The Blind Side (6 page)

The disposition of Michael Oher’s application to Briarcrest was Steve Simpson’s decision, and normally he would have had no trouble making it: an emphatic, gusty rejection. Beneath the crest of the Briarcrest Christian School was the motto: Decidedly Academic, Distinctly Christian. Michael Oher was, it seemed to Simpson, neither. But Mr. Simpson was new to the school, and this great football coach, Hugh Freeze, had phoned Simpson’s boss, the school president, a football fan, and made his pitch: This wasn’t a thing you did for the Briarcrest football team, Freeze had said, this was a thing you did because it was right! Briarcrest was this kid’s last chance! The president in turn had phoned Simpson and told him that if he felt right with it, he could admit the boy.

Simpson thought it over and said: sorry. There was just no chance Michael Oher could cut it in the tenth grade; the fourth grade might be a stretch for him. But the pressure from the football coach, coupled with a little twinge inside his own heart, led Simpson to reject the applicant gently. “There was just something about the boy’s desire to be here,” he said. “I couldn’t justify sending him away without any hope.” He granted a single concession: if Michael Oher enrolled in a home study program based in Memphis called the Gateway Christian School, and performed at a high level for a semester, Briarcrest would admit him the following semester. Simpson knew there wasn’t much chance Gateway would pass him, and suspected he’d never hear from the football coach, or Michael Oher, again.

He was wrong. Two months later—six weeks into the school year—his phone rang. It was Big Tony. It was a sad sight, said Big Tony, watching Big Mike stare at these books sent to him by the Gateway Christian School, without any ability to make heads or tails of them. Big Tony didn’t have the time or the energy to work with him. Big Mike was trying so hard but getting nowhere, and it was too late for him to enroll in a public school. What should they do now?

That’s when Mr. Simpson realized he’d made a mistake. In effect, he had removed a boy from the public school system. He’d tried to handle this problem the easy way, for him, and it had backfired. “It was one of those things,” Simpson said. “I should have said, ‘You don’t qualify and there’s no chance you will ever qualify.’ When Big Tony called back, I thought, ‘Man, look what I’ve done to these people. I sent them out of here with false hope.’” He went to the Briarcrest president, Tim Hilen, and told him that he had made a big mess for these people. Then he called Michael Oher—who appeared still to be living with Big Tony—and said, “We’re gonna take a chance on you but you’re not going to play ball.” The message was delivered simultaneously to Hugh Freeze: no football, no basketball—the kid couldn’t even sing in the choir until he proved to the school that he could handle the schoolwork. Michael didn’t say much at all in response, but that didn’t matter to Mr. Simpson. “My conscience would be clear if we gave him a chance,” he said. His thoughts turned to the teachers: how would he explain this mess to them?

JENNIFER GRAVES HAD RUN Briarcrest’s program for students with special needs for nine years. “I decided early on in my life,” she said, “that Christ was calling me to work with the kids who did not have it so easy.” But her mission took on a different and less hopeful tone when, six weeks into the school year, this huge black kid was dumped in her lap. She, too, had seen the file on Big Mike that had come over from the Memphis City School system. After the transcript came the boy himself, accompanied by Mr. Simpson. “He said this is Michael Oher and you’ll be working with him,” recalled Graves. “And Michael didn’t say a thing. His head was always down. He kept his head down and his mouth shut.” And she thought: Oh Lord what have we gotten ourselves into? She knew the coaches thought that he might help their sports teams, but even that surprised her. “He was fat,” she said. “I didn’t see how he could move it around. We weren’t real sure what we’re going to do with him, and I’ll bet they weren’t either.” After Michael left her office, she went right back to Mr. Simpson to ask what good he imagined would come from letting this child into the Briarcrest Christian School. “He said, ‘Jennifer, let’s give him until Christmas.’”

She took him around and placed him in the middle of every classroom. “By sixth period of the first day everyone knew who he was,” she said. “And he hadn’t said a word.” It was a matter of days before the reports poured in from the teachers, every last one of them asking the same question of her that she asked of Mr. Simpson: why had they let this kid in? “Big Mike had no conception of what real school was about,” she said. “He’d never have his books with him, didn’t speak in class, nothing. He had no academic background, no foundation at all. His transcript said he’d had algebra but he’d obviously never laid eyes on it.” Another shocking discovery: “I don’t know that he’d ever even held a Bible.”

