The Blind Side (41 page)

“I wouldn’t say that’s a done deal.”

“Michael is going to be a first-round draft choice in the NFL, so he’ll be really rich.”

“Uh huh,” she said. “So?”

“So” asked Sean Junior, “why are they even in the will?”

“Because,” said Leigh Anne. “That’s just the way it’s done.”

THE TUOHY MOST directly responsible for the transformation of Michael Oher, Leigh Anne had the most trouble ignoring his implications. “Look at him,” she would say, whenever Michael stood more than about ten feet away. “He has everything: integrity, ambition, and a future.” Then she’d think a moment, with the critical detachment of a sculptor whose work was nearly, but not quite, finished. “The only thing he needs now is to learn to give.”

Then she’d think again. Michael might be, very nearly, a finished product. He didn’t need her time and attention—but that only raised an obvious question: who did? The inner city of Memphis alone teemed with kids whose athletic ability had market value. Very few ever reached their market. As Michael himself said, “If all the guys who could play got a chance to play, there would have to be two NFLs because one wouldn’t be enough.” Sports was the closest thing in America to pure meritocracy, the one avenue of ambition widely thought to be open to all. (Pity the kid inside Hurt Village who was born to play the piano, or manage people, or trade bonds.) And Michael Oher was in possession of what had to be among the more conspicuous athletic gifts. Apart from the seven foot tall basketball player, the six five, 350-pound kid who could fly had to be about the easiest future star to identify. And yet, without outside intervention even his talent would quite likely have been thrown away. Michael Oher would have become just another big fat man: Big Mike. If Michael Oher’s talent could be missed—whose couldn’t? Those poor black kids were like left tackles: people whose value was hidden in plain sight.

Leigh Anne thought about this, a lot. And one morning in early 2006 Sean was interrupted from lifting himself out of bed by his wife, who was brandishing the sports section of the morning paper. The Memphis Commercial Appeal had reported the story of a young man named Arthur Sallis. Sallis had been the star fullback on Memphis’s East High team, which had been state champions in 1999 and runners-up in 2000. He’d averaged, incredibly, more than 10 yards a carry. “When I’m dreaming,” he once told a reporter, “I’m suiting up and going on the field. It’s like there’s no stopping me. It’s like I can’t go down.” Before Sallis’s senior year, his high school coach Wayne Randall received phone calls from every head coach in the SEC. The Kentucky coach, Hal Mumme, told Randall that Sallis was one of the finest football players he had ever seen.

Sallis had been offered scholarships by the University of Kentucky and Ole Miss, but he never took them. High school proved to be the end of Arthur Sallis’s football career. His grades were poor, and he was disqualified by NCAA rules. Prevented by the NCAA from going to college on a football scholarship Sallis had stayed home, in his old neighborhood, on the west side of Memphis.

In this Arthur Sallis was only typical. As it happened, East High—Sallis’s public school—had been part of a study made of Memphis inner-city athletes. The study revealed that, for every six public school kids with the ability to play college sports, five failed to qualify academically. What was unusual about Arthur Sallis was the persistence of his desire to make something of his life, in spite of the odds against him. He never knew his father, and his mother was an alcoholic in and out of jail. “From the time he was a little boy Arthur lived by himself, out on the streets,” said Coach Randall. In high school he’d gotten into all kinds of trouble, but most of it was driven by his need to get money to live. “I used to joke,” said Randall, “that Arthur was the only football player I ever had who I had to keep a lawyer on retainer for.”

But after high school, with his football coach’s help, Arthur Sallis had gone straight. He eked out a living with his own carpet cleaning business. He’d fathered a baby girl, and was raising her by himself. “He was doing all the things a responsible person should be doing,” said his former coach. Then, a few months after Arthur Sallis left high school, he caught two men stealing a car and tried to stop them. For his trouble he got himself shot, point-blank, once in the back and once in the chest. He very nearly died. When his old high school coach visited him in the hospital Sallis told him, “If God gets me out of this, Coach, I’m never going to be out on the street again.”

He had been true to his word. The newspaper Leigh Anne dropped in Sean’s lap told the story of what happened next. Arthur Sallis wasn’t on the streets, but at home with his four-year-old daughter, when three men broke in. Sallis grabbed one, and another shot him three times in the head. Arthur Sallis could have been a teammate of Michael Oher’s at Ole Miss. Instead, at the age of twenty-two, he was dead.

