The Blind Side (39 page)

He also now had a kind of shadow brother: Big Zach. Zachary Bright lived a few doors down from Michael in Hurt Village. Big Zach was ten years older than Michael, but their resemblance was a constant source of wonder to the neighbors. “Everybody used to say, ‘Zach, you got a brother!’” recalled Zachary Bright. “‘Guy down the sidewalk looks just like you!’” Zach went and had a look at Michael Oher for himself and couldn’t deny the family resemblance. Their skin color was an identical dark chocolate. Their features, in the context of their huge selves, seemed small and delicate. They both had ears designed for men half their size, and narrow eyes that closed almost shut when they laughed or became angry.

They shared a similar athletic ability, too. In 1994, two years before Michael turned up in Hurt Village, Zachary Bright had graduated from Kingsbury High School. After his junior year he’d been one of the most highly sought after college football prospects in Tennessee. He’d had scholarship offers from nearly every major football school in the country. In a high school all-star game Big Zach’s backup was Cletidus Hunt—who eventually went on to play for the Green Bay Packers. And in that game Big Zach had played defensive tackle, which wasn’t his natural position. His natural position was left tackle on offense. He was six six and, while he weighed only 265 pounds, he had a frame that would support a lot more, once he received proper nutrition. He had great long arms and the grace and agility of a star basketball player. “Zachary Bright has the potential to be a big-time offensive tackle,” Tom Lemming had written in his annual review of high school football stars.

Coach Bobby Bowden of Florida State had the same thought. Bowden had flown Big Zach down to Tallahassee, where he’d spent two days and nights being wined and dined by Heisman Trophy winner and future NBA guard Charlie Ward and future NFL superstar Derrick Brooks. Florida State had his locker ready and a jersey (No. 71) with BRIGHT stenciled on the back. But Big Zach’s girlfriend had already given birth to their first child. She didn’t want to go to Florida State, and the truth was he didn’t really feel like doing his schoolwork or making his grades. Surrounded by friends who told him that he’d be wasting his time to even try college, he quit. He never even finished high school. When the next school year started, and Big Zach didn’t show up for it, Bobby Bowden himself came up from Florida State to Hurt Village, in search of his prized recruit. Big Zach hid out with his girlfriend and their new baby until Bowden was gone.

Big Zach would one day reflect upon that strange and wasteful period in his life. “Guys who were around said, ‘Everyone can’t make it to the NFL,’” he said. “Telling me I wasn’t really gonna make it. Years passed by. I was still thinking I was at the top of my game. But my time was passing me on by. After a while I decided I was too old for it.” He’d shake his head in wonder at all he had thrown away and say, “I feel like I could a did something, if I were to start over and do it again. I didn’t know how close I was. All I had to do was knock on the NFL door.”

But the wisdom, and the sadness, came much later; in 1996 he was just two years out of high school and still having fun. And suddenly all these people started coming up to him to ask if that kid now living a few doors down the block was his little brother. He grabbed the kid and took him out on the basketball court to see how he handled himself.

Well, as it turned out. (“But it was more like football than basketball,” said Zach.) Michael Oher was no longer Michael Oher: he was “Big Mike.” Michael loathed that nickname; it was the enemy of what he hoped to become. “I didn’t want to be big,” said Michael. He wanted to be lithe and fast; he wanted to be Michael Jordan. The wider he became the more preposterous was that ambition, but it proved easier to ignore his width than to abandon his dream. Everyone might be calling him “Big Mike,” but no one ever took a picture of him. There weren’t many mirrors around, either. He seldom was faced with his own reflection. He fiddled with optical illusions, and took to wearing his shoes too small and his clothes too big. He did push-ups and sit-ups, thinking they kept him thin. He developed the odd habit—for a boy his size—of always looking for something high over his head to jump up and hit, or tap, or jump up on. Every game they played he arranged it so that his role in it stressed, and trained, his quickness and his agility. Craig was his only real friend, and Craig reassured him that no matter what anybody called him he was still, like Jordan, a born outside threat. He just had to keep working on his quick first step and his crossover dribble.

