The Blind Side (36 page)

Bill Walsh had shown how much an imaginative coach might achieve even with mediocre talent; Noel Mazzone was demonstrating how little could be achieved by a coach who did not admit any role for the imagination. The next five times Ole Miss had the ball Mazzone used the opportunity to prove that his slow, fifth-string running back couldn’t run through a giant pile of bodies in the middle of the field. Once the Ole Miss offense faced third and long, as it invariably did, everyone in the stadium knew a pass was coming. There was nothing for the Ole Miss quarterback to do but drop back and wait to be buried under the Mississippi State blitz. Most of the time, just before he was crushed, he managed to throw an incomplete pass or an interception.

Three punts and two interceptions later Mississippi State led 21–7. Rather than try a different strategy—say, the surprising pass play that had worked the first time they had the ball—the Ole Miss coaches tried different players. First they switched their fifth-string running back out for their sixth-string running back. (Between them they ran the ball twenty-five times for 31 yards.) Then they switched their first-string quarterback out for their second-string quarterback—the fellow who had started the season as the first-string quarterback. (Between them they threw four interceptions.) The frantic search for the right combination of players reflected their more general football worldview: they believed in talent rather than strategy. They placed less emphasis on how players were used than who they were. Whoever had the best players won: it was as simple as that.

It was a bleak and deterministic worldview, implying, as it did, that there was little a strategist could do to raise the value of his players. More to the point, it was a false view, at least for running a football offense. The beauty of the football offense was that it allowed for a smart strategist to compensate for his players’ limitations. He might find better ways to use players, to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. He might even change the players’ sense of themselves. But Ole Miss not only lacked a smart strategist: it lacked a coach who understood the importance of strategy. The genius of Bill Walsh was missing; so, for that matter, was the genius of Leigh Anne Tuohy. There wasn’t a soul on the Ole Miss sidelines thinking seriously how to make the most of what another person could do. They were all stuck dwelling on what other people couldn’t do.

After each failed series the linemen trotted to the bench and plunked themselves down for a chalk talk delivered by assistant line coach Matt Luke. This served mainly to highlight their near-total confusion. After one series the right tackle, Tre Stallings, confessed he had gone the wrong way because he thought the center, Daryl Harris, had shouted “Philly,” when he had in fact shouted “Willie.” After another series there ensued a long argument—for them—about the difference between “G” and “Gem.” After a third series three of the linemen got screamed at for firing out and blocking linebackers instead of blocking the linemen right in front of them. After a fourth series a coach thrust a headset at Michael Oher so that Michael could listen to Coach DeLeone, up in the press box, holler at him to try harder. After a fifth series the left guard, Andrew Wicker, hurled his helmet on the ground and shouted, “We’re getting our ass kicked by State.” And they were—largely because none of them had any clear idea what he was meant to do on any given play.

By halftime hope was rapidly giving way to denial. At the start of the third quarter denial gave way to depression, with hardly a pause for the intermediate stages of bargaining and anger. The change came on a single play. With Ole Miss down 21–14, the team had the ball and began, slowly, to move it. It was, as always, third and long, and the Ole Miss quarterback, Michael Spurlock, called for a pass. That in itself posed a problem, as he was only about five nine, and unable to see over the linemen. To compensate for his stature, Spurlock had the habit of just taking off toward the sideline the minute he received the ball. The price he paid for his new view of the field was to render himself nearly useless as a passer—he was running too fast to throw the ball with accuracy—and to confuse the linemen assigned to protect him, as they had no idea where he was.

On this play it hardly mattered. Ole Miss had lined up with two tight ends: both ran the wrong way and missed their blocks. Ole Miss had a tailback: he, too, ran the wrong way and failed to block the defender he was meant to block. Three of the five Ole Miss linemen—Michael plus the center plus the left guard—all blocked a single Mississippi State defensive tackle. With most of Ole Miss’s blockers ungainfully employed, a Bulldog linebacker shot through a gap and sacked the Rebel quarterback for a 20-yard loss, almost killing him in the bargain. After that Coach DeLeone, watching from the press box, yanked Michael Oher from the game. Michael ended his season on the bench, a simmering symbol of his coach’s frustration.