Sean was only just waking up, and yet his wife was pacing back and forth in front of him, angry and upset. She was crying but she was also pissed off, and that, in his experience, was a dangerous combination. “Do you realize that you could take this kid’s name out and put Michael’s name in and have the same story?” she said. “Why didn’t this kid fall on our doorstep?”

Then and there Leigh Anne made a decision: she wasn’t finished. “I want a building,” she said. “We’re going to open a foundation that’s only going to help out kids with athletic ability who don’t have the academics to go to college. Screw the NCAA. I don’t care what people say. I don’t care if they say we’re only interested in them because they’re good at sports. Sports is all we know about. And there are hundreds of kids in Memphis alone with this story.”

Sean was now fully alert. Hundreds of kids. A building. His personal finances were always a bit more uncertain than he let on, even to his wife. Sean’s way of life depended on his ability to hide his fears and anxieties. Everything was always good and if it wasn’t, he could fix it. He conveyed the impression so well that people naturally handed him things to fix; and people who were broken drifted to him, in hopes of being fixed. His own success and well-being were taken as given, but they weren’t. Four years ago Taco Bell had been in a down cycle, and he’d teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. In the nick of time, Taco Bell made some changes in its menus and its sales had boomed. (“The quesadilla saved my ass,” he explained.) But his fast-food stores were never a sure thing. “I’m not financially secure where I can sit back and do nothing,” he said. “But I like my chances.” On the other hand, if his wife was now going to attack single-handedly America’s most intractable social problem, he liked his chances a bit less.

Leigh Anne must have seen him thinking because she left him to get himself up and dressed, found her phone, and called Michael Oher. “Michael, you better get off your ass and get to work,” she said. “Because we got things we got to do with your money.”

It wasn’t clear to Michael what, if anything, he owed the world. He now received lots of phone calls from poor black friends and family, and all of them wanted money. His mother called him a lot more than she used to, and it bothered him enough that he often didn’t return her calls. “People don’t understand that I made the newspaper but nothing comes with that,” he said. “I haven’t made a dollar yet.” Not long after college coaches informed him that he had a future in the NFL, Michael informed Leigh Anne that, if he indeed made it to the NFL, he intended to buy a house with thirteen bedrooms so that his mother and siblings would be guaranteed shelter. Now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to do that. “They had the same chances I had,” he said. “They need to get off their lazy asses and work. They need to start hearing ‘no.’”

People are no better at seeing the various paths their lives might have taken than football fans are at seeing the many different things that might have happened on any single play. People note outcomes, and reason backward from them. Michael noted his outcome and concluded that his life was always going to work out. He refused to believe there was ever the faintest possibility that he was going to be anything other than a huge success. He had set out to become Michael Jordan and he was fulfilling that destiny, in his way. “I was always going to college,” he said. “I guess I thought that if things didn’t work out in the NBA, I’d have the NFL as my backup.” If he didn’t give a lot of credit to others for having changed his life—if he didn’t feel that he owed much to many—it was, in part, because he didn’t really believe he had changed. “I’m the same way I’ve always been,” he said. “I’m exactly the same guy I was back in Hurt Village. The only thing that’s changed for me is the environment.”

The change in environment was no small thing, and it took the help of many people—Big Tony, the Briarcrest teachers, the families that had housed him—for him to function in the new environment. Still, when Michael thought about who he wanted to help, if he had the power to help, the only person he could think of was Craig.

In his first year and a half at the Briarcrest Christian School, Michael hadn’t seen as much of Craig as he would have liked. Craig lived back on the west side of Memphis and that suddenly seemed a long way away. But the moment Michael had gotten his driver’s license he knew what he wanted to do with it. When he and Leigh Anne arrived home from the DMV, Michael asked Leigh Anne if he could drive back to western Memphis and bring back an old friend. For nearly a year Leigh Anne had been pressing him to bring home his old friends, but he’d never done it. Off he drove and soon returned with this shy, quiet, sweet-natured boy whom Michael introduced as “Craig.” This was the one friend Michael had told them about—his one close friend in the world—in whose existence Leigh Anne had ceased to believe. She had come to think of Craig, like Harvey the rabbit, as an imaginary friend. Now Harvey stood uncomfortably in her foyer. “I never been this far from home,” Craig said.