At length, in response to an especially loud complaint from the English teacher, Graves brought Big Mike into her office. She pulled out a remedial English test, and gave it to him. “The first thing he was supposed to do,” she recalled, “was to identify parts of speech. He says, ‘What do I do?’ And I say, ‘You mark all the parts of speech.’ He says, ‘I don’t know ’em.’ So I say, ‘Let’s start out with nouns.’ He says, ‘I don’t know ’em.’ I tell him that ‘a noun names a person, place, or thing.’ He says, ‘It does?’ For him English was almost like a second language.”

She noticed things about him. She noticed, for instance, that he wore the same pair of cutoff jeans every day, and that he hadn’t the first idea how to interact with other people. Everyone in the school knew who he was—he was the biggest human being anyone had ever seen—and they tried to engage him, but he refused to comply. One day while she was sitting with Michael, sorting out some mess or other, her own little girls, aged six and nine, came into her office. “And they just stood there with their mouths open. They’d never seen anyone who looked like that. But then Big Mike left and my six-year-old asked, ‘Mama, who was that?’ And I told her it was Big Mike.” The next few days the little girl went out of her way to find Big Mike in the school halls, just to say, “Hi, Big Mike!” And Big Mike just stared at her. The little girl came back to her mother, obviously frightened, and said, “Mama, he doesn’t speak to me!” Graves called Big Mike into her office and explained that if he wanted to stare at the ground mutely in her presence, that was fine. “But when a little child tells you hello and you don’t respond, you scare that little child.” A few days later Graves caught sight of Big Mike in the hallways, smiling and shaking hands with a crowd of small, awed children.

Still, Michael Oher was only a few weeks into his tenure at the Briarcrest Christian School before several teachers suggested he should be on his way out. He wasn’t merely failing tests, he wasn’t even starting them. The only honest grade to give him in his academic subjects was zero. And it wasn’t just the academic subjects. Briarcrest offered a class in weightlifting, and Jennifer Graves had gotten him into it on the assumption it might offer him some relief from relentless failure. If there was one class Big Mike should have been able to ace, this was it. But the weightlifting teacher, Coach Mark Boggess, said that the boy was neglecting even to change into gym clothes. He just sat around, lifting not even his eyes. Boggess doubled as the Briarcrest track coach, and already had made vague plans for Big Mike to put the shot for his team, once he became academically eligible. The third time he watched Michael sit through class in street clothes—not even bothering to change into his sweats—he doubted that would ever happen, and he jumped on him. “Michael, there are a lot of people in this school waiting to see you fail,” he said. “Every little step that you make, people are watching. This is the one class in this whole school that can help you with your grades. All you have to do is show up. And right now, you’re flunking weightlifting.”

The situation appeared hopeless, and humiliating for all concerned. Word of the new boy’s various failures inevitably reached Mr. Simpson, who also began to sense the dimensions of the void in the boy’s life experiences. Michael Oher didn’t know what an ocean was, or a bird’s nest, or the tooth fairy. He couldn’t very well be taught tenth-grade biology if he had no clue what was meant by the word “cell,” and he couldn’t very well get through tenth-grade English if he’d never heard of a verb or a noun. It was as if he had materialized on the planet as an overgrown sixteen-year-old. Jennifer Graves had the same misgivings: the boy reminded her of a story she had read in a psychology journal, about a child who had been locked away inside a closet for years. “That child didn’t even have tactile sense,” she said, “but it felt like the same sort of thing. Big Mike was a blank slate.” The obvious problem, that he suffered from some learning disability, had been ruled out. Graves had called the Memphis school system and been told that Michael Oher had been tested for learning disabilities, and he had none. In short, they said, he was just stupid. “By their standards,” she said, “he was achieving what was expected.”

