The Blind Side (20 page)

At some point early in the game, Hugh Freeze decided he didn’t fully enjoy the sight of his team simply rolling over the opposition to the state championship. The truth was, he’d grown weary of winning with brute force; when that force was Michael Oher, it was too easy. In the middle of the second quarter, Briarcrest had the ball first and goal on the ECS ten-yard line. They were leading, 10–0, and if they punched this one into the end zone, the game would be as good as over. Hugh saw Sean walking up the sidelines, no doubt to tell him to just keep running Gap over Michael’s right butt cheek until they scored. Hugh sent in the play before he could get there.

“What’d you call?” asked Sean.

“Coach Tuohy, you just don’t want to know,” said Hugh.

“Hugh, we can just run off tackle three times and score,” Sean begged.

“Coach Tuohy, that’s not near as much fun,” said Hugh. He’d been holding back for two and a half months now and he couldn’t hold back any longer. “It was my one season in my coaching career where I didn’t feel like myself,” Hugh said. When his gut told him that no one in Vanderbilt Stadium expected him to run a trick play—well, that’s when you ran a trick play. And his gut now told him that there wasn’t a soul in Vanderbilt Stadium who expected him to do anything but run right behind Michael Oher.

When they broke the huddle, the short little fullback hid behind the right guard—when Hugh taught his fullbacks how to run the fumblerooski, he told them, “You should be sniffing the right guard’s butt.” When they got to the line the fullback squatted down, nose to the guard’s rear end, and remained hidden from the defense. Apart from the center, who was on the ball, the Briarcrest offensive linemen never even bothered to drop down into their stances. They stood tall, as if unready for the snap but in fact obscuring the defense’s view of their backfield. The center snapped the ball to the quarterback, who walked a step to his right, handed the ball between the legs of the squatting fullback (who buried it in his stomach), and then sprinted out as if running an option play. (This handoff was a wrinkle Hugh had added; in a true fumblerooski, the quarterback puts the ball on the ground, creating a “fumble” that the guard picks up and runs with.) The right guard, right tackle, and halfback all sprinted right with the quarterback. Believing that the quarterback still had the ball, the defense—already slow to react because the play was so bizarre—chased after him. The fullback waited until the coast cleared and then stood up and raced in the opposite direction, around the left end, where his left guard and left tackle waited to escort him downfield.

Everyone did what he was supposed to do, except for Michael Oher. For some reason known only to himself, Michael just stood there from the start of the play until the end. The Briarcrest fullback got as far as the one-yard line before he was pushed out of bounds, by the man Michael should have blocked. On the next play they scored, but Sean was waiting for Michael when he trotted off the field.

“Michael, all you had to do was give that guy a little push and we’d have scored,” he said. “What were you thinking?”

“Man, I know,” said Michael. “But it was such a great play. I just wanted to watch.”

Hugh Freeze had Michael playing the entire game not only left tackle on offense but also at nose tackle on defense. This ensured, among other things, that ECS players spent even more time than usual beneath him. Trailing 17–0, ECS ran a sweep. The ECS fullback led the ECS halfback around the end, and looked for someone to block. The fullback was a five eight, 165-pound gamer named Clarke Norton. Clarke, as it happened, was the son of friends of Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, and spent a lot of time inside the Tuohys’ home. Clarke’s job was to pick up the first defender he saw as he came around the right end. Expecting to encounter an ordinary-sized human, he ran straight into No. 74. “Everything went black for a moment,” said Clarke. “Then he goes to throw me on the ground and I think, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna kill me.’” But then Michael peered through the face mask and saw the boy he’d dined beside not two weeks before. Their eyes met. “Oh. Hey, Clarky,” said Michael, and carefully picked Clarke up and moved him out of harm’s way, before running down the ball carrier. “I was like, ‘Thank God for the Tuohy family,’” Clarke later said, “because I was about to die.”

