The Blind Side (33 page)

As a boy, Ogden had been terribly shy. When he’d been required to compete in a spelling bee he had turned his back on the audience, as he couldn’t face them and spell at the same time. A few years into his sensational NFL career you couldn’t find a soul who would describe Jonathan Ogden as shy. He was bright and chatty and funny—and about as sure of himself and his abilities as a human being can be. And why shouldn’t he be? He did what he did alone, and he did it as well as anyone ever did it. He had the proof: his quarterbacks never got sacked. When they went back to pass, they knew that what was behind them didn’t matter. Opposing players weren’t pleased to see him. “It can be intimidating if you allow it to be,” legendary pass rusher Bruce Smith told the Washington Post when the reporter asked him what it was like to go head to head with Jonathan Ogden. “I know when I walk up to the line of scrimmage and I have to look up, I only think to myself: ‘What in the world did his parents feed him?’”

Before the 2000 season the Baltimore Ravens re-signed Ogden to a six-year deal worth $44 million. That was what one prominent agent referred to as “one of the great what-the-fuck moments in the history of pro football negotiations.” At that moment Jonathan Ogden was being paid more money than any quarterback in the NFL—and eight times more than Trent Dilfer, the quarterback he’d be protecting.

Now the highest paid player on the field, Ogden was doing his job so well and so effortlessly that he had time to wonder how hard it would be for him to do some of the other less highly paid jobs. At the end of that 2000 season, en route to their Super Bowl victory, the Ravens played in the AFC Championship game. Ogden watched the Ravens’ tight end, Shannon Sharpe, catch a pass and run 96 yards for a touchdown. Ravens center Jeff Mitchell told The Sporting News that as Sharpe raced into the end zone, Ogden had turned to him and said, “I could have made that play. If they had thrown that ball to me, I would have done the same thing.”

Having sized up the star receivers, Ogden looked around and noticed that these quarterbacks he was protecting were…rather ordinary. Here he was, leaving them all the time in the world to throw the ball, and they still weren’t doing it very well. They kept getting fired! Even after they’d won the Super Bowl, the Ravens got rid of their quarterback, Trent Dilfer, and went looking for a better one. What was wrong with these people? Ogden didn’t go so far as to suggest that he should play quarterback, but he came as close as any lineman ever had to the heretical thought. “If you’re going to throw the ball,” he said, “just make it work. Nothing against all the quarterbacks we’ve had since I’ve been here—all twenty of them, it seems. But if we’re going to complete ten of thirty passes, no TDs and two picks, then let’s just run the ball. At least I can have some fun.”

The left tackle had become a star, but of a curious kind. He knew he was a star, and his teammates and coaches knew it, too. But to the general fan he remained obscure. The TV cameras still weren’t on Ogden, and their indifference to his work hadn’t escaped him. “There’s a little bit of satisfaction in playing well, but not that much,” he said. “Nobody pays any attention to what I do as a lineman. All those offensive linemen in the Hall of Fame. I mean, they all deserve to be there. But who knows who they are? The first one you can think of is Anthony Muñoz. The only one you can think of is Anthony Muñoz.” Generally overlooked, Ogden offered conspicuous displays of his athletic ability, just for the hell of it. It was as if he wanted the coaches who sat down and studied the game film to know how he measured up against the people getting all the attention.

That game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for example. The Ravens quarterback throws an interception. The cornerback who has picked off the pass flies down the sideline—it’s 60 yards to the end zone and there’s nothing between him and it. Most of the Ravens just watch: there’s no chance they’ll catch the speedster, so why bother? A couple give it the old college try and lumber after him for twenty yards or so, with no real intention of catching him, like old dogs chasing after a new sports car. Jonathan Ogden, however, actually tries. He doesn’t have an angle, and, really, how is a six nine, 350-pound man going to catch a five eleven, 185-pound man employed specifically for his foot speed? The angle is all wrong, and yet…he seems to be catching up. As Ogden runs, you can’t see his facial expressions or read his mind, but his body language is eloquent: you little supposedly fleet-footed sonofabitch. Me and you. One on one. Twenty-yard dash. I’ll leave you in the dust.