From his seat beside his wife, high in the stands, Sean Tuohy watched the loss take shape with the calm of an asset manager who long ago banked his annual returns. In the grand scheme of Michael’s career this one game—this entire season—didn’t matter. Just by taking the field as a freshman, Michael’s stock remained high. Sean’s main goal had been to make sure that Michael didn’t have the same experience of college sports that he had had, and that Michael didn’t wind up depending on the mercy or the intelligence of his coaches. Now Sean understood that the Ole Miss coaches needed Michael far more than he needed them. Their careers were at stake; Michael could always transfer—a fact Leigh Anne had brought to the attention of the Ole Miss coaches more than once. Leigh Anne had already told Coach O that if Noel Mazzone and George DeLeone returned to run the Ole Miss offense for one more year, Michael would not—and the two coaches were almost sure to be gone after this game. Michael didn’t need to worry about the bigger picture; the bigger picture was arranging itself to maximize his value. “See how his face looks right now,” said Sean, his binoculars trained on Michael. Michael’s upper lip was tucked under his lower, and his eyes stared straight ahead at nothing. “That’s how he looks when he’s planning on not talking to anyone for a while.” He could afford to pout.

THE DAY AFTER his team’s embarrassing 35–14 loss to Mississippi State, Coach O fired his offensive coordinator and began to look for a new offensive line coach. Then he sat down and wrote out his depth chart for the 2006 football season. The first name he moved around was Michael Oher’s. Michael became Ole Miss’s starting left tackle. “If I could do it over,” said the head coach, “I’d have just put him there to begin with and let him figure it out.”

The plan started with Michael Oher but didn’t end there. Coach O might not have Bill Walsh’s gift for taking average talent and tricking it into being better, but he knew how to find and attract great talent. Over the next few months he set out to pluck the finest football talent from the junior colleges and high schools of America—and, to judge from the high marks he received from the recruiting services, he appeared to have succeeded. At the center of this effort, oddly enough, was Michael Oher. “In every conversation Michael’s name came up,” he said. “He was my tool. And when we had the top guys on campus, I had him show them around.”

Michael walked away from his freshman season wondering what that had all been about. And then, strangely, the honors began to roll in. He was named a First Team Freshman All-American, and First Team Freshman All-SEC. He was named pre-season All-SEC by magazines and also by the SEC’s coaches. College Football Weekly listed him the best player on the Ole Miss offense. His value, once perceived, was indestructible. He could play on one of the worst football offenses in the nation and nobody would hold it against him. The experience had been a blur. But all anyone seemed to care about was that (a) he was still the biggest guy on the field and a freakishly gifted athlete, (b) he’d picked up the college game faster than anyone had the right to expect, and (c) when he knew what he was supposed to do, he’d knocked some folks around. And while that wasn’t as often as anyone would have liked, it had been often enough that players and coaches now knew he’d eventually figure it out.

So often given the benefit of doubts, Michael Oher now set out to confirm the wisdom of the people who showed such faith in him. After the season, for the first time in his life, he hit the weight room. Six months later he emerged a different shape; he went in a square and came out an inverted triangle. He went in being able to bench-press 225 pounds and came out bench-pressing nearly 400 pounds. He went in weighing 345 pounds and came out weighing 320—without, it seemed, an ounce of fat on him.

But there still lingered this ominous feeling about him. He might be injured at any time, of course, but that wasn’t the source of the feeling. There was another, more disturbing risk, because it was harder to pin down. He could never shake entirely the place he had come from, and he could never change entirely who he was born. Every now and then, for instance, he’d go back to his old neighborhood and when he did bad things often happened. At Leigh Anne’s urging he had gone to see his mother—and the next thing Leigh Anne knew she was getting a call from a clearly flustered Big Tony, and the only words she could understand were “truck” and “dead” and that Michael was in the custody of the Memphis police. When Michael had arrived at his mother’s house he’d found the police there, arresting her. For some reason she’d been driving around in a truck that belonged to a man the police had just found, murdered. The police had asked Michael why he was there, he’d told them, and they’d put him in handcuffs and taken him to central lockup. Sean had sprung him, then given Michael a little speech about black people and the police and the unlikelihood of the former being treated graciously or even fairly by the latter. When a police officer told Michael to do something, no matter how rudely he put it, Michael was to say “yes, sir” and do it. And his first telephone call should be to Sean Tuohy.