The season had begun with an act of vengeance; it ended with that act of mercy. A few of the ECS players, frustrated and ungrateful, in effect quit playing the game and turned their energies directly on the player most responsible for their unhappiness. As Briarcrest ran out the clock, the ECS defenders lunged at Michael’s knees and tried to take him out. It was dangerous, unsportsmanlike, and probably also un-Christian; and after a few plays of this Michael walked over to an official and asked him to make them stop. The official had no sympathy. “Son,” he said. “You been whipping everybody out here all night long. Why don’t you just go back to the huddle and let this game be over with.” A few minutes later, the Briarcrest Christian School Saints were state champions. Michael Oher was, by general consensus, the best football player in the state of Tennessee. The easy part was over.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Blind Side

THE PASTA COACH

A SURPRISINGLY LONG TIME before the Briarcrest Christian School Saints bulldozed their way to a Tennessee State Championship, Leigh Anne mailed the Tuohy family Christmas card. At the end of December 2004, she and Sean would become Michael’s legal guardians, but even without the imprimatur of law Michael felt so much a part of the family that she couldn’t imagine him out of the Christmas picture. Leigh Anne did everything two months before it needed to be done, and her Christmas card was no exception. She snapped the portrait of her three perfect children in October, and sent it out to several hundred friends and distant relatives, without it ever occurring to her that most of the recipients would have no idea about the strange new addition to the family. A few weeks later, the phone rang late one night. It was a North Carolina cousin.

“All right,” he blurted into the phone. “I’ve just had my fifth beer. Who the hell is this black kid in y’all’s Christmas card?”

She sprang the relationship on the college football coaches of America in the same take-it-or-leave-it spirit, without comment or explanation. She virtually dared them to ask who she thought she was to harbor the nation’s most highly prized lineman. They’d fly into Memphis from all over the country thinking they were coming to sell another poor black kid with raw talent, few strings attached, and the usual vulnerabilities. What they found waiting for them, in effect, was an extremely well connected rich kid who was nearly impossible to impress—and guarded by a warrior princess.

Michael Oher didn’t want money or shoes or clothes or cars. Sean and Leigh Anne bought him pretty much whatever he asked for, and his share in the Tuohy estate came to millions. He didn’t want to see the NBA games at the FedEx Forum; Sean, who announced the games, had a season pass, courtside. He didn’t want free plane tickets, or a fifty-yard line seat for the national championship college football game between USC and Oklahoma. A private jet would fly him to the Orange Bowl or anywhere else for that matter, and Fred Smith’s corporate suite would host him once inside. Smith, the founder and CEO of Federal Express, as well as the Orange Bowl’s sponsor, was a good friend of the Tuohys. Collins Tuohy was dating his son.

As half the college football coaches in America gathered on his front lawn, Sean assumed the same pose that he had adopted at the end of basketball games when he had the ball in his hands with six seconds to go and his team was down by a point. He feigned indifference. To avoid the appearance of interest, he required all college coaches to approach Michael not through him but through Hugh Freeze. This provided him with an alibi without actually fooling anyone. Everywhere they looked, the college football coaches of America saw evidence of Sean Tuohy’s devotion to his alma mater, the University of Mississippi. He and Leigh Anne were building a second home in Oxford, just off campus, on the assumption that Collins would follow her mother’s footsteps and become an Ole Miss cheerleader and leading member of the ancient Kappa Delta sorority. When the coaches walked into the living room of the Tuohys’ lovely Memphis home, the first thing they saw was the Rebel Christmas tree: red and blue branches festooned with nothing but Ole Miss ornaments. On their way out they passed, in the front yard, a little stone statue of what at first appeared a gnome but, upon closer inspection, proved to be the Ole Miss mascot, “Colonel Rebel.” A statue of Santa Claus joined him at Christmas, a giant Easter Bunny came out for Easter, but Colonel Rebel was the statue for all seasons. Sean himself was so well known as an Ole Miss alumnus that a Memphis radio station, on the eve of the University of Memphis–Ole Miss football game, stole his Rebel gnome, hid it, and offered a prize to whichever listener found it first. Leigh Anne and Sean had both been the first members of their families to go to Ole Miss, but their lives were as intertwined with the place as if they’d founded it.