There’s no way that Jonathan Ogden, NFL left tackle, can be faster than an NFL cornerback, but don’t tell him that. He knows that he’s special—one of a kind. Or, perhaps, first of a breed. “To be the next me, it’s really not easy,” he said. “’Cause you really can’t teach some of the things I’ve been able to do. You can’t teach someone to be six nine. You can’t teach someone how, when they are off balance, to recover. To be good, you almost have to be born to play left tackle.” To be born to play left tackle you must be born to do a great deal more than play left tackle. With the cornerback 15 yards from the end zone, Ogden still trails him by 10 yards. Between the monster and the midget is a single player, another Tampa Bay defensive back serving, unnecessarily, as an escort. Realizing, finally, that he won’t catch the cornerback, Ogden decides to use this poor unsuspecting fellow as a human missile. Still running at full tilt, he grabs this 200-pound man and launches him at his teammate—and just misses. The cornerback who picked off the pass and ran it back for a touchdown has no idea what nearly hit him. He races into the end zone and celebrates his wonderful self. The crowd cooperates, and gives him all their attention. But they shouldn’t have.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER TEN

The Blind Side

THE EGG BOWL

IN 1958, WHEN A BLACK TEACHER from Gulfport, Mississippi, named Clennon King tried to enroll in Ole Miss, and was instead carted away by Mississippi state troopers to an insane asylum, the football coach couldn’t have imagined it had anything to do with him. When, in 1962, James Meredith came and stayed, the campus was engulfed in riots, and the football coach watched as his practice field became a staging area for army helicopters—but his team still went 10–0 and ended the season as national champions. But not long after that Ole Miss coaches set out to recruit the black athlete and found that history interfered. “There just aren’t that many white guys in Mississippi who can play,” said one of the Ole Miss football coaches. “The game is so much about speed now. The defense is so much about speed now. We need the best black kids if we’re going to have a chance.” But they seldom attracted the best black players; and since the early 1970s the Ole Miss football team has had about it a delicious fatalism. The civil rights movement achieved many things, and one of them was to create a plausible analogy between Ole Miss football and the Confederate army.

In part because of the needs of their local football team, there wasn’t a town in America more concerned than Oxford, Mississippi, with seeming to have dispensed with race as an issue. The effort the locals put into avoiding obvious racism rendered the near-total lack of interaction between black people and white people in Oxford, Mississippi, almost as invisible as it was in the rest of the country. The history of the place was inescapable, however, if for no other reason than all these extremely annoying outsiders kept dragging it into otherwise pleasant conversations. As late as the fall of 2004 coaches from other SEC schools—including the University of Alabama—were phoning up Michael Oher and telling him that he shouldn’t go to Ole Miss because black people weren’t welcome there. And if Michael Oher hadn’t put down the phone and found himself staring at his very own white Ole Miss family, he might have taken an interest in the subject. Mississippi’s past had created the climate for Mississippi’s present, and it would continue to do so until the present was otherwise notified. Bobby Nix, a white Ole Miss graduate from the early 1980s who now tutored football players, made this point routinely. To help the black kids feel as if they belonged at Ole Miss, Nix often took them into the places frequented by the old white affluent Ole Miss crowd. The Grove, say, or the Square. Usually he would end up feeling awkward and self-conscious. “When you show up with them,” he said, “you’ll get this look. It’s like you have the crying baby on the airplane.”

That look could have meant any number of things. The color of their skin was just the beginning of what set the Ole Miss football players apart. They had gold caps on their teeth and blue tattoos on their skins. They wore different clothes: oversized ersatz sports apparel so loose fitting that every stiff breeze threatened to leave them naked in the streets. They drove different cars—these jalopies outfitted with hubcaps worth twice the market value of the entire vehicle. You’d see them driving around in these bizarre-looking rigs with the front seats tilted so far back that the driver appeared to be an astrologist hard at work in a fully reclined Barcalounger. Many of them didn’t speak or write standard English; to all but the most attentive white Ole Miss football fan, the black football players were barely comprehensible. Many of them, according to their tutors, were less well prepared for college than Michael Oher. The typical incoming player in Michael’s class had third-grade level reading skills. Several had never taken math. Ever.

