The Blind Side (29 page)

Coach O wasn’t one for sitting behind a desk. When he had people into his office at Ole Miss, he’d install them on his long black leather sofa while he marched back and forth, giving pep talks. The subject of Michael Oher brought out the student in him; when Sean came, he sat behind a desk. Coach O actually had a yellow pad to write on. He didn’t get up. He didn’t answer the phone. He took three pages of notes.

The two of them talked about many aspects of Michael Oher, but eventually Sean got around to his mental development. Michael’s mind, Sean said, “is like a house built on sand. He doesn’t know what ‘agenda’ means, but he knows eight thousand more complicated words.” Sean didn’t worry all that much about Michael’s schoolwork, as he planned to ship Miss Sue down to Oxford with him; Miss Sue could take care of Michael’s grades. What he was worried about was Michael’s ability to understand football plays. “Michael can read,” he said, “but it just doesn’t register very well. If you give him a play book filled with X’s and O’s, he’ll say, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ Then he’ll run on the field and won’t have any idea what he’s supposed to do. If you think you can just put it on a chalkboard and he’s going to know the play, it’s not going to happen. But if you take him aside and explain it to him using mustard bottles and ketchup bottles—some visual aide that enables him to see it—not only will he remember it, he’ll remember it for the rest of his life.”

“This is very important,” said Coach O, scribbling notes.

“Coach,” said Sean. “My faith believes that the Lord sends down gifts for everyone and our job is to find those gifts. Michael’s gift is the gift of memory. When he knows it, he knows it.”

Coach O stopped scribbling and looked up. “I’m going to tell you one thing, Sean,” he bellowed. “He’s got some pretty good fucking feet, too. You seen them feet? Now them feet: that’s a fucking gift!”

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER NINE

The Blind Side

BIRTH OF A STAR

THE REDBRICK MONSTROSITY rises from a hollow beside a quiet road in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. To call it a home would be to give the wrong impression. It’s less a shelter than a statement: the long sweeping driveway, the lawn that could double as a putting green, the giant white columns, the smooth stone porch inscribed with greetings in Latin. Through the leaded glass windows can be glimpsed sleek marble floors leading to a grand staircase lit by chandeliers with enough wattage to illuminate an opera house. It’s the sort of place where the door really should be answered by an English butler, but Steve Wallace answers his own door. He wears shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, and has the pleasantly surprised air of a man who has just woken up from a dream that he is rich only to discover that he’s actually rich. The only thing that the home and its owner have in common is that they are both huge. He walks across his great stone porch and onto his lawn to adjust the sprinkler. He limps; but they all limp. One nasty scar runs down his right knee and another lines his left ankle. Former NFL linemen age painfully and die young. No life insurance salesman in his right mind sells them coverage at the usual rates.

Hard as it is to believe now—as he returns to his mansion and passes through its stone halls toward the magnificent den with its elaborate audiovisual system—there was a time when Steve Wallace worried about such financial trivia as life insurance. He worried about making a living. He wasn’t born with money; all he knew how to do was block, and in 1986, when he started his NFL career, blockers didn’t get paid much. His first contract guaranteed him $90,000 a year, which was pretty good, but he wasn’t sure how long it would last. He sat on the bench, and waited, without knowing exactly what he was waiting for. It turned out he was waiting for Bubba Paris to eat himself out of a job.

After the 49ers won their first Super Bowl, in 1982, Bill Walsh had used his first draft choice to select Paris. Bubba was meant to be the final solution to Walsh’s biggest problem, the need to protect Joe Montana’s blind side. “At three hundred pounds or less,” said Walsh, “Bubba would have been a Hall of Fame left tackle. He was quick, active, bright, and he had a mean streak.” Bubba also had a history of putting on weight, but, as Walsh said, “we felt we could deal with that. And we did. Briefly.” Walsh fined Bubba for being overweight. He inserted clauses in Bubba’s contracts that paid him bonuses for showing up for work under 300 pounds. He sent Bubba to Santa Monica to live at the Pritikin Diet Center. He even hired a fitness instructor to drive over to Bubba’s house every morning and feed him less than Bubba fed himself. Walsh did everything he could think of to keep Bubba from expanding. And then one day the fitness instructor showed up at Bubba’s house and, as Walsh put it, “The car was in the driveway, the drapes were closed, and nobody answered the door.”

