The Blind Side (19 page)

On Friday night, the players donned their green helmets. There was a reason for this: the light uniforms made them look fast, the dark uniforms made them look big. In his dark green helmet and his dark green uniform, Michael Oher looked about nine feet tall and eight feet wide. Before the game, Hugh gathered together not just his players and coaches but also the offensive line coach from LSU, Stacey Searles, fresh off a national championship, who had come to see Michael play. Hugh loved to give pre-game speeches. “I feel that’s the gift God gave me,” he said. “I feel that is what I was really gifted at. I never would be emotional during the week. I’d save it all for right before the game.” Now he began to speak.

“I don’t mind that their coach said in the newspaper that they gonna beat us,” he started out, then paused for effect. “What I mind is that they compared us to Harding.” He let that sink in. (The fact that Harding Academy of Memphis was, from ten paces, indistinguishable from the Briarcrest Christian School of Memphis was what made the comparison so deeply, and unforgivably, insulting.) “So what we gonna do when we get the ball, on the first play, is we’re gonna run Gap.”

“The second play we’re gonna run Gap,” he said. Now his players were looking at each other. There wasn’t a soul in that locker room who didn’t know what he meant: the taboo weapon would finally be deployed. Michael Oher would be pointed at the opposition and fired. The Briarcrest Christian School was about to go nuclear.

“Then we’re gonna run Gap again,” said Hugh. He could feel the thrill in the air.

“The fourth play, we’re gonna run Gap.”

“The fifth play,” he continued, then looked around the room. “What are we gonna run?”

“Gap!” they all screamed. They could be heard by the fans outside the field house, 50 yards away.

“And the sixth play?”

“GAP!!”

“And the seventh play?”

“GAP!!!!!”

Hugh then went quiet, and led them in the prayer that always concluded these pre-game locker-room talks. The players repeated after him:

“For we can…” For we can…

“Do all things…” Do all things…

“Through Jesus Christ…” Through Jesus Christ…

“Who strengthens us…” Who strengthens us…

“Each and every day…” Each and every day…

“And may God…” And may God…

“Bless the Saints!!!” they screamed together at the tops of their lungs. At which point the line coach from LSU could no longer contain himself, and shouted: “Somebody’s got to find me a helmet! I got to play tonight.”

With that, the team ran out onto the field. Seven plays into the game the score was 14–0 and they had done nothing but give the ball to their stumpy five three running back—“the Oompaloom-pah,” Sean called him—and told him to follow Michael Oher’s right butt cheek. The Treadwell defensive lineman across from Michael weighed 365 pounds, but they were the wrong sort of pounds, and Michael blasted them away before moving on to destroy other targets. They ran that same play over and over again. By the time they were done, the Briarcrest offense would know that one play better than a football team ever knew a play. And because they knew it so well, they ran it with conviction and confidence; the entire team moved like a single well-thrown spear, knowing that the head of the spear was among the most terrifying sights on an American high school football field.

The LSU line coach, Stacey Searles, had never seen anything like it. Between plays, Michael was as impressive as during them. He skipped and fidgeted and jumped around like a 165-pound man. He walked on the balls of his feet. Running on and off the field he moved like a running back. There was nothing lumbering about him; it was as if when gravity was doling out its assignments, Michael wasn’t paying attention. The LSU coach finally turned to Sean and asked, “How many three-hundred-forty-five-pound guys skip?”

By the end of the first half, Briarcrest had scored 40 points. When Sean looked down the sidelines, he saw Hugh shaking his head sadly. “This ain’t any fun,” he said. And, for Hugh, it wasn’t. For the fans in the stands inclined to watch offensive line play, or the viewers of the game films, the sight of Michael Oher operating at full force, with a simple assignment and a definite purpose, was a unique experience. They saw things they had never before seen. They saw defenders, at the snap of the ball, turn and run in the opposite direction. They saw defensive ends assigned to rush the quarterback run to the sidelines to avoid having to make contact with this awesome force in charge of protecting the quarterback. They saw a single offensive lineman determine the outcome of a football game. Tim Long, the former NFL lineman long accustomed to the idea that offensive linemen were built to be ignored, experienced football nirvana. “What was so much fun,” he said later, “was when he would take a guy and run him right off the field. He ran one guy right out of the back of the end zone. He just went completely out of the picture.”

