The Blind Side (37 page)

Michael knew he didn’t need to run. He knew where Antonio had gone—there was no place else to go where Antonio would think he was safe. Michael walked across campus, calmly stalking his prey. Finally, he came to the study hall. There, in a small room filled with half a dozen players and tutors, he found Antonio, and charged.

Force equals mass times acceleration, as Hugh Freeze said, and when Michael’s mass comes at you at Michael’s speed, it’s just an incredible force. With that incredible force he drove Antonio into the ground. Then he picked him up with one hand by the throat and lifted him straight off the ground. Antonio weighed 230 pounds but in Michael’s big hand he looked, as one player later put it, “like a rag doll.” Michael beat Antonio around the face and threw him across the room as, around the room, huge football players took cover beneath small desks.

That’s when a lot of people at once began to scream hysterically and Michael noticed the little white boy on the floor, in a pool of blood. He hadn’t seen the little white boy—the three-year-old son of one of the tutors. Who had put the little white boy there? When he’d charged Antonio, the boy somehow had been hit and thrown up against the wall. His head was now bleeding badly. Seeing the body lying in his own blood, Michael ran.

Antonio, a sobbing wreck, was taken to the home of running back coach Frank Wilson, for his own protection. He was still alive, and the Ole Miss coaches planned to keep him that way. Back in the study hall Miss Sue sat listening to another football player, a linebacker named Robert Russell. She told him she didn’t understand why these disputes must be resolved with violence. “Miss Sue,” he said, “Michael and I weren’t raised that way. No matter how much you try to wash us up behind the ears, we’re going to go back to what we know.”

Hugh Freeze called Leigh Anne, who was up in Memphis. Like a zoo director discussing a crazed rhinoceros with its trainer, he said, “You got to get down here and find him. You’re the only one who can control him.” Leigh Anne jumped in her car, took off for Oxford—and then stopped. Michael was gone, no one knew where he was, and she didn’t actually believe she could find him. She pulled over to the side of the road and called Sean, who was somewhere on the West Coast with the Memphis Grizzlies. It was Sean who said, “He’s running because that’s all he knows how to do.” He wasn’t out looking for someone to kill. He was just trying to escape his predicament. Just a few months earlier Sean would have been shocked. But now he knew that when Michael got into trouble, he ran. He knew it because not long after Michael had left for Ole Miss he’d had an argument with Miss Sue and vanished for two days. He wouldn’t return phone calls—nothing. Late one night, Sean and Leigh Anne had turned to each other in bed and considered the possibility that Michael Oher might never come back. That he’d just used them to get what he’d wanted and that he actually had no real feelings for them. “You think this is it?” Leigh Anne had asked. And the truth was, Sean didn’t know. “Your mind does funny things when it’s idle,” said Sean. “But that’s when I decided that the downside was that we’d helped some kid—so even if he’d been playing us all along there really was no downside.”

But he knew something else, too. He knew that Michael had spent his life running. Not long before, he’d been in his Memphis office when a woman named Bobby Spivey, who worked for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, finally returned his call. Spivey was the officer who had handled Michael’s case. Sean had phoned her three times to see what he could learn about the missing years in Michael’s life, and each time he found himself in conversation with Spivey’s voice mail box.* Now, finally, Spivey herself was on his speaker phone, and embarrassed to say that most of the details of Michael’s case were unavailable. The Department of Children’s Services had lost his file. She remembered very clearly some things about Michael Oher, however. She recalled, for instance, the night that Children’s Services had sent the police to remove seven-year-old Michael Oher from his mother’s care.

“It was raining that night,” said Bobby Spivey. “She was homeless. She was on drugs. Someone called the police and said she was walking around in the rain with her kids.”

She recalled that Michael Oher had been taken away and put into a foster home—but that he hadn’t stayed. “He was a runaway a majority of the time,” she said, laconically. “He was real quiet. He wasn’t disrespectful. He just ran.” Eventually, the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services had given up looking for Michael Oher. “He ran so much that we stopped trying to stop him,” said this woman who had handled his case. The government had officially taken charge of Michael at the age of seven, she said, but lost track of him around his tenth birthday. She was curious to know what had become of him.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Blind Side

FREAK OF NURTURE

NCAA Lady: Can I ask you this—

Sean: He has no hate. No animosity. His memories are all good.