But if they wanted to play college football—if they wanted a shot at “the league”—they had to go through the tedious charade of pretending to be ordinary college students. Of the seventy players who survived Coach O’s first grueling spring practice, more than forty were classified as “academically at risk,” which meant, among other things, that they spent a great deal of their time inside a redbrick building with dark windows on the fringes of the Ole Miss campus, being spoon-fed books by an army of tutors. “We tell them that they are employees of a corporation,” said Nix, one of the more experienced of those tutors. “And that they might be dropped at any time for lack of performance.” A big part of the tutor’s job was to steer the players away from the professors and courses most likely to lead to lack of performance. The majority of the football team wound up majoring in “Criminal Justice.” What Criminal Justice had going for it was that it didn’t require any math or language skills. Criminal Justice classes were also almost always filled with other football players. Of course, football players weren’t the only Ole Miss students majoring in Criminal Justice. But when the Criminal Justice program took the field trip to Parchman Farm—aka the Mississippi State Penitentiary—the football players were the only students with friends on the inside.

When people on the streets looked at the black football players, and made Bobby Nix feel as if he was holding the crying baby on the airplane, they might have had other things in mind but the color of their skin. And in other places, Nix might have discounted those looks. Here in Oxford he couldn’t. Here every look was filtered by the past.

The perception that Ole Miss’s treatment of black people might not be up to the high standards of, say, the University of Alabama was just one of the many problems Coach O faced when he set out to convince the region’s top high school football players to come play for him—but he couldn’t ignore it. Coach O had been hired by Ole Miss in large part because he had proven himself to be a gifted recruiter of black football players. He’d never been a head coach, or run a football offense. And while he had an obvious knack for firing up a football defense, his single most important career achievement was to have recruited a pair of national championship football teams for the University of Southern California. When Coach O had arrived in the late 1990s the USC football team was faring poorly, and losing the best Los Angeles inner-city athletes to other schools. Coach O decided that what he needed was an example. Talk just one great inner-city high school player into committing to USC, prove that he can have a great experience, and others would follow. His opinion leader had been a defensive lineman named Shaun Cody—a USA Today High School All-American who, after three years at USC, went on to become a second-round draft pick of the Detroit Lions. When Coach O looked at Michael Oher, he saw Shaun Cody. But he was more than that. Not only was Michael Oher black, famous, and the best offensive lineman anywhere near Oxford, Mississippi. Michael Oher had a white sister who was an Ole Miss cheerleader and belonged to one of the snootiest white sororities on campus. The possibilities were endless.

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for word to arrive back at Ole Miss that the new head coach was out there saying he planned to build his football team on the back of Michael Oher. Ole Miss’s two starting tackles, Bobby Harris and Tre Stallings, dug out Michael Oher’s high school recruiting tape just to have a look at this new guy everyone was talking about. Stallings and Harris both were entering their senior seasons with at least a shot at playing in the NFL—Stallings would be taken in the sixth round by the Kansas City Chiefs, and Harris would sign a free agent contract with the San Francisco 49ers. Stallings, especially, expected to be the center of attention when people paid attention to Ole Miss offensive linemen. Then he rolled the tape of Michael Oher playing left tackle for the Briarcrest Christian School. “We both just laughed,” said Harris. “I’d have to say he was the best lineman I’d ever seen with my own eyes—Terrence Metcalf [of the Chicago Bears] would be second. He was just maulin’ people. Tre and me just looked at each other and said, ‘He a beast!’”

Coach O handed the same tape to George DeLeone. DeLeone, in his thirty-sixth year of coaching offensive linemen, in college and the pros, had just arrived at Ole Miss from Syracuse University. He popped in Michael’s tape, and as he watched he thought, Oh my God. “The flexibility in those hips! The arch in that back! That mass! Those feet!” he exclaimed, as he rewatched. DeLeone had seen plenty of future star NFL linemen back as college prospects. “Orlando Pace,” he said, “or Andre Gurode with the Cowboys. In my judgment Michael Oher looks just like those guys did at this stage. It’s a kinesthetic sense. You can’t teach it.”