They beat Treadwell 59–20, with Michael sitting out the last quarter, and the chicken necks—which was what they’d dubbed the freshmen and sophomores—on the field. God Bless!!!! read the Briarcrest scoreboard. “That was the defining moment for us,” said Hugh. “From that moment we decided that this is what we’re going to do and teams are going to have to stop this. No matter what defenses they presented, no matter what blitzes. We were running Gap.”

The next game they faced a bigger and tougher public school, Carver High, to whom they had lost badly the year before. Carver had a tough little 200-pound nose tackle who had lived in the Briarcrest backfield. He lined up between the guard and the center and raced through the gap before the Briarcrest lineman could get to him. He’d created total havoc; and this year he was back, bigger and better. Hugh wanted to discourage the kid before he caused trouble again.

Hugh now understood that Michael learned much more quickly from pictures than from words or charts. There was no point drawing up X’s and O’s on the chalkboard for him. Before the game he showed Michael tapes of the previous year’s game, to illustrate the nature of the problem. On the first play of the game Michael moved down from left tackle to left guard, and positioned himself directly across from the kid—who wore No. 30. Hugh had called for a quarterback sneak. He’d told Michael, “I don’t want you to block number thirty. I don’t want him to go under you. I want him to go for a ride.” At the snap of the ball the kid tried to do his usual trick, and jumped into the gap between the center and Michael, but Michael was too quick. He got up under No. 30 and for the next few seconds the nose tackle looked like a man riding a tsunami: arms flailing madly, legs kicking wildly. You could almost hear him gasping for air. Ten yards downfield he was delivered, violently, back to the earth, where he vanished for several seconds beneath Michael, until Michael, with the indolence of an heir to a great fortune getting out of bed in the morning, lifted himself off the flattened body. On the second play Michael lined up at guard again and Hugh called another quarterback sneak. At the snap of the ball No. 30 just threw himself flat on the ground. After that Michael moved back to left tackle, and No. 30 did his best to remain inconspicuous.

They beat Carver and then played Christian Brothers, a school five times the size of Briarcrest and a perennial Tennessee football powerhouse. Across the line from Michael were a defensive end and a linebacker who were Division I college football prospects; the linebacker, Chris Mosby, would later sign to play linebacker for the University of Kentucky. Still they ran Gap, straight into the strength of the defense. Nine plays into the game, Michael went out after Mosby and pancaked him. Mosby left the game and never returned. “The Christian Brothers’ game finished my thought process,” said Hugh Freeze. “When I saw Michael doing what he was doing to those guys, I thought, ‘You know, we just might line up behind him and win a state championship. And really not have to do anything else.’ Mosby was the best player we saw. And he wanted no part of him. I’ve never seen a lineman have that effect, and I tell you what, I coached against Chad Clifton and Will Ofenheusle.”*

The funny thing was how unappreciated Michael remained. He was the driving factor in every game and the average fan would have had to force himself to pay attention to him, because the average fan watched the ball. Oh, he might notice that small, slow-running backs were waltzing over the left tackle for 15 yards each carry. He might notice, after the play, how many times Briarcrest’s No. 74 was lifting himself off the ground to reveal a previously invisible opponent flat on the grass beneath him. But he wouldn’t really understand. Even Michael’s own teammates didn’t understand his consequences until they watched game film. “In games you’d be too caught up,” said Terio Franklin. “But you’d look at the tape and you’d see he’d be knocking down three, four people on every play.”