In his first four seasons Bubba’s weight jumped around, but the trend line pointed up. Offered many choices between carrots and sticks, Bubba reached every time for another jelly doughnut. The 49ers won the Super Bowl again, after the 1984 season. But the next three seasons they went into the playoffs with high hopes and were bounced in the first round. In 1985 and 1986, they were beaten badly by the New York Giants, and in both games Lawrence Taylor wreaked havoc. He’d been too quick for Bubba. The 49er offense, usually so reliable, had scored only three points in each of those games. Joe Montana had been knocked out of the 1986 game with a concussion. The hits didn’t always come from the blind side but the blind side was the sore spot. As 49er center Randy Cross said, “Increasingly, we game-planned specifically for that rush guy on the right side.” The right side of the defense, the left side of the offense, was the turf Bubba Paris was meant to secure. “There’s that old Roberto Duran idea from boxing,” said Cross. “Get the head and the body dies. More and more teams were coming for our head.”

It was at the end of the 1987 season that Bill Walsh’s frustrations with his promising left tackle peaked. That left side of the line was now, obviously, the pressure point that a very good pass rusher could use to shut down the 49er passing game. And Bubba Paris just kept getting fatter, and slower, and less able to keep up with the ever-faster pass rush. During the regular season Bubba’s weight hadn’t mattered very much. He was waddling onto the field at well over 300 pounds, and the 49ers still cruised through the season. They’d finished with a record of 14–2. Amazingly, they had the number one offense and the number one defense in the NFL. Going into the playoffs, they were viewed as such an unstoppable force that the bookies had them as 14-point favorites to win the Super Bowl, no matter who they played.

They appeared to be a team without a weakness; but then, the regular season is not as effective as the playoffs at exposing a team’s weakness. The stakes are lower, the opponents generally less able, their knowledge of your team less complete. It’s when a team hits the playoffs that its weaknesses are most highly magnified; and in the 1987 playoffs, Walsh discovered that his seemingly perfect team had a flaw.

The first game was against the Minnesota Vikings, and it was supposed to be a cakewalk. But the Vikings had a sensational six five, 270-pound young pass rusher named Chris Doleman, and he came off the blind side like a bat out of hell. He was fast, he was strong, he was crafty, he was mean. He wore Lawrence Taylor’s number, 56, and when he was asked who in football he most admired, Doleman said, “The one guy who has the desire to be the best, and the tenacity, is Lawrence Taylor. I’m not saying I want to be exactly like Lawrence…” Every blind side rusher knew about the anxiety of influence. Doleman wasn’t exactly Lawrence Taylor but he was exactly in the tradition of Lawrence Taylor. He’d been drafted as an outside linebacker, but in the 4–3 defense, which the Vikings played, the outside linebacker wasn’t chiefly a pass rusher. Finally it occurred to the Vikings coaches to try him as a right defensive end—that is, to make him a pass rusher. To give him the role in the 4–3 that Taylor played in the 3–4. He was an instant success.

Fearing that Doleman might shut down his passing game, Bill Walsh considered his trick of pulling a guard to deal with him. John Ayers had moved on, and the 49ers had no one quite so well designed to the job. Anyway, the trick was old: the Vikings would see it for what it was and quickly move to exploit the hole left in the middle of the 49er line. They had a weapon to serve just this purpose: right tackle Keith Millard. He lined up beside Doleman, and was himself—oddly, for a tackle—a speedy pass rusher. Send the guard to help with Doleman and you left Millard to run free. Walsh couldn’t do that.

Thus Bill Walsh received another lesson about the cost of not having a left tackle capable of protecting his quarterback’s blind side. This time the lesson was far more painful than the last. This time he had expected to win the Super Bowl. He had built the niftiest little passing machine in the history of the NFL, manned with talented players, and this one guy on the other team had his finger on the switch that shut it down. Chris Doleman hit Joe Montana early and often, but even when he didn’t hit Montana he came so close that Montana couldn’t step into his throws. Backup left tackle Steve Wallace watched from the sidelines. “He never let Joe get his feet set,” he said later. What Doleman did to Joe Montana’s feet was minor compared to what he did to his mind. “Every time Joe went back, he was peeping out of the corner of his eye first,” said Wallace, “then looking at his receivers.” The pass rush rendered Joe Montana so inept that in the second half Walsh benched him and inserted his backup, Steve Young. Young was left-handed, which enabled him to see Doleman coming. Young was also fast enough to flee—which he did, often. Against a team they were meant to beat by three touchdowns on their way to an inevitable Super Bowl victory, the 49ers lost 36–24. Afterwards, Vikings coach Jerry Burns told reporters that “the way to stop [the 49ers] is to pressure the quarterback. Our whole approach was to pressure Montana.”

