The Blind Side (4 page)

But size alone couldn’t cope with the threat to the quarterback’s blind side, because that threat was also fast. The ideal left tackle also had great feet. Incredibly nimble and quick feet. Quick enough feet, ideally, that the idea of racing him in a five-yard dash made the team’s running backs uneasy. He had the body control of a ballerina and the agility of a basketball player. The combination was just incredibly rare. And so, ultimately, very expensive.

The price of protecting quarterbacks was driven by the same forces that drove the price of other kinds of insurance: it rose with the value of the asset insured, with the risk posed to that asset. Quarterbacks had become wildly expensive. Even the rookie quarterback contracts now included huge guarantees. The San Francisco 49ers had agreed to pay Alex Smith $56 million over seven years; and if his career ended tomorrow, they’d still owe him $24 million. The New York Giants were paying their young quarterback, Eli Manning, $54 million for his first seven years of service; if an injury ended his career, they were still on the line for $20 million. The highest paid NFL quarterback, Eli’s brother, Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts, had a seven-year contract worth $99.2 million. Several others made nearly $10 million a year. The money wasn’t all guaranteed, but a career-ending injury still cost an NFL franchise millions of dollars—if Peyton Manning suffered a career-ending injury, the Colts were out of pocket about half of their entire 2005 payroll. And those lost dollars would be but a fraction of the Colts’ misery; there would also be the cost of playing without their star quarterback. When a star running back or wide receiver is injured, the coaches worry about their game plans. When a star quarterback gets hurt, the coaches worry about their jobs.

Their anxiety came to be reflected in the pay of left tackles. By the 2004 NFL season, the average NFL left tackle salary was $5.5 million a year, and the left tackle had become the second highest paid position on the field, after the quarterback. In Super Bowl XL, played on February 5,2006, the highest paid player on the field was Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck—who had just signed a new six-year deal worth $8.2 million a year. The second highest paid player on the field was the man who protected Hasselbeck’s blind side, left tackle Walter Jones, who made $7.5 million a year. (The closest Steeler trailed by $1.9 million.)

The other force that drove the price of quarterback insurance was the supply of human beings who could plausibly provide it. There weren’t many people on the planet, and only a few in the NFL, with Walter Jones’s combination of size, speed, agility, hands, feet, and arms. Jonathan Ogden, Orlando Pace, maybe Chris Samuels of the Redskins. They were the prototypes. And it was these men—Walter Jones, and the few NFL left tackles of his caliber—that Tom Lemming had in mind when he arrived in Memphis in March of 2004 and went looking for Michael Oher.

EVEN MORE THAN USUAL, Lemming needed to see this kid. It just smelled fishy: there was no way an American high school player in 2004 with this kind of talent could be such a mystery. Film occasionally deceived: maybe he wasn’t as big as he looked. Maybe there was something seriously defective about his character. Football was a team game; there was a limit to the pathological behavior it would tolerate, especially in a high school player. “Baseball can tolerate a Barry Bonds,” said Lemming. “In football you never do anything alone. Even though you’re Joe Montana you still need Jerry Rice, and the nine other guys on offense, if you’re going to be any good. That’s why [NFL receiver] Terrell Owens got himself in so much trouble. He thought he was bigger than the game. And no one player is bigger than the game.”

Lemming had seen hundreds of NFL-caliber players with social problems come to inglorious ends. In 1995, Lemming picked as a first team high school All-American a sensational defensive end from Louisiana named Eric Jefferson. Jefferson signed to play football for the University of Illinois, and Lemming and a lot of other people couldn’t see him as anything but a future NFL star. Before he played a down of college ball he pled guilty to armed robbery and is now serving a five-year sentence in California state prison. In 1996, a Chicago kid named Michael Burden had been easily the nation’s most promising defensive back (“a future NFL star without a doubt”) when he was charged with rape. Ohio State still took him, and he even played a year—then got into trouble at school and vanished without a trace. In 1997, a defensive lineman named Boo Boo Williams had been the most likely future NFL player in the nation. “He was the next Reggie White,” said Lemming, referring to the Hall of Fame pass rusher for the Green Bay Packers. As a junior in high school, Boo Boo was six five, 265 pounds, ran a 4.7 40, and bench-pressed 375 pounds, despite never lifting weights. He’d not merely won the heavyweight state wrestling champion; he had picked up the runner-up, a 220-pound star running back, and lifted him straight over his head, then tossed him to the ground. Boo Boo Williams was the most promising player in a graduating class that included all kinds of future NFL stars. But Boo Boo’s grades were so bad that he was required to sit out of college ball not just one but two years. And then Boo Boo, too, vanished: poof.