NCAA Lady: To be quite honest with you—do you fully know his childhood?

Sean: Oh, absolutely not. First of all he doesn’t have a great relationship with me. Because he never had a daddy. I’m more of just an older man. He’ll talk to my daughter or my wife. But we don’t ask questions like that. Because a lot of times we don’t want the answers.

NCAA Lady: You don’t care.

Sean: I only care about what he cares about.

NCAA Lady: You don’t ask, I should say.

Sean: We’re trying to take care of geometry class tomorrow. What happened when he was four years old—if he’s okay by it, we’re okay by it. The timeline to us, we figure it’ll come one day. We’re in no hurry. We got a long time.

DENISE OHER COULDN’T SAY who murdered her father—just that he had been shot several times in his bed when she was a little girl. She couldn’t tell you exactly when she had been removed from her mother’s custody. She knew her mother was an alcoholic and totally incapable of taking care of her and her half-brother, Robert Faulkner. Her mother never cooked her a meal, read her a book, or took her to school—at least, not that she could recall. One day the police came for them, and took her and Robert away to an orphanage. She still didn’t feel especially cared for—she never felt loved or anything like that. She skipped plenty of school, and even more when, at the age of fifteen, her mother somehow sprung her from the institution. Once out she fell in with the wrong crowd. It led her to drugs and other things and, at twenty, she gave birth to a baby boy. Four more babies soon followed. Around the neighborhood people would say, “Dee Dee is a breeder.” And she was: inside of six years she had five little boys. Their father, she felt sure, was a man named Odell Watkins, but he declined the offer from the Department of Children’s Services to acknowledge his paternity. Instead he took a DNA test. The test proved, just as she’d said all along, that Odell Watkins was the father.

By the late summer of 1985 Dee Dee was twenty-seven years old, and finished with Odell Watkins. She wasn’t even half-finished having babies, however, and the father of her next child had just arrived on her front porch. He came directly to her from Robert, her brother.

Since they’d left the orphanage Robert had gotten the nickname “Skillet.” Oddly enough, it was a skillet, and then a horseshoe, that Robert later used to crush his wife’s skull after she told him she wanted a divorce. His wife’s brutal murder landed Robert on Death Row at River Bend over in Nashville; but that all came later. The first time Robert had been thrown in jail for murder he’d been sent away for just a few years. Denise couldn’t tell you who Robert had killed, or why. She just knew that her brother had been convicted for murder and sent away to Fort Pillow prison, where he’d met a man named Michael Jerome Williams. Why Michael Jerome Williams had been in jail Dee Dee either didn’t know or would soon forget. All she knew was that Robert had wanted to send word to her of his well-being and that Michael Jerome Williams, on his way out of jail, had been kind enough to serve as messenger. “When I met him I wasn’t with nobody,” said Dee Dee. “We got to talking and we wound up together. But he was a little bitty fellow. Five foot six, maybe.”

Soon after Michael Williams visited her, Dee Dee discovered she was pregnant again. She had no money, no job, and was now flirting with a serious drug problem—but still she didn’t worry about the welfare of this new baby. “God put it there,” she said, “and He ain’t going to put no mouth on this earth he can’t feed.” Unlike Odell Watkins, Michael Williams didn’t dispute his paternity, and she named the baby after him: Michael Jerome Williams.

But right around the time the child was born, Michael Jerome Williams vanished. The Department of Children’s Services went looking for him, and it was a full year before they found him—back in prison. By then Dee Dee had decided she didn’t want her baby named for Michael Jerome Williams. Though she made no effort to change the baby’s legal name, she began to call him “Michael Oher.” Oher was her family name, which she had taken from her mother.