Of course, Michael could sense his own swelling mass, but only by its effects. He was pleasantly shocked when one day, while wrestling, he just picked up a kid as if he weighed nothing and hurled him across the yard. On the other hand, he was no longer winning the foot races against the other kids—but at least he was still running them. They’d go out into the turning lane on Danny Thomas Boulevard like they always did, but now he’d be given a head start. He devoted so much time and energy to defying his own size that it couldn’t help but yield results. Even as he became one of the biggest human beings in Hurt Village, he remained quick and agile. He willed himself to be graceful—to remain a little man, inside a big man’s body. Later, college coaches who came to watch him would see a freak of nature. But where had nature left off, and nurture taken over? It was, as always, hard to say.

Between the ages of ten and fifteen Michael Oher was left alone with his fantasy. He learned nothing in school, confined himself to the incredibly narrow life available inside Hurt Village, and developed nothing in himself apart from his athletic ability. No one told him he should be doing anything other than what he was doing. If Hurt Village was an island in the Memphis economy, Michael’s home was a hidden cave on that island. It probably helped that Delvin Lane’s Gangster Disciples discouraged its members from messing with little kids. At any rate, Michael didn’t have anything to do with the gangs or anyone else but Craig. He dipped in and out of school, and was moved along from one grade to the next, meaninglessly. He watched every one of his older brothers drop out. Marcus quit after the ninth grade, Andre and Deljuan and Rico after the eleventh, and Carlos after the tenth. Each had fathered at least one child, and among them they had fathered ten. But Michael remained happy and free, without the faintest premonition that anything would ever change, or needed to.

Then, just before his fifteenth birthday, he met Tony Henderson. Big Tony had grown up in Hurt Village, too. He came back often in search of kids to play for the football and basketball teams he coached. If you had the skills and the size, it was hard to hide from Big Tony. Big Zach had played for Big Tony; so had Tombstone and Big Brim.

Big Tony’s first impression of Big Mike was that his family life was unusually troubled, even by the standards of Hurt Village. His second impression was that Big Mike had no friends. “I never saw him hanging around nobody,” said Tony. “He was real quiet.” He quickly figured out that Big Mike, like half the other kids he knew, was living to be the next Michael Jordan, and Tony did what he could to help him realize the dream. The summer before Michael’s freshman year in high school Tony, through a friend, sneaked Michael into the basketball camp run by Carver High School. The first day Tony’s friend called him to say that Big Mike had fled the camp. Big Tony hustled on over and found Big Mike walking the streets, a mile away, with tears streaming down his face. He was fifteen miles from Hurt Village and he didn’t have a dime in his pockets. He was walking home, he said. The coaches had taken one look at him and told him he wasn’t a perimeter player—that he wasn’t Michael Jordan. And once he’d taken his newly assigned position in the low post, the bigger older kids alongside him had started shoving and hitting him. “Mike was a big ol’ kid,” said Tony, “but he didn’t want to be touched. They got mad at him because he wouldn’t knock the other kids down. The coach told him he’d never be nothing, and Mike started crying.”

Big Tony was friends with Harold Johnson, the basketball coach at Westwood High. Westwood was a long way from Hurt Village, but Tony figured if he was driving his son Steven to Westwood he might as well drive Big Mike, too. At Westwood Big Mike played football, too, but his heart wasn’t in it. The coach just threw out the balls and went and sat in the shade, and Big Mike coasted through the year as a defensive tackle on a bad team.

That was a shame, thought Big Tony, because Big Mike was getting seriously big. He reminded Tony of Big Zach: his size alone meant he’d attract the attention of college football coaches. For that to happen, however, he needed to get through high school, and that didn’t seem even remotely possible. He was failing his freshman classes and, on many days, didn’t even bother to show up for them. Other days Big Tony would drop Steven and Big Mike at school, and return that afternoon to find only Steven waiting. “He wasn’t going back,” said Big Tony. “Big Mike was going to drop out.” The only reason Big Mike hadn’t already gotten himself into a world of trouble, Big Tony thought, was that he was so loosely connected to the people around him. He wasn’t at the same risk as Big Zach for the simple reason that he didn’t have a crowd of friends tempting him with the fast life.