Michael claimed that Craig was the one person in the world he fully trusted, and so Craig became a regular visitor to the Tuohy home. For his part Craig was perplexed: his friend leaves the ’hood to go to a new school and the next thing he knows he’s not merely shacked up with these rich white people on the other side of Memphis but claiming they are his family. “Big Mike call me one day and I ask him what he’s doing,” said Craig. “He say, ‘I’m just driving to get something to eat with my brother.’ I ask him, ‘Which brother is that?’ He say, ‘My brother, Sean Junior.’ I say, ‘Who?’”

Now Michael said, “If I ever make it to the NFL Craig has to come. We got so close ’cause he just like me. We the same people, just different size.” Craig didn’t have any more money than anyone else from his former life. And while Craig was his only real friend, Craig had never asked him for a thing. “I offer him something, he says, ‘I’m good, I’m all right.’” That was one of the traits he admired most in Craig: he didn’t go around acting like some victim. He had his pride.

At any rate he and Craig now spent more time together. One night Michael took him to see the Memphis Grizzlies play. They were making their way toward Sean’s courtside seats when Craig noticed that a lot of people were staring at them and pointing. “They were all saying, ‘That’s Michael Oher! That’s Michael Oher!’” Craig already knew that people in poor black Memphis assumed that Michael Oher was going to the league. “They all talk about him,” he said. “Nobody call him Big Mike anymore. They just call him Michael Oher.” Now he saw that Michael’s fame had spread beyond poor black Memphis, to courtside at the Memphis Grizzlies game, and realized: “Everyone in Memphis know who Michael Oher is!”

As they found their seats, Craig asked Michael if he noticed the many people pointing and staring at him. Michael smiled and Craig could tell that he not only noticed but loved it. “What if you don’t make it to the NFL?” was the question Craig wanted to ask next, but he didn’t. Instead he asked, “When you think you be ready for the league?” At that Michael laughed and said, “I’m ready now.”

Craig laughed. The world might have changed, but his friend had not. “He’s the same guy,” Craig said. “Everyone say Michael got cocky. What they don’t know is that he was always cocky. He just didn’t show it.”

Still, Craig thought Michael must be joking. He wasn’t.

“I could take Dwight Freeney right now,” said Michael, seriously.

Dwight Freeney played for the Indianapolis Colts. He was the most feared pass rushing defensive end in the NFL, and maybe the fastest the NFL had ever seen. He’d arrived in the NFL in 2002 with his 4.3 forty-yard dash and his wild spin moves, and quickly figured out where he needed to be: the blind side. Two seasons later he rocked the order of the football universe when he went by Jonathan Ogden and sacked the Ravens’ quarterback not once but twice. No one went by Jonathan Ogden—but Freeney had.

Freeney understood he was a man working in a tradition. When he was eight years old he’d seen a highlight film of Lawrence Taylor and right then and there knew who he was going to be when he grew up. “If you ask me to list my favorite players, I’d tell you LT and there’d be nobody second,” he said. “There’d just be LT.” Freeney took it for granted his job was to defeat the superstar of the offensive line. Best on best. That was his great strength: finding ways to win the most important one-on-one contest on the football field. And so when he heard that there was this kid down in Memphis who thought he was on his way to the league and said he “could take Dwight Freeney right now,” he just laughed and said, “That’s the way he’s got to be.” But he was curious enough to ask, “Who is this kid?”

Dwight Freeney stood outside the Colts’ locker room, sweating in his pads, helmet in his hand, and listened patiently to a summary of the brief career of Michael Oher. How Michael had been one of thirteen children born to a mother who couldn’t care for them, and so had more or less raised himself on the streets of Memphis. How he hadn’t reported to serious football practice until his junior year in high school—but by then was six five, 350 pounds, and had been timed running the forty-yard dash in 4.9 seconds. How his forty-yard dash time didn’t really capture his speed: to appreciate his quickness you needed to watch him in short bursts. How he’d been one of the best basketball players in the state of Tennessee, and held his own on the court with high school All-Americans, and still secretly believed his natural position was shooting guard. How, on the brink of adulthood, with a measured IQ of 80, no formal education and no experience of white people, he had so insinuated himself into rich white Memphis that white people no longer noticed the color of his skin. How he was now six six and 325 pounds and the starting left tackle at Ole Miss, and a fair bet to be named to the All-SEC team at the end of next season. How, fast and strong as he had been at 350 pounds, he was faster and stronger now. How every day he felt a little bit less a lost boy and a little bit more a man with a mission.