A football game is too complicated to be reduced to a single encounter. Lots of other things happened that afternoon in Candlestick Park. But the inability of his left tackle to handle the Vikings’ right end was, in Walsh’s view, a difference maker: it created fantastically disproportionate distortions in the game. “Bubba got beat,” he said. “Doleman and Millard just dominated the game.” After the game, Walsh was so shattered he walked right out of Candlestick Park without pausing to speak to his players. Always a bit leery of the way Walsh viewed them—as cogs in his intricate machine—the players would later point to that playoff loss as the beginning of the end of their feeling for their ingenious coach. “Walsh couldn’t talk to us the day after,” defensive back Eric Wright later told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He lost a lot of respect with the players. When it was going well, he was there. When the ship was shaky, he couldn’t face us.”

Walsh coached football just one more season, and he decided to hang his fortunes on something more dependable than the Bubba Paris Diet. But Bubba had no obvious replacement. His backup was Steve Wallace, and Wallace hadn’t been trained as a left tackle. He’d been drafted by the 49ers in the fourth round in 1986, and was known chiefly for having blocked for running back Bo Jackson at Auburn. The joke was that Auburn had only three plays: Bo left, Bo right, and Bo up the middle. Having spent most of his college career run blocking, Wallace had to teach himself how to pass-block; but Wallace was a student of the game, willing to pay a steep price to play it, and the recipient of Walsh’s highest compliment: nasty. As in: “Steve Wallace was a nasty football player.”

A year after their loss to the Vikings, the 49ers found themselves in exactly the same place: in the playoffs, facing the Minnesota Vikings. The 49ers weren’t as good as they had been the year before, and the Vikings were better. They, not the 49ers, now had the NFL’s number one defense. It was led by Chris Doleman who was, if anything, even better at sacking quarterbacks.

The night before the game, Steve Wallace didn’t sleep. “I’d just try to go to bed early and hope somewhere along the way I fell asleep,” he said. The inability to fall asleep on the night before the game had already become a pattern for him. Apparently, it came with the left tackle position. Will Wolford, who protected Jim Kelly’s blind side for the Buffalo Bills, had exactly the same experience. He started out his career as a guard—and slept—then moved to left tackle—and didn’t. Late in his career, he moved back to guard, and, presto, he could sleep again. The left tackle position, as it had been reconceived by the modern pass-oriented offense, presented a new psychological challenge for the offensive lineman. In the old days, no one could really see what you were doing, and you usually had help from the lineman on the other side of you. That was still true at the other line positions. A mistake at guard cost a running back a few yards; a mistake at left tackle usually cost a sack, occasionally cost the team the ball, and sometimes cost the team the quarterback.

And—here was the main thing—you only needed to make one mistake at left tackle to have a bad game. The left tackle was defined by his weakest moment. He wasn’t measured by the body of his work but by the outliers. “You have this tremendous ability to be embarrassed,” said Wallace. “You know you can’t afford three bad games in a row. They gonna say, ‘Nice knowing you.’ And it only takes one play—if he has one sack, then he’s interviewed after the game. And you’re the guy who gave up the sack. I could be good on thirty-four out of thirty-five pass plays, and all anyone would remember was that one sack.”

This point was driven home to him the Saturday before the Vikings game, when Bill Walsh called the team into the auditorium for the pleasurable viewing of its past highlights. Walsh did this before every game. He thought it helped his players to see themselves at their best before they went out to play. The players watched Jerry Rice dash into the end zone, Ronnie Lott intercept a pass, and Joe Montana thread the ball between defenders. They whooped and hollered and cheered for each other. It was all good fun, all positive. But at the very end of the highlight reel, Walsh, perversely, had inserted a single negative play: the Doleman sack.