The Blind Side (21 page)

The head coaches weren’t allowed to visit Michael in Memphis until the end of the Briarcrest football season, but they were allowed to call him whenever they wanted to—which turned out to be whenever Michael would pick up the phone. He had a lifetime of homework to finish, he had football to play, and no hours in the day to waste chitchatting with the head football coach from schools in states he couldn’t find on a map.

Sean Tuohy and Hugh Freeze agreed that on Wednesday night each week Michael should go to Hugh’s house and receive phone calls. The coaches soon learned that Wednesday night was the night to find Michael Oher, and Hugh soon learned that any coach who happened to get Michael on the phone wound up thinking that Michael might like to play for him. For instance, the recruiter from Alabama, Sparky Woods, called, and Michael, who had not shown the faintest interest in Alabama, jumped on the phone with him and said how much he liked the idea of paying Alabama an official visit. As Michael was allowed to make only five official visits, he was telling the Alabama coach that he was on his short list of five. “If the coaches ever got Michael on the phone,” Hugh said, “he was going to lead ’em on. Every one of those coaches came away thinking Michael Oher wanted to play for him.”

But Michael didn’t want to play for them; he merely wanted to fly to see them. Flying on private planes, Michael developed the opinion that pretty much anyplace in America he wanted to go was a delightful day trip from Memphis. One Friday afternoon, Sean came home to find Michael walking out of the house, with the air of a man going for a stroll down the block.

“Where you going?” Sean asked.

“N.C. State,” said Michael. He had accepted the school’s invitation to make an “official visit.” Michael was allowed to make as many unofficial visits to N.C. State as he wanted and to those he could fly in Mr. Sparks’s jet. But North Carolina State picked up the tab for the official visit, and they flew their recruits commercial. Sean knew this, and wondered why Michael was leaving the house empty-handed. The boy didn’t have so much as a toothbrush on him.

“Where your bags?” asked Sean.

“Not taking any,” said Michael. “I’m coming back today.”

Sean explained that when you took an official visit, you flew commercial, and when you flew commercial, the miles between the Tuohy home and the North Carolina State football stadium took a lot longer to travel. Michael might need to change planes, and he’d certainly need to accommodate the airlines’ schedules. A boy leaving Memphis on Saturday morning for a football game that afternoon in Raleigh, North Carolina, had no choice but to spend the night somewhere other than Memphis.

When Sean had finished, Michael turned around, marched back into the house, and said, “Then I’m not going.”

Sean couldn’t let that happen. Not turning up for an official visit to N.C. State would give the impression the fix was in for Ole Miss. He hollered at Michael to pack his bag and get his ass to the airport, and Michael did.

The wooing of Michael Oher was pure southern ritual: everyone knew, or thought they knew, everyone else’s darker motives, and what didn’t get said was far more important than what did. The men seized formal control of the process. The women, acting behind the scenes, assumed they were actually in charge. Of all the people around there was really only one who spoke his mind directly, and advertised his own naked self-interest: eleven-year-old Sean Junior. The first coach through the Tuohy home, Ole Miss assistant coach Kurt Roper, noticed right away that his prized recruit had a special feeling for this little kid. When Roper arrived, he asked Michael to show him around, and they wound up in his room, with Roper reduced to onlooker while Michael and Sean Junior engaged in some endless contest involving miniature basketballs. “You could tell just watching them shoot around,” said Roper. “Those two were like brothers.” And just in case he didn’t pick up on this little kid’s importance, Michael muttered something about how Roper “really ought to talk to SJ, because he’s gonna have a say in where I go.”

When Roper took Michael back downstairs for the sales pitch, Sean Junior followed. At the end of the pitch, to which Michael listened wordlessly, Sean Junior stood up. He didn’t raise his hand but he might as well have. “Can I ask my question?” he asked. His voice cracked. He now had this squeaky drawl, to go with his big slow smile and straight black hair falling down over his eyes. He was the sort of little kid grown women took one look at and said, “Oh, isn’t he just the sweetest thing you ever saw!”