In the next four years Denise bore four more children, by several different fathers, none of whom stuck around. By the time Michael was five years old, and his memory kicked in to record events for posterity, Dee Dee was caring for seven boys and three girls, all under the age of fifteen. Only she wasn’t really caring for anyone, as she’d become addicted to crack cocaine. “On the first of the month she’d get a check,” recalled Marcus, Michael’s eldest brother, “and she’d leave and we wouldn’t see her until the tenth…. Them drugs tear everything up.” As Dee Dee had no income except for whatever the government sent her on the first of each month, the children had no money for provisions. They had no food or clothing, except what they could scrounge from churches and the street. Surprisingly often, given the abundance of public housing in Memphis, they had no shelter. When asked what he recalls of his first six years, Michael said, “Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.” The winter was cold, but the summer was worse because the heat was so oppressive and the mosquitoes bit all night long.

Yet, by the time Michael turned seven his greatest fear was that some man in a uniform would come and take him away from his mother. His mother had her problems but she was never overtly cruel: she never hit them, for instance, and she often said she loved them. She just wasn’t around that much and, when she was around, had nothing to give them. Marcus, now sixteen years old, knew that the police sometimes broke up families such as theirs. They’d heard snippets about foster homes, and the snippets hadn’t been reassuring. The police just took you away and dumped you with people whose only interest in you was the cash they received for your presence. Michael’s brothers spoke of the possibility that the police might take them away, and decided that, whatever happened, they would try to stick together.

On April 14, 1994, the Memphis courts, for the first time, registered Michael’s existence. Listing Michael’s name, as well as the names of his siblings, it rendered the following verdict: “It appears to this Court that said children are in need of immediate protection of this Court and that said children are subject to an immediate threat of said children’s health to the extent that delay for a hearing would be likely to result in severe or irreparable harm.”

A month before Michael’s eighth birthday, the police cars rolled up in front of the shed behind the cottage that Denise had told the children belonged to a cousin of hers. The three little girls were out in front. Andre and Rico were someplace else. The four other boys—Marcus, Deljuan, Carlos, and Michael—were inside the shed. “We seen them pull up and we already knew what they were coming for,” said Marcus. “We done seen it happen before with other people. We really thought they were going to scatter us up.” Seeing the police, Marcus turned to his brothers and said, “Run!”

Michael prided himself on his foot speed. “I can fly,” he liked to say. Speed was essential to the new plans he had for himself—plans he would cling to, with an amazing tenacity, for the next ten years. On June 20, 1993, he had been inside someone else’s house and seen a basketball game on television. On that night Michael Jordan was using the Phoenix Suns as his foil for the public display of his greatness. The moment he saw Michael Jordan play basketball, Michael Oher knew who he was meant to be: the next Michael Jordan. Because he was seven, he thought it was an original idea. Because he was quiet, the idea went unexpressed, and so undisturbed.

But Michael Oher now had a secret ambition, and it would define much of what he did with himself for the next ten years. The ambition stood in defiance of a world that had assigned him no value. His father hadn’t valued him enough to meet him. His mother hadn’t valued him enough to feed him. He’d never been to a doctor, or been given medicine of any sort. He’d missed nearly as much school as he’d made. His older brothers cared for him and were good at finding food. But they had their own problems; they had no real ability to nurture. No one invested in Michael Oher, and so he yielded no visible returns. Michael did not consider himself without value, however. From the moment he laid eyes on Michael Jordan, he was, himself, destined to become the richest and most famous black athlete on earth.

When the police cars came and his brother screamed at him to run, Michael didn’t really know what was going on. He just saw Marcus (sixteen), Deljuan (thirteen), and Carlos (eleven) sprinting out the back door. He flew after them. To be the next Michael Jordan, Michael Oher needed to be quick and agile—and he was. His older brothers were still faster than he was, but Michael pumped his little legs as fast as they’d go, and he finally caught up to them. When they’d finished running they stood on the second floor of an abandoned auto repair shop down the street, huffing and puffing. From a broken window they watched their mother scream as the police took away her three baby girls—Denise, Tara, and Depthia—and put them in the back of the squad car. Marcus told his brothers that they’d probably never see those little girls again, and he was right.