The Blind Side (22 page)

A year and a half into the reeducation of Michael Oher she felt, for the first time, almost relaxed. One night she realized that for the first time since she began to feel responsible for Michael, she was worried about nothing. “It was nine at night and Sean was traveling with the Grizzlies,” she said. “I was sitting alone in bed with the remote in my lap. I could hear Miss Sue working away with Michael at the kitchen table. And I thought: I am so happy. I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to do anything.”

Not long after that, she went out for her afternoon walk. The sky couldn’t decide whether to rain or snow; it was a winter day not so very different from the one on which she had first met Michael. She was motoring along at a fantastic clip when her cell phone rang: “Mom, you have to come home,” Collins shouted into the phone. “There’s been an accident.”

All Collins knew was that Michael had been driving Sean Junior out to Briarcrest to play basketball when Michael’s truck collided with another car. Collins and Leigh Anne drove out together, but the accident had created a traffic jam, and they couldn’t get within a half-mile of it. When Leigh Anne saw they couldn’t drive any closer, she left Collins with the car and took off at a sprint. The first thing she saw was Michael’s truck, totaled. Then Michael, sitting on the side of the road, crying.

When she got to him, he was sobbing so violently that she could barely understand what he was saying. She grabbed his cheeks in her hands and said, “Michael, listen to me, this could happen to anybody.” Then she understood what he was saying: “SJ needs you. Go over to SJ.” Then she saw Sean Junior stretched out on the ground on the other side of the mangled truck. She ran to him in a panic. His face was an unrecognizable mass of swollen, oozing flesh. She wasn’t entirely sure it was him until he spoke. “Mom,” he said, “will the blood come out of my shirt?”

She laughed; how badly hurt could he be if he was worried about his shirt? She sent Michael home and climbed in the ambulance with SJ. And Michael kept right on sobbing. “I just wished it was me going to the hospital instead of SJ,” he said later.

At the hospital, the doctors said they were amazed that Sean Junior hadn’t been more seriously injured. His face was bruised, and incredibly swollen—“I never knew a human face could do that,” said Leigh Anne. “I never knew lips could swell like that.” But his bones were perfectly intact. Michael’s truck had skidded on the ice across the divide at 25 miles per hour and crashed head-on into the big van, also traveling at 25 miles per hour. The driver of the van was fine, and so was Michael, but no four and a half foot tall boy should have been sitting in the front seat: the airbag had exploded directly into Sean Junior’s face. The doctors saw this kind of thing fairly often, and in every other case the airbag busted the little kid’s nose or cheekbones, and usually took out a bunch of teeth in the bargain.

Leigh Anne listened to the doctors discuss how bizarrely lucky Sean Junior had been in his collision with the airbag. Then she went back home and relayed the conversation to Michael, who held out his arm. An ugly burn mark ran right down the fearsome length of it. “I stopped it,” he said.

In Michael Oher’s file at the Briarcrest Christian School were the results of a test he had been given, by the Memphis City School system, at some point during the eighth grade. The test was designed to measure his aptitude for a variety of careers. It showed that he had an aptitude for almost nothing. He scored in the 3rd percentile in spatial relations. In a category called “the ability to learn,” he had scored in the 5th percentile. But there was one quality he possessed in an extreme form, and in whatever test the public school system had used to measure it, Michael Oher had scored in the 90th percentile. The quality was labeled “Protective Instincts.”

AROUND THE TIME of the accident, the head coaches of the schools on Michael’s short list came for their formal visits, or tried to. Urban Meyer was named the new head coach at the University of Florida and called Hugh Freeze every single day for the next two weeks, hoping to be invited into the Tuohy home. Leigh Anne picked up the home phone once a week to find Mark Richt, the head football coach from the University of Georgia. One week Richt finally said to her, “Look, if I have any shot at all, I’ll be there in an hour and a half.” “I have to be honest with you,” said Leigh Anne. “I have no desire to go to Athens, Georgia, every Saturday to watch my son play football.” Richt graciously thanked her for not wasting his time, and promised not to pester her further. Some of the coaches gave up; more of them slinked into Briarcrest and found Michael there. But they all knew they remained outside the circle of trust. Michael formally decided who to have into the house, but Leigh Anne was never far away from the decision. In the end, they chose three: Nick Saban of LSU; Phil Fulmer of Tennessee; and David Cutcliffe of Ole Miss.