“Uh, sure.”

With that, Sean Junior took off on a surprisingly insistent rap. He explained how important it was for him to be near Michael, and how concerned he was that once Michael committed himself to some big-time college football program, he’d become totally inaccessible. Then came the question: if Michael Oher agreed to play football for Ole Miss, what level of access would be granted to his little brother?

“How about we get you an all-access pass?” said the Ole Miss recruiter.

“That’d be good.”

LEIGH ANNE’S FIRST impression of the college coaches of America was that none of them had the first idea what he was getting into. Michael Oher was so far from being qualified to go to college that there was hardly any point to the discussion. Added to that was the obvious question: even if he somehow qualified to attend college, without the elaborate support system she had created for him, how would he cope once he got there? She wasn’t worried about the spirit but the letter of higher education. School she viewed mostly as something you did well in so you could (a) play sports and (b) get out of it and make something of yourself in the wider world. In the wider world Michael was lost, and would remain lost no matter how much Shakespeare they made him read.

Michael wasn’t stupid. He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence. He’d been denied the life experience that led to knowingness, which every other kid at Briarcrest took for granted. Leigh Anne was now making it her personal responsibility to introduce him to the most basic facts of life, the sort of things any normal person would have learned by osmosis. “Every day I try to make sure he knows something he doesn’t know,” she said. “If you ask him, ‘Where should I shop for a girl to impress her?’ he’ll tell you, ‘Tiffany’s.’ I’ll go through the whole golf game. He can tell you what six under is, and what’s a birdie and what’s par. I want him to know the difference between Monet and Matisse.”

Restaurant dining was a subject unto itself. “You don’t know how complicated it all is until you go with someone who has no idea,” she said. When she took him to an Italian restaurant, she didn’t order for two. She ordered up the entire menu, “just to show him what they were.” Michael thus learned to distinguish pesto from alfredo, and puttanesca from marinara.

The trouble was that there really was no end to the quotidian details of upper-class American life bafflingly new to Michael Oher. Every time he turned around, he bumped into a thing with which he should have been completely familiar and wasn’t. One day they were leaving the house to go to a track meet. It would be a three-hour flight on Air Taco and Michael needed to bring his North Face backpack so he could study on the road. They were still in the driveway when Leigh Anne noticed he didn’t have it with him.

“Michael,” she said, “go and get your backpack.”

“I don’t know where it is,” he said.

“It’s in the foyer,” she said. “Just go in and get it.”

He left the car reluctantly and returned to the house. She waited several long minutes, then followed him inside to see what on earth had gone wrong. Coming through the front door she found the backpack where it had been, in the foyer. There was no sign of Michael, and she walked through the house until she came upon him near the back door, loitering uneasily. He looked up at her and asked, “What’s a foyer?” It took a minute to explain, as her explanations amounted to little lectures on the general subject. (“It’s an entry hall some places. A foy-er some places. A foy-yay other places, depending on where you are in the South.”) When she was done, Michael just shook his head.

“But let me tell you something,” Leigh Anne said. “He absorbed it. He absorbed everything.” More and more, as Michael put it, “I feel smarter. ’Cause I know what things are.”

Leigh Anne Tuohy was trying to do for one boy what economists had been trying to do, with little success, for less developed countries for the last fifty years. Kick him out of one growth path and onto another. Jump-start him. She had already satisfied his most basic needs: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and health care. He had pouted for three days after she had taken him to get the vaccines he should have had as a child. It was amazing he hadn’t already died some nineteenth-century death from, say, the mumps. (When she tried to get him a flu shot the second year in a row, he said, “You white people are obsessed with that flu shot. You don’t need one every year.”) Now she was moving on to what she interpreted as his cultural deficiencies. She had watched her own penniless husband turn his athletic triumphs into business success and, indeed, a happy life. But there was nothing inevitable about the process; you needed to know how to translate one narrow kind of success into another, much broader kind. To Sean, the skill came naturally. It would never come naturally to Michael, but it might come unnaturally, if she worked on him. She would make him completely at home in white Christian entrepreneurial Memphis, but in the way that a blind man became comfortable in a well-furnished room. He’d memorize the contents of the room so perfectly that his blindness became irrelevant.