And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside the game: aggressive people. Lemming was wary of kids with bad grades, criminal records, or anything else that suggested they’d never get to college, much less through it. To play in the NFL for money it was practically necessary to play three years in college for free. It was true, as Lemming put it, that “there are some colleges that would take Charles Manson if he could run a four-four forty and get his work release.” Their existence didn’t prevent the premature end of a shocking number of potentially lucrative careers.

After he’d seen Michael Oher’s tape, Lemming tried to reach the kid by phone. He found out that his surname was pronounced “Oar,” but that’s about all he learned. He was accustomed to the social lives of high school football stars: the handlers, the harems, the informal advisers, the coaches. The kids Lemming sought to meet were not, typically, hard to find. This kid not only had no handlers, he didn’t appear to exist outside of school. He had no home; he didn’t even have a phone number. Or so said the Briarcrest Christian School when Lemming called looking for Michael Oher. They had been mystified by Lemming’s interest in their student, but they were also polite, and finally agreed to have someone drive Michael Oher over to the University of Memphis football facility for a face-to-face interview. “I’ll never forget when he walked into the room,” says Lemming. “He looked like a house walking into a bigger house. He walked in the door and he barely fit through the door.” He wasn’t just huge, he was huge in exactly the right ways. “There’s the big blob three-hundred-pounder, and there’s the solid kind,” said Lemming. “He was the solid kind. You also see big guys, tall guys who weigh a lot, but they have thin legs. They’re fine in high school, but in college they’ll get pushed around. He was just massive everywhere.”

What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming’s twenty-seven-year football scouting career. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him…and refused to speak. “He shook my hand and then didn’t say a word,” said Lemming. (“His hands: they were huge!”) Lemming asked him the usual questions.

“What colleges are you interested in?”

“What do you want to major in?”

“Where do you think you’ll be in ten years?”

They were met with total silence. Not knowing what else to do, Lemming handed the kid his questionnaire. Michael Oher looked at it and put it to one side. Lemming then handed him the ultimate prize: the form to play in the U.S. Army high school all-star football game. Michael Oher looked at it and put it, too, to one side. (“I noticed his arms were really long.”)

“You want to fill it out or not?” asked Lemming, finally.

Michael Oher just shrugged.

In hopes of generating some kind of response, Lemming asked what he assumed was a simple question: “So, you want to play in the Army game or not?” It was the equivalent of asking a four-year-old if he’d like a lifetime supply of ice cream. But Michael Oher didn’t say yes or no. “He made some sound of total indifference,” said Lemming. “First guy ever to say that. First and last.”

Lemming decided further interaction was pointless. Michael Oher left, and left behind blank forms and unanswered questions. In the past twenty-six years Lemming had interviewed between forty and fifty thousand high school football players. Never—not once—had a player simply refused to talk to him, or declined to fill in his forms. They begged to answer his questions and fill in his forms. Once, a player had had the audacity to delegate the form-filling to a coach and it had left a bad taste in Lemming’s mouth. That incident had occurred in this very room, in Memphis, Tennessee. The player was named Albert Means. Albert Means’s sure-thing career had gone up in smoke after the NCAA discovered a University of Alabama booster had paid his high school coaches one hundred fifty grand to guide him to Alabama. (And the Crimson Tide spent the next two seasons on probation.)