Hugh Freeze, for his part, quickly complicated the wooing of Michael Oher by entering into talks to join the coaching staff at the University of Tennessee. Hugh didn’t even pretend not to care where Michael played college football; he let Michael know early and often his opinion that the University of Tennessee was the place for him. Further expanding the web of intrigue surrounding Michael was Justin Sparks, the Briarcrest placekicker. Justin’s parents, Robert and Linda Sparks, had family ties to Oklahoma State and Mississippi State, and a lot more money than the Tuohys. The Sparkses’ Hawker-800 dwarfed Sean’s small plane—which Leigh Anne had dubbed Air Taco. The Hawker-800 flew Michael to all Sparks-affiliated schools. And because Justin Sparks could kick a football so well, the number of Sparks-affiliated schools quickly expanded. Justin flew to LSU’s summer football camp, and Michael flew with him. North Carolina State was the first to offer Justin a football scholarship and, with direct private jet service established between Memphis and Raleigh, North Carolina State became, to Michael Oher, an appealing place to play football.

But the web around Michael was tightly strung. Inside it, every move triggered a countermove. Nanoseconds after North Carolina State made its offer to Justin, Leigh Anne called the Ole Miss football coach, David Cutcliffe, and told him that if he wanted Michael Oher, he had better offer a scholarship to Justin, too. Cutcliffe quickly did.

During the five months between the start of his senior year and the day—February 1, 2005—when prized college football recruits announced their decisions, Michael Oher was surrounded by people intensely interested in that decision. In what came to be, perhaps inadvertently, a kind of Ole Miss pincer movement, Leigh Anne had brought in Sue Mitchell to tutor Michael every night. Miss Sue, as she was known, had spent her career as a teacher in the Memphis public schools. Now in her mid-fifties, and retired, Miss Sue’s only remaining school tie was with Ole Miss, from which she had graduated. Every night for five hours, six nights a week, Miss Sue and Michael worked together. They grew very close. And the closer they grew, the more Miss Sue felt she had to let Michael know what a mistake he’d be making if he didn’t go to Ole Miss. On the night before he was making his official visit to Tennessee, for instance, Miss Sue told him that he had to be very careful in Knoxville, Tennessee, as she’d just learned from a good friend acquainted with the mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell that Knoxville, Tennessee, was used by the FBI to study the effects of the soil on decomposing human body parts.

“They bury a hand and let it sit for six weeks, then dig it up and see what it looks like,” she explained. “These body parts are just below the surface of Knoxville, but the main thing is where they store them, when they aren’t burying them. Right underneath the football field!” When the coaches took him out on the field before the game, she said, Michael should pay less attention to the 107,000 people dressed in orange and cheering him at the top of their lungs than to the hands and feet of dead people set to poke up through the turf. She ended her speech with a cheery, “But it’s your decision where you play football. Don’t let me ‘influence’ you!”

Michael, for his part, did an excellent imitation of a ditzy debutante unable to decide which of the fifteen eager young men in her parlor she wanted to escort her to the ball. He of course told Leigh Anne and Sean that he really liked Ole Miss—but only after Leigh Anne and Sean explained to him that, if he had any intention of going to Ole Miss, they really ought to go through the process of formally adopting him, so that the many gifts they had already bestowed on him might be construed not as boosters’ graft but parental love. Then he flew off to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp at the University of Oklahoma.

A few weeks later, a Memphis news station rolled into a Briarcrest football practice to ask Michael where he might like to go to college. “I really can see myself going to Oklahoma,” Michael said, provoking a frenzy on the Oklahoma football fan Web sites, and instigating a number of calls from Oklahoma coaches. He made further, unofficial visits to Mississippi State, Oklahoma State, North Carolina State, Tennessee, LSU, and Ole Miss. After he’d told the Memphis television audience that Oklahoma was now “at the top of my list,” he told Hugh Freeze that it was his “lifetime dream” to go to Tennessee. After he’d shared with his coach his love of Tennessee, he told Robert Sparks how much he also liked Oklahoma State and Mississippi State. And after North Carolina State became the first school to offer Justin Sparks a football scholarship, Michael told the N.C. State coaches how much he liked the idea of playing football for them, too.