The assistant coaches of all three universities had spent the previous six months loitering in the vicinity of the Tuohy home and Briarcrest. Trooper Taylor, the recruiter from the University of Tennessee, might as well have had season tickets to Michael Oher’s Briarcrest basketball games. “I just love watching high school basketball,” he leaned over and told Sean Junior during one of the games. And who could argue the point, when he traveled six hours from Knoxville to do it? Now the head coaches arrived to close the deal with Michael, with the ceremonial air of great chefs condescending to grill the beef, after their sous-chefs had done the marinating.

Sean made a show of not being present when the coaches turned up in his living room (See? I don’t care!). It was left to Leigh Anne to receive the famous football coaches with a big smile that disguised her gritted teeth. Leigh Anne didn’t have Sean’s ability to fake it. Sean could pretend all he wanted, but Michael simply could not function without the elaborate support system she had built for him: private tutors, constant monitoring, and a steady drip-drip-drip Chinese cultural reeducation program, administered by her, to assimilate him into their world. (“The Chinese government would have shot her at some point,” said Sean, “’cause after she finished telling everyone else what to do, she would have tried to tell them what to do, too.”)

Leigh Anne reasoned that, if Michael was going to be part of the family, he had to know what the family knew and behave as the family behaved. Ole Miss was an hour away, and she had, on her fingertips, every pullable string inside the place. The chancellor was a friend, the athletic director called Sean for advice, the locals, who still remembered Sean as the Great White Point Guard, asked him for his autograph. Leigh Anne could be as sweet as the day is long, and seldom did she need to be anything but sweet. But if her friends at Ole Miss didn’t take care of her little 350-pound baby she could, and would, have their asses in a sling. She liked knowing that.

The first to enter was Nick Saban, of LSU, fresh off winning the national championship. He was at a serious disadvantage with Michael, however, because Michael had already visited LSU and been entertained for a lurid evening by a few of LSU’s star football players. Michael refused to go into the details of the night, but when he came home his eyes were big and round. To Leigh Anne he said simply, “Mom, that’s a bad place down there.” Leigh Anne didn’t want to know what had happened—she could guess—but she did ask Michael what they fed him: raw seafood. “I don’t think he ate anything the whole weekend,” she said.

With Michael’s official visit to Ole Miss coming up, she picked up the phone, called Ole Miss recruiter Kurt Roper, and said, “I am faxing you a list of what Michael likes and what he doesn’t like and you use it like a frickin’ road map.” Leigh Anne’s list was straightforward and exact: “Don’t take him to some titty bar and give him shots of tequila. Don’t put him with guys who want to show him how to have sex in eighty-five different positions. Don’t feed him a steak: he hates steak. Take him to Ole Venice [a restaurant in Oxford] and feed him Fettuccine Alfredo with chicken. Take him to a movie—and not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because he’ll just hide his face in his hands the whole time. And then let him go to bed.” And the people at Ole Miss had done exactly that. And Michael had come home and said what a fine time he had had—and how Ole Miss wasn’t at all like LSU.

Then Nick Saban arrived. Waiting for him were the Tuohys minus Sean, plus Miss Sue, Coach Hugh Freeze, and Briarcrest principal Steve Simpson—who Sean thought would get a kick out of being included. Whatever damage LSU had done to its reputation with Michael on his visit to the place was immediately forgotten—at least by Leigh Anne. Saban came into the house in his Armani suit and Gucci dress shoes and made a point of being polite to every single person in the room. Then he looked around, as if soaking in every last detail of the Olde English and Country French furnishings, and said, “What a lovely home. I just love those window treatments.” I just love those window treatments. He didn’t say, “I just love the way you put together the Windsor valances with the draw drapes,” but he might as well have. Right then Leigh Anne decided that if Nick Saban wasn’t the most polished and charming football coach in America, she was ready to marry whoever was.