Lemming didn’t exactly write off Michael Oher, but he put him to one side with a mental asterisk beside his name. “I thought he was trouble,” he said. “It’s not only size and strength and speed and athletic ability in football. Football’s an emotional game. It’s about aggression, tenacity, and heart. I didn’t have any idea what was in his heart. I got no sense of anything about him.” If Lemming picked twenty high school All-Americans, he expected ten of them to fulfill their potential. The other ten would be lost to injury or crime or bad grades or drugs. The sponsors of the U.S. Army All-American game worried a great deal about their good name. Every year there was a player or two they declined to invite because they didn’t want dope in their rooms, or criminal records on their rosters, or even boorish behavior. Michael Oher fell into that category, Lemming decided, a character risk. Still, he couldn’t deny his talent. “I didn’t hold a grudge,” said Lemming. “He wasn’t rude to me. And I try to go with the best players. I thought he could be the best offensive lineman to come out of the South in the last five years. He was an instant All-American. I saw him as a number one NFL draft choice. Playing left tackle.” But there was no way he’d invite Michael Oher to play in the U.S. Army All-American game.

What never crossed Tom Lemming’s mind was that the player he would rank the number one offensive lineman in the nation, and perhaps the finest left tackle prospect since Orlando Pace, hadn’t the faintest idea who Lemming was or why he was asking him all these questions. For that matter, he didn’t even think of himself as a football player. And he’d never played left tackle in his life.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER THREE

The Blind Side

CROSSING THE LINE

WHEN BIG TONY put the two boys in his car on the west side of Memphis and drove them out, he was taking the longest journey he could imagine, and yet he only had to travel about fifteen miles. Driving east, he left the third poorest zip code in the United States and headed toward some of the richest people on earth. He left a neighborhood in which he could drive all day without laying eyes on a white person for one where a black person was a bit of a curiosity. Memphis could make you wonder why anyone ever bothered to create laws segregating the races. More than a million people making many millions of individual choices generated an outcome not so different from a law forbidding black people and white people from mingling.

As Big Tony puttered along in his ancient Ford Taurus, he passed what was left of Hurt Village, a barracks-style housing project built for white working-class families in the mid-1950s, reoccupied by blacks, and, in the end, controlled by gangs: Hurt Village was where Big Tony had grown up. He passed schools that had once been all white and were now all black. He passed people, like himself, in old clothes driving old cars. He passed Second Presbyterian Church, from which Martin Luther King Jr. staged his last march before he was shot and killed—now abandoned and boarded shut. Further east, he passed the relatively prosperous black church, Mississippi Boulevard, housed in a building abandoned by the white Baptists when they fled further east to a new church so huge and sprawling that it had been dubbed Six Flags Over Jesus. Even God, in the west end of Memphis, felt like a hand-me-down. As Big Tony drove east he left what was, in effect, a secondhand city occupied by black people and entered the place for which it had been exchanged: a brand-new city, created by Born Again white people. And now here came Big Tony, chugging along in his beat-to-hell Taurus, chasing after them.

Everyone called him Big Tony—his actual name was Tony Henderson—because he stood six three and weighed nearly 400 pounds. It was in Big Tony’s nature to cross lines, if for no other reason than when he looked down he couldn’t see them. But today he had a motive: his mother had died. And her dying wish had been for him to go east. Big Tony’s mother’s name was Betty, but she went by “Betty Boo.” Right up until Big Tony reached the sixth grade, Betty Boo had been the party girl of Hurt Village. She smoked, she drank, she ran around; then suddenly, in 1973, she gave up alcohol, then her three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, then sin itself. She announced she had been saved, and accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior—and spent most of the next twenty-five years mailing pamphlets and pressing Christian literature and videos into people’s hands. She wasn’t tedious about it, though, and all the kids in Hurt Village called her “Grandma.” Her first real grandson was Tony’s son, Steven. As Betty Boo lay dying, in the early summer of 2002, she asked Tony for one thing: that he take Steven out of public school and get him a Christian education. She wanted her grandson to become a preacher.