. But even the left tackle, if he was to succeed, needed to play with aggression. And the few people who had paid attention on the few occasions when Michael played in football games hadn’t seen even a hint of aggression.

Michael’s first test was not an official game, but a pre-season scrimmage at home, against a team from Munford, twenty-five miles outside of Memphis. Leigh Anne took her usual seat in the stands, on the fifty-yard line, two rows from the top, right beneath the “N” in “SAINTS.” She sat in a cluster of players’ mothers, all of whom had definite views about the quality of Briarcrest’s coaching and football strategy. They kept a cell phone handy just in case, as Leigh Anne put it, “we had any opinions or thoughts on the game that we felt Hugh or Sean needed to know.” She was the coach in the skybox, and already she watched football games in a way few Americans did: focused on the offensive line. A play would end and she would have missed entirely what had happened to the ball. “I don’t know about ‘keeping his pad level down’ and ‘getting fit’ and all these key little nichey phrases that the football coaches use to talk about what linemen do,” she said. “All I can tell is if Michael’s laying on top of somebody. And if he’s spreadeagled on top of somebody, that’s good.”

Sean also took his place, a few yards down the sidelines from Hugh Freeze, where he could get a different view of the action than the head coach. Hugh, who fully grasped Sean’s near-magical ability to boost the confidence of teen-aged boys, had taught him football just so that he might put him in charge of the Briarcrest quarterbacks. Sean still kept one eye on Michael, but tonight he missed the signs. From the first play of the game the Munford defensive end who lined up directly across from Michael targeted him for special ridicule. The Munford player was about six two and couldn’t have weighed more than 220 pounds, and yet he wouldn’t shut up. Every play, he had something nasty to say.