To others it might seem silly, or beside the point, for Michael to know how to read a wine list, or score a golf game, or distinguish between Gucci and Chanel, but to Leigh Anne it didn’t seem silly at all. He had to know all sorts of ridiculous little things if he was ever going to feel at ease in their world. The rich world. It was one thing when she first met Michael and took him out to buy clothes—she could see why she shouldn’t impose her tastes on a stranger. It was another matter entirely now that Michael was, in effect, her child. “I’m trying to make him more preppy,” she said. “He just looks so nice in a Ralph Lauren sports jacket.”

He went through phases where he wore headbands and throwback jerseys and pants that drooped down the back of his ass, and Sean had tried to explain to her that “yes, it’s a thug look, but it’s an organized thug look, a high-priced thug look.” She didn’t buy it; she fought back; and she took it as one of many small victories in the great war when Michael’s friend Terio Franklin from Briarcrest called her one day and said, “Mizz Tuohy, I need some of those shirts with alligators on them—can you get me some?”

In every city in America, rich white kids worked overtime to look and sound like black kids from the ghetto. In Leigh Anne’s new world, black kids were crossing the line from the other direction.

She wasn’t shy, either, about impressing upon Michael the important distinctions within the white world, and a sense of his new social class. One morning she and Collins and Michael set out on a little trip to Alabama. On their way they stopped at a McDonald’s. As they waited for their food, a scruffy-looking man came through in a pickup truck with a gun rack and some dead animal in the bed of his truck. “Lord, he’s such a redneck,” said Collins. Ten minutes down the road, Michael asked, “What’s a redneck?” Collins tried to explain but couldn’t quite get it across until she said, “Thomas Trubride is a redneck.”*

Trubride was a Briarcrest classmate of theirs. “Thomas Trubride is a good guy,” Michael said.

“A redneck is just someone who drives a pickup truck with guns in it,” said Leigh Anne.

“That doesn’t sound too bad to me,” said Michael.

“It’s not bad,” said Leigh Anne. “It’s just not who we are.”

Increasingly, it wasn’t. In many ways Michael was coming to resemble a naturalized citizen of East Memphis. Every Sunday he attended Grace Evangelical Church, and he was always the first one dressed to go in the morning. His grades had improved, dramatically, thanks to Miss Sue. At the end of the first semester he’d come home from the Briarcrest Christian School with four A’s, two B’s, and a C. The school’s report cards included the students’ cumulative class ranking. Up until then Michael had always finished dead last. On the strength of the first semester of his senior year, in a class of 163 students, he placed 162nd. “He’s started making his move!” shouted Sean, gleefully. “He’s picking them off one at a time, like Sergeant York.”

But it wasn’t just his grades. He had a family that loved him, and would take care of him, and he was coming to take their love for granted. Leigh Anne got these little hints of Michael’s security in the relationship. For instance, one afternoon she received a phone call from the store manager of one of Sean’s Taco Bells on the other side of Memphis. “Mizz Tuohy,” the man drawled, “there is a big ol’ black kid here who says we need to serve him for free ’cause he’s your son.” She had treated Michael as she treated their other two children, which is to say she lavished upon him most of the material comforts and spiritual guidance known to mankind. “A year ago he didn’t have a bed to sleep in and wouldn’t look you in the eye,” said Sean. “Now he’s got a car, money in his pocket, and everyone knows who he is.” No wonder he got better at football his senior year, thought Leigh Anne. He was charging off the ball with confidence because he was arriving at the football field with confidence.