Saban sat down beside the Ole Miss Christmas tree and explained to Michael how he, and LSU, planned to make him not merely a great NFL player but also a college graduate. Michael said not one word. “These coaches would come into the house to talk to him,” said Collins, who watched the whole process with disguised but intense interest, “and he was like a stone. The coaches talked the whole time.” Ten minutes into the soliloquy Hugh Freeze rose, offered a big yawn, and announced that he really had to leave to go spend some time with his family.

Leigh Anne seethed. This was nothing more than the University of Tennessee spitting on LSU. “It was so rude,” she said. “And he did it because LSU hadn’t offered him a coaching job.” Saban’s response—to not miss a beat, to not take obvious offense—caused Leigh Anne to think even more highly of him. Now that was good manners. He knew everything from the names of the people who would tutor Michael to the place on campus where Michael would do his laundry. And he addressed his remarks not only to Michael but also to Leigh Anne. Michael didn’t have any questions for him but Leigh Anne did; and he answered them beautifully.

When he was done, Sean Junior stepped out into the living room. “Um, can I ask my question?” he said, then explained his concern about having access to his beloved older brother—and revealed that the recruiter from Ole Miss had offered to give him an all-access pass.

The LSU coach smiled his charming smile and said that Sean Junior could have a pass that said he was welcome in the LSU locker room, even if Michael didn’t play football for LSU. And if Michael did play football for LSU, they’d make sure SJ had the adjoining locker.

“Hmm,” said Sean Junior. “That’d be good.”

On Saban’s way out the door, Michael finally had a question, and it was a pointed one:

“You staying?” he asked, offhandedly.

There were rumors in the air that Saban was being offered NFL jobs. There was no point in going to LSU to play football for the incredibly charming Nick Saban if Nick Saban wasn’t going to be there. “I’ve been offered several NFL head coaching jobs since I’ve been at LSU,” replied Saban, “and haven’t taken one yet.” Then he left and Collins turned to Leigh Anne and said, “That was a great political answer.” (Three weeks later, the Miami Dolphins announced Nick Saban as their new head coach.)

Michael’s next visitor was meant to be Ole Miss’s David Cutcliffe. He was due to arrive in the living room on a Sunday, but he was fired the Friday before. Oops! The news didn’t travel fast, it traveled instantaneously. Moments after Cutcliffe’s dismissal, the Tuohys’ home phone began to ring. The first caller was LSU’s director of athletics, Skip Bertman, to say that even though Nick Saban had just announced he was leaving to coach the Miami Dolphins, and LSU no longer had a football coach, LSU was of course still extremely interested in having Michael Oher play for LSU. The next call came from Phil Fulmer, head coach of the University of Tennessee Volunteers, who was scheduled to visit Michael in a couple of weeks. Now, Fulmer said, he’d be coming right over.

Since the spring football practice that doubled as Michael’s coming-out party, Phil Fulmer had become perfectly obsessed with Michael Oher. When the University of Tennessee traveled to play Ole Miss, Fulmer took his entire team on a wide detour to the middle of nowhere, to practice at the Briarcrest Christian School. His plan had been to roll up to Briarcrest in the Volunteers’ swanky team buses, and, offensive lineman leading the charge, have the entire team surround Michael Oher and give him a cheer. Even more shrewdly, Fulmer staged his tableau on the very Friday that Michael was meant to make his official visit to Ole Miss. Michael was to become, in effect, Ole Miss’s property at 3:00 p.m. sharp. Fulmer planned to arrive just before that, and detain him.

It didn’t work out that way. Just before 3:00, Fulmer called the Ole Miss recruiter, Kurt Roper, said his team bus was stuck in Memphis traffic, and persuaded Roper to wait until 3:30 to take Michael away. (In the small world of big-time football, assistant coaches know better than to annoy head coaches; a year later, Fulmer hired Roper at Tennesee.) Roper informed Leigh Anne who, of course, was furious. She told Roper that if Fulmer’s bus came even one minute past 3:30 he was to take off. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Roper succumbed to the rock: Fulmer’s buses rolled into Briarcrest at 3:31, just in time to pass Roper driving in the other direction, with Michael in the car.