It was then that the Briarcrest biology teacher, Marilyn Beasley, came to Graves in despair. She said that giving Michael yet another weekly biology test was pointless: nothing came back. “We’ve got to find out what he does and doesn’t know,” she said. She proposed that Graves replace her in the biology class, and proctor the exam while she, Beasley, took Michael into a separate room and gave him the test verbally. The next day, Ms. Beasley took him into a room and sat down beside him, test in hand. By now she, like the other teachers, knew about his academic record. She had taught at Briarcrest for twenty-one years—and had entire classrooms of children with learning disabilities—and had never experienced a student so seemingly hopeless. “I had never encountered anybody at Michael’s reading and comprehension level,” she said. His brain did not appear to contain any sort of intellect.

As they sat down together she noticed, once again, how enormous his hands seemed when set beside hers. She had a son who was six one, but compared to Big Mike, his hands were the hands of a child. She picked up the test and read aloud the first question from the multiple choice exam:

Protozoans are classified based on:

a. How they get their foodb. How they reproducec. How they moved. Both a and c

She waited for his answer and received nothing but a blank look. She knew the problem: many of the words, words every tenth-grader should know, were foreign to him. “Classified” overwhelmed him. “Science has its own vocabulary,” she said. “He didn’t know it. He didn’t know what a cell was, or an atom. He didn’t have the foundation to figure out meanings through prefixes and suffixes. He didn’t know what the prefixes and suffixes were—they might as well have been Greek.” The vast quantity of things he didn’t know paralyzed his mind. A word at a time, she talked him through the problem.

“Michael, do you remember what a protozoan is?”

Just down the hall Jennifer Graves waited for what she assumed would be bad news. She was already wondering about the best way to ease Big Mike out of the school. An hour later Marilyn Beasley emerged with wonder on her face and a simple observation:

“He knows it.”

“What?”

“Jennifer, he knows the material!”

Or, at any rate, he knew something. As he had given no sign of picking up anything, Beasley was shocked at how much he had absorbed. His brain wasn’t dead; he simply had no idea how to learn in a classroom. Even so, he knew enough biology to get himself a C on the test, and a high D for the semester instead of an F. He wasn’t yet eligible to play any sports, but Graves could see that he longed to. He’d missed the football season, but it was basketball he was most eager to play. She hinted that if the biology test was any indication of the contents of his mind, he might well be eligible to play ball after Christmas, and catch the last part of the season. “The first thing he did,” she said, “was start hanging around the basketball court.”

WHEN SEAN TUOHY first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym, staring at basketball practice, he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.

Sean was an American success story: he had come from nothing and made himself rich. He was forty-three years old. His hairline had receded but not quite to the point where you could call him bald and his stomach had expanded but not quite to the point where you could call him fat. He was keenly interested in social status—his own, and other people’s—but not in the Old Southern kind. Not long after he’d become a figure in Memphis—a rich businessman who had his own jet and was the radio voice of the Memphis Grizzlies—he’d had feelers from the Memphis Country Club. He didn’t encourage them because, as he put it, “I don’t hang with the blues. I’d rather go to a high school football game on Friday night than go to a country club and drink four scotches and complain about my wife.” Sean Tuohy loved success. He delighted in the sight of people moving up in the world. Country clubs were all about staying in one place.

When he introduced himself to Big Mike, Sean was already knee-deep in the various problems and crises of the few black students at Briarcrest. Sean’s daughter, Collins, a junior at Briarcrest and Tennessee State champion in the pole vault, had guaranteed him almost constant exposure to them. She ran track, they ran track. The first time Sean decided to play a role in their social education had been a couple of years earlier, when the track team traveled to Chattanooga for a meet. Coincidentally, also in Chattanooga, a Briarcrest tennis player was playing a tournament at the fancy local country club. Sean thought the black kids at Briarcrest might benefit from some exposure to tennis and golf and other white country club sports; and he thought the Briarcrest tennis player would enjoy a cheering section. Gathering up all two of the black kids on the track team—which amounted to two thirds of the blacks at Briarcrest—he drove them to the Chattanooga Country Club. Sure enough, it was, for them, an entirely new experience. Neither had ever seen a tennis match in person. And while they had no idea how to keep score, they quickly worked out that the Briarcrest kid was making mincemeat of his opponent. After each point they’d stand and holler and raise their fists: