The Blind Side (27 page)

When she’d finished the testing, Jessup called Sean Tuohy. She wanted to see him in person; what she had to say was too interesting to relate over the phone. She drove to the Tuohy home and delivered a fairly long lecture to which Sean listened politely. (“I understood about two words she said,” he noted later.) When Jakatae Jessup was done, he had only one question for her.

“Is this going to get me by the NCAA, or not?” he asked.

It was. If Michael’s IQ really was as low as advertised, Jessup explained, he wouldn’t have been classified as learning-disabled: he was just learning as well as his brain would allow. Now that he was established to have greater capacities, his problems could only be interpreted as a disability. Michael, to everyone’s delight, was certifiably LD.

THUS BEGAN THE great Mormon grade-grab. Mainly it involved Miss Sue grinding through the Character Courses with Michael. Every week or so they replaced a Memphis public school F with a BYU A. Every assignment needed to be read aloud, and decoded. Here he was, late in his senior year in high school, and he’d never heard of a right angle, or the Civil War, or I Love Lucy. But getting the grades was far easier than generating in Michael any sort of pleasure in learning. When Briarcrest had given him a list of choices of books to write a report on, Miss Sue, thinking it might spark Michael’s interest, picked Great Expectations. “Because of the character of Pip,” she said. “He was poor and an orphan. And someone sort of found him. I just thought Michael might be able to relate.” He couldn’t. Pygmalion came next. Again, he hadn’t the faintest interest in the thing. They got through it by performing the work aloud, with Michael assigned to the role of Freddie. “He does wonderful memory work,” said Miss Sue. “It’s a survival technique. You can give him anything and he’ll memorize it.” But that’s all he did. Engaging with the material in any deeper way seemed impossible. He was as isolated from the great works of Western literature as he was from other people. “If you asked him why we’re doing all this,” she said, “he’d say, ‘I got to do it to get to the league.’”

It was always work, and so it was always tiring, and every now and again Miss Sue needed a break. One night the Detroit Pistons were playing the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA finals, and Michael insisted on watching the game out of one eye. With the other eye he watched Miss Sue, and some book. If he wasn’t going to take any more interest than that, she thought, why should she?

That’s when Sean came through the door. Miss Sue handed Sean the reading assignment—Character Education I, Lesson II—and went to stretch out on the Tuohys’ sofa.

The text was “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” That Sean Tuohy would know a poem was as likely as Sylvia Plath hitting a jump shot at the buzzer, but Sean knew “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He hadn’t seen it in twenty years but he still could nearly recite it by heart. He grabbed the sheet, got between Michael and the NBA finals, and said, “You ready, Bubba?” Then he boomed:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward the Light Brigade!”

“Charge for the guns!” he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Rather than stop to explain, he raced on to the next, his favorite verse:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d:

Their’s not to make reply,

Their’s not to reason why,

Their’s but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred…

Now he realized he should give Michael a bit of help. “You know Death Valley at LSU?” he asked.

“Death Valley” is what LSU football fans had nicknamed the LSU football stadium. Michael had visited Death Valley. Now he was planning to ride into it, on the opposing team’s bus.

“Well, this is where it comes from,” said Sean. “This guy,” he said, waving the work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “is writing about Ole Miss–LSU.”

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” was now a football story, and Sean read it all the way through. Performed it, really. Then he read it again, more slowly. In his crackly North Mississippi–West Tennessee baritone, its sounds couldn’t have been much less stately than the sounds Tennyson heard as he wrote:

Cannon to right of them

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d…

He stopped again and asked: “So where are they now?” He compelled Michael to imagine the valley, and the surrounding artillery. Prostrate in the adjoining room, Miss Sue saw Michael’s body language change. He usually leaned away from the lesson; this time he was leaning toward it. “Michael holds back so many things,” she said. “Even his interest.” For the first time since she met him, she could sense that he was conceding an interest. In a poem! She knew that he absorbed only what he could visualize. She thought: Sean is making him SEE the poem.

Sean charged on. Toward the end, Michael tried to stop him. Twice he asked, “Did they all die?” “Did they all die?” But Sean kept booming on, right through to the final stanza:

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

“They’re all going to die?” asked Michael, when it was over.

“They’re all going to die,” said Sean.

Michael leaned over and switched off the NBA finals. “What’s a league?” he asked.

Sean actually didn’t know. Obviously, though not to Michael, a league was a unit of distance. Fortunately, BYU kept a crib sheet on line and Sean went to the computer and pulled it up. They went through the poem and replaced several of what Sean conceded were “goofy words”—league, blunder’d, battery, shatter’d and sunder’d—with words Michael knew. “Saber” was the exception. Michael didn’t know what a saber was but when Sean explained, “it’s a big long-ass sword, bigger than the knives you used in the hood,” they agreed to let Tennyson keep it. Then Sean read it again.

Half a mile, half a mile,

Half a mile onward…

After the second reading Michael said, “Why would anybody do that?”

“The point is that this is about courage,” said Sean.

“But they’re going to all get killed!” he said.

“And you honor that,” said Sean, “because they used courage, even if it was dumb.”

From the next room Miss Sue hollered, “Michael Oher, if there’s a war broke out, you head straight to Canada! Do you hear me?”

If Michael heard her he didn’t show it.

“And sometimes courage is dumb,” said Sean. “What they are saying is not that it’s right or wrong. What they are saying is that it’s not for us to question the coach. If you’re the left tackle and the coach tells you to block the whole other team, you do it first, and you ask questions later.”

“Why didn’t we read any great poems like that at Briarcrest?” asked Michael.

And Sean thought: You did. But it didn’t mean anything to you, because they took it for granted that you knew what a saber was.

“Let’s read it again,” said Michael.

NEARLY A MONTH after her first visit, Miss Joyce Thompson from the NCAA returned. This time she arrived early and found Michael at home alone. They sat together uncomfortably. She started to explain all over again the purpose of her visit—there were these rules forbidding people affiliated with college football programs doing any favors for big-time high school football players, etc.—when Michael interjected.

“I should be paid,” he said.

She laughed, but nervously.

“They’re making all this money off football,” he said. “Why shouldn’t they pay the players?”

She treated it as a silly question. It wasn’t. The reason the NCAA needed investigators roaming the country to ensure that college football teams, and their boosters, weren’t giving money or food or clothing or shelter or succor of any sort to the nation’s best high school football players is that the nation’s best high school football players were worth a lot more to the colleges than the tuition, room, and board they were allowed to pay them. The NCAA rules had created a black market—and done for high school football players what the Soviet police had once done for Levi’s blue jeans. A market doesn’t simply shut down when its goods become contraband. It just becomes more profitable for the people willing to operate in it. There were a number of colleges—and Ole Miss was one of them—for which the expropriation of the market value of pre-professional football players was something very like a core business. Whether NCAA investigators impeded, or enabled, this state of affairs was an open question.

Michael, newly alert to his own market value, had wondered about that: if he was allowed to auction his services in the 2004 market for college football players, how much, exactly, would they have paid him? The going black market rate for a Memphis high school superstar five years earlier appeared to have been around $150,000. One hundred fifty grand is what the University of Alabama booster Logan Young paid to the high school coaches of Albert Means, in exchange for persuading him to play for the Crimson Tide. Who knows what the University of Alabama might have paid if it could have cut a deal with Means directly?

At any rate, in 2004, one hundred fifty grand sounded almost quaint.

But the NCAA lady didn’t want to engage Michael on the subject. If there wasn’t a principle to prevent rich college boosters from feeding, clothing, and educating black inner-city football players, the NCAA investigative unit would be out of business. She went back to trying to determine which rich white person had given what to Michael Oher. Before she got very far, one of those rich white people came through the side door. He wasn’t happy to see her.

The first time the NCAA lady had walked into his living room, Sean Tuohy had been all false bonhomie. He’d held out his pleasantness the way a trainer, faced with an ill-tempered horse, might hold out a carrot, with the clear implication that it could always be withdrawn. Now it was. As Joyce Thompson, NCAA investigator, switched on her tape recorder and asked the very same questions he had already spent five hours answering, Sean began to redden.

“Michael,” she asked. “Who took care of your basic needs?”

She went over the same questions: food, clothing, shelter, the truck. What about spending money? She had no more luck getting satisfying answers out of Michael this time than she had the last. But this time she had a Plan B. If he wasn’t going to talk to her about who gave him what, she was going to press him about his grades. She’d seen his transcripts: how did he intend to get himself academically qualified? Michael didn’t know, but Sean told her that they had just started the BYU program of correspondence courses.

“Can you tell me how you’re doing it?” she asked.

Sean offered a basic summary, and then disclaimed any more detailed knowledge. The great Mormon grade-grab was being managed by Michael’s tutor, Miss Sue.

“Do you take the test on the computer?” the lady asked Michael. “In a book?”

Once again Michael didn’t answer. Sean did. And what followed sounded like a courtroom exchange.

Sean: I have no idea. You’d have to ask her [Miss Sue]. She’s doing it.

NCAA Lady: But Michael’s taking the class!

Sean: I have no idea, and I know he doesn’t either. She’s conducting it, so you’d have to ask her.

NCAA Lady: That wasn’t explained? Or you don’t know how that’s done? Whether or not you take a lesson, you grade it, you hand it in?

Sean: No! I mean I think I was clear: I’m not being flippant. I don’t know. And neither does he. We’ll find out for you. And you can keep asking.

NCAA Lady: It just surprises me.

Sean (hollering): Well, it can surprise you. But we don’t know.

NCAA Lady: You don’t know what core subjects they are going to be in?

Sean: There’ll be an English and a math.

Michael: Depends on how the ACT turned out.

That was another loophole Sean had found. Now that Michael had been certified as learning-disabled, he was allowed to retake the ACT tests as many times as he wanted, with Miss Sue on hand to help him parse the questions. That’d be worth a few extra points, and a few extra points on the ACT meant fewer needed on the GPA.

“Okay,” said the NCAA lady, obviously hoping to encourage Michael, and not Sean, to elaborate. He didn’t.

“I figure when I get to the second course, I’ll look for the third one,” said Sean. “And when I get to the third one, I’ll look for the fourth one.”