It took even Hugh Freeze several games to understand that a single offensive lineman, all by himself, could change the ecosystem on the football field. In response to Michael, the other team simply abandoned any hope of getting to the quarterback. In response to Michael, the other team stacked their players in all sorts of strange ways to compensate—thus creating openings elsewhere. Only after the fact, on film, could one fully appreciate the effect of this kind of power. Even the officials were unprepared; Michael dominated the opposition so thoroughly that the officials assumed he must be cheating, and they hurled their yellow flags at that assumption. As Tim Long put it, “The referees would see him killing everyone and try to level the playing field.” Midway through the season, Hugh began to take the officials aside before the game and say, “Let me tell you three things about my number seventy-four. My number seventy-four doesn’t hold. My number seventy-four will block until the whistle blows. And my number seventy-four is the quickest player on either team. He’s not offside; he’s the first off the ball.” He asked the officials to watch, rather than assume. And when they watched, they saw that Hugh was right.

It wasn’t until near the end of the season that an opposing team came up with a strategy for dealing with this new force. Briarcrest’s archrival was the Evangelical Christian School (ECS). The two schools met every year in what Sean had dubbed the “Jesus Bowl,” and in the 2004 Jesus Bowl ECS sent players to simply tackle Michael Oher, so he couldn’t escort a running back down the field. They’d assign a player, or sometimes two, to the job, and the strategy worked; ECS won that game. Afterwards Hugh thought, That’s just got to be illegal, you can’t just tackle an offensive lineman. He called the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association and found a perplexed authority, who told him, “Well, we never really thought about it, ’cause why would a defensive player tackle an offensive lineman?” As they’d never heard of anyone doing it, they weren’t going to do anything to prevent it. The tactic presented Hugh with about the only chance he had all season to outsmart the opposition. He told Michael, “If they come low, fall on them as heavily as you can, with your arms splayed wide, so they can’t call you for holding. If they try to take you head-on, destroy them.” Hugh then stacked the left side of the line with extra blockers; they would serve as the downfield escort for the running back, after he had scampered through the large hole where Michael, and the defenders who tackled him, had been.

They made it into the playoffs in early December and found themselves just three games away from the state championship. The first game was against Harding Academy. The Harding coach, Paul Simmons, had taken one look at Michael Oher and seen a player unlike any big man his teams had ever faced. There was simply no way they could win if they didn’t do something a little strange. “Our whole goal was to keep Michael Oher from blocking more than one person,” said Simmons. He told his six two, 230-pound defensive end to take Michael out below the knees; if he went for his knees, he should be able to bring him down all by himself. “For a defensive end to cut block an offensive lineman is unheard of,” said Simmons. “But if Michael buried the defensive end and only the defensive end, that was a victory for us.” Michael still opened a hole. (“Instead of having a freeway,” said Simmons, “they just had a pretty good path.” ) And as the game went on, Micheal began to figure out how to use his hands to keep the defensive end away from his knees.

Briarcrest beat Harding, barely, and then faced a team from across the state, Notre Dame. Notre Dame had the ball first. Hugh sent Michael out on defense. He lined up at nose tackle; but the moment the Notre Dame offense broke huddle and came to the line, he backed up and became a middle linebacker, 350 pounds rocking back and forth preparing to charge. The Notre Dame quarterback called time-out and ran to the sidelines to ask his coach what to do about it; the coach didn’t really know. The game was never close.

The state championship game was played six hours away in Nashville, in Vanderbilt Stadium. It was a rematch of the Jesus Bowl—the Briarcrest Christian School against the Evangelical Christian School—but it didn’t take long to see that Jesus was keeping his distance. Before the first half was over, one of the ECS players had been penalized for calling the referee a motherfucker, and one of the Briarcrest players had been flagged for skipping around the field gleefully, hollering, “We’re gonna beat their fucking ass! We’re gonna beat their fucking ass!” The problem on both sides was a total lack of balance, caused by Michael Oher, which was odd in view of ECS’s victory in their first meeting earlier in the season. But Hugh had succeeded in neutralizing the strategy of tackling Michael, and keeping him on the line of scrimmage. Michael still opened a big hole, but he was no longer available to escort the running back downfield, and so Hugh simply lined up a couple of extra blockers on Michael’s side to deal with the downfield tacklers. ECS gave it up, and played him straight. As Briarcrest marched downfield to score the first touchdown, the ECS coach, Jim Heinz, grasped that he was up against an unstoppable force. “Whatever Michael Oher wanted to do,” said Heinz, “he did.”