Still, there was only so much distance any young man who dropped out of high school could put between himself and the ’hood. “He didn’t have nothing to turn to,” said Big Tony. “What chance did he have to go straight? He had no chance.” As Michael neared the end of his freshman year in high school, he had before him one obvious career path. Once he quit school he would have waiting for him a single, well-paying, high-status job: bodyguard to Delvin Lane. Or rather, since Delvin had moved on, to Delvin’s successor. The job was to watch the back of the guy who ran the only real business in the neighborhood. Left tackle of the ghetto.

That’s when Betty Boo died, and stated as her dying wish that her grandson receive a Christian education. And as odd as it felt to Big Tony to put Steven in his car and drive him into the heart of rich, white Memphis, it felt odder still to ignore his mother’s dying wish. And Big Tony thought, if I’m taking Steven I might as well take Big Mike, too.

ONE OF THE TACTICAL disadvantages of being a six five, 350-pound black kid in a school built for white kids is that other people tend to recall their encounters with you in far more vivid detail than you do. The main thing Michael Oher would remember of his first few weeks at the Briarcrest Christian School was his own terror and confusion. All white kids looked alike; and they were all bizarrely enthusiastic and friendly. “Everyone was exactly the same,” he said. “For three or four weeks, every time I turned the corner I’d see some white kid shouting hello to me and I’d think: I just saw you!” His senior year he’d figure out that, while he hated to read, he liked to write. Assigned to write a personal essay, he chose as his subject his first days at Briarcrest. “White Walls,” he titled his piece. It began:

I look and I see white everywhere: white walls, white floors, and a lot of white people…. The teachers are not aware that I have no idea of anything they are talking about. I do not want to listen to anyone, especially the teachers. They are giving homework and expecting me to do the problems on my own. I’ve never done homework in my life. I go to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and say, “This is not Mike Oher. I want to get out of this place.”

The other thing he remembered about those first frightful days was his hunger. The free food had been the main reason he bothered to go to public school as often as he had. These Christians didn’t give you lunch, and that shocked him.

Hunger and confusion did not prevent him from noting significant details about white people. He’d had no interaction with them before this. Now as he studied them he judged them ill-designed for survival. Astonishingly prone to exaggerating the severity of the most trivial illness or injury, they were forever racing off to doctors and hospitals, as if they were about to die. “They’d get a twisted ankle or something and they’re walking around school with a boot!” Michael said. “I was like, ‘What are y’all doing? You got to just walk it off!’”

In addition to their pathological friendliness, and their constant need for medical attention, they exhibited a bizarre tendency to leave their most valuable possessions unattended. Steven was in the grade below him, and so they didn’t cross paths very often, but when they did they shared their incredulity: these white kids left gold watches, hand TVs, name brand shoes, and wallets just lying around. It was as if the doors to Ali Baba’s cave had sprung open. The boys’ locker room alone was a cornucopia; all you had to do was swoop your hand through once and you’d come away with fistfuls of cash. “A burglar’s dream,” Michael called it. One night they came home with money that wasn’t theirs, and Big Tony found out and tried to explain to them a little bit about white people and how, lacking street smarts, they had established some rules to preserve their species and that, odd as those rules might seem, Steven and Michael needed to obey them. Rule number one was that a kid did not steal, or fight, or get into trouble of any sort; and what was a rule for white kids was an iron law for a black kid. Because a black kid who got into trouble in the white world was a black kid on his way out of that world.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Blind Side

AND MOSES STUTTERED

IN THE HOURS FOLLOWING Michael Oher’s disappearance, hell broke loose. The Ole Miss study center for football players became a crime scene. The ambulance came for the little white boy, who continued to bleed from his head wound, and took him away. Campus police raced in, followed by the Oxford city police. Miss Sue screamed into the phone to Leigh Anne: “He’s going to jail! They’re going to put him in jail!” The teammate Michael had attacked, Antonio Turner, was hustled off, bruised and battered, to a coach’s house, to be guarded like a witness in a protection program. The little boy’s father—Bobby Nix, the tutor who had been at such pains to get the black players out into white Oxford—was understandably beside himself. He and his wife had already lost a child, and now he’d just seen his three-year-old son lying on the floor in a pool of blood, a victim of a black football player’s rage. He said he was pressing charges.