In theory, when Michael went away to Ole Miss, he put some distance between himself and the hand reaching out from his past. But Michael had left behind inner-city social risks only to find that inner-city social risks had followed him to Oxford, Mississippi. One friend and teammate, having failed his Ole Miss classes, left school and went right back to his old neigborhood to peddle drugs—because it was the only way he knew how to make money. His three closest friends on the Ole Miss team all had children. One, Jamarca Stanford, had become a father at fifteen. Another friend was a tough defensive end named Peria (he pronounced it Pur-Ray) Jerry. Peria had so little knowledge of math or English he might as well never have been to school. Miss Sue not only tutored him, and got him reading and adding fractions, she mothered him incessantly. Michael didn’t fully approve—he thought Miss Sue was his. One day he blurted out to Miss Sue, “You love Peria more than you love me.” “I’ll never love any of them more than I love you,” said Miss Sue. “But he’s catching up!” said Michael, outraged.

And he was: one day Peria looked at Miss Sue with tears in his eyes and said, “Nobody ever loved me till you,” and it was all Miss Sue could do not to break down right there. Peria was so big that you forgot he was still, in most ways, just another needy child.

There were at least a dozen black football players from impoverished backgrounds auditioning for the role of Eliza Doolittle. (“I wish I could get me an adopted family,” said Peria.) No one asked Leigh Anne for a shirt with a little alligator on it. But they all longed for some connection and the sense of being taken care of. Michael brought them home to Memphis, and so Leigh Anne got some idea of the risks to keeping Michael on the straight and narrow. To Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, Michael had invited a freshman linebacker named Quentin Taylor, who had no place else to go. At the start of the meal Michael leaned over and whispered, sternly, “Quentin, you’re supposed to put your napkin in your lap.” Right after that, Quentin let it drop that he had fathered three children by two different mothers. Leigh Anne pulled the carving knife from the turkey and said, “Quentin, you can do what you want and it’s your own business. But if Michael Oher does that I’m cutting his penis off.” From the look on Quentin’s face Michael could see he didn’t think she was joking. “She would, too,” said Michael, without breaking a smile.

All these surprisingly good things were happening to Michael Oher. Still there was a sense that something surprisingly bad could happen at any time. And it did.

ONE AFTERNOON, long after their miserable season was over, Michael sat on the front steps of his dormitory with a couple of teammates. Up walked another teammate, a freshman linebacker named Antonio Turner. Antonio had visited the Tuohy home in Memphis, and apparently he didn’t like what he had seen. Now he made a number of unflattering remarks about white people generally and about Michael’s “cracker family” specifically. When he called Michael a “cracker,” Michael gave him a shove, and Antonio punched him in the face—then ran. Michael gave chase, and the two of them raced in circles around a parked car like a couple of cartoon characters. Finally, Antonio said something about Collins and Leigh Anne Tuohy. What exactly he said no one ever exactly learned—and Michael refused to repeat it. But it had something to do with Antonio’s intention to have sex with Michael’s white sister, but only after he’d had sex with Michael’s white mother. Whereupon Michael said he was going to his dorm room to change his clothes, because he didn’t want to get Antonio’s blood on his nice shirt.

When Michael walked back into the dorm to find a shirt he didn’t mind spoiling with Antonio’s blood, Antonio took off at a sprint. He ran to the redbrick study hall with the darkened windows used by the football players and monitored by tutors. Surrounded by teammates and white tutors, he figured he’d be safe. He figured wrong.