The Blind Side (8 page)

He didn’t, but he didn’t explain.

This wouldn’t do. Leigh Anne Tuohy was an extreme, and seemingly combustible, mixture of tenderness and willfulness. She cried when a goldfish died. On her daily walks, when she spotted an earthworm sizzling on the sidewalk, she picked it up and put it back on the grass. On the other hand, when a large drunk man pushed and cut his way in front of her in a line outside a football game, she grabbed him by the arm and screamed, “You just get your fat ass right back where it belongs. Now!” When she did things like this, her husband would shrug and say, “You have to understand that my wife has a heart the size of a pea. If you cross her, she will step on your throat and take you out and she won’t feel a thing.” Sean had decided, no matter what the potential gains, it was never worth provoking his wife.

And this child’s reluctance to answer her questions had provoked her. “We’re gonna keep talking about this,” she said. “We can do this the easy way. Or we can do it the hard way. Take your pick.”

That worked, sort of. She learned that he’d not laid eyes on his father in many years. He never had much to do with his grandmother, who was now gone. He had a sister but didn’t know where she was. His mother was, Leigh Anne surmised, an alcoholic. “But he never actually used the word ‘alcoholic.’ He let me say it and never corrected me. I didn’t know then, but Michael will let you believe what you want to believe.” After torturing him for a bit, she decided to leave him be. She’d had too much success getting what she wanted to pay much attention to temporary setbacks: it was only a matter of time before he’d tell her everything. “I knew that 103.5 FM was kind of a black station so I had that playing,” she said. “I didn’t want him thinking this was some charity thing and ‘oh poor, pitiful me.’ So I said that the Briarcrest basketball team needed its players looking spiffy and we were just going out to make sure that happened.”

If it were up to her, she would have driven him straight to Brooks Brothers or Ralph Lauren, but she realized it might make him feel uncomfortable.

“No offense, but where do you go to buy clothes?” she asked.

He mentioned a place—it was in a less affluent section of Memphis. Not the safest neighborhood. She set off in that direction, heading west.

“You okay going there?” he asked.

“I’m okay going there with you. You’re going to take care of me, right?”

“Right,” he said. She sensed a little shift in him. Sooner or later she’d break him. “I can talk to a wall,” she liked to say.

For the next couple of hours that’s just what she did. She was facing a new problem: trying to guess, from his body language, what a sixteen-year-old black child of the ghetto might wear to his new white Christian school. They arrived at the first of many Big and Tall shops and ran smack into another problem: nothing fit him! He wasn’t big or tall. He was big and tall. The selection of clothing into which he could painlessly squeeze himself was limited, and he reduced it by refusing to wear anything that wasn’t loose-fitting. For twenty minutes or so she pulled the biggest articles of clothing she could find off shelves and racks, without a comment from the boy.

“Michael!” she finally said. “You got to tell me if you like it or not. I cannot read your mind. Or we’ll be here till Christmas, with me trying to guess what you like.”

She pulled down the absolute biggest shirt she could find.

“I think that’s okay,” he said, at length. For him it counted as a soliloquy.

“No! Not okay! You need to love it! If you don’t love it in the store, you’ll never wear it once you get it home. The store is where you like it best.”

She pulled down a gargantuan brown and yellow Rugby shirt.

“I like that one,” he said.

She was five one, 115 pounds of blond hair, straight white teeth, and the most perfect pink dress. He was black, poor, and three times her size. Everyone—everyone—stared at them. And as they moved from shop to shop, the surroundings, and the attention, became more discomforting. At the final Big and Tall Shop on the border of what had just been pronounced, by the 2000 United States Census, the third poorest zip code in the country, Leigh Anne said, “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never been to this neighborhood.” And Big Mike finally spoke up. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I got your back.”

Along the way she asked him more questions. “But of course they were the wrong questions,” she said later. She noticed little things about him, however, and in these were tiny clues. “I could tell he wasn’t used to being touched,” she said. “The first time I tried to touch him—he just freezes up.”

When they were finished shopping, he was heaped with packages and yet he insisted he wanted to take the bus home. (“I am not letting him ride the bus with all these bags!”) She drove him back—into what she assumed must be the worst neighborhood in Memphis. They stopped in at McDonald’s. He ordered for himself two quarter pounders with cheese. On a hunch she bought six extra burgers for him to take home with him. At length, they reached what he said was his mother’s house. It was an ominous dark redbrick building behind a tall metal gate. Across the street was an abandoned house. The scrub grass, the dead plants in pots, the flaking paint on the houses: everything, including the small children in the streets, looked uncared for. She parked and stepped out of the car, to help him with all the bags. That’s when he sprang into action:

“Don’t get out!” he said.

“I’ll just help you with the bags.”

“You don’t need to get out of the car,” he said.

He was so insistent that she stepped back inside the car and promised to stay put, with the doors locked, while he went in and found someone to help him with his packages. A few minutes later a line of small children streamed out of the front gates of the depressing apartment building and, antlike, lifted the sacks and carried them inside. When the last child had moved the last package, the gate closed behind him.

He hadn’t given her the first clue of what he thought of her, or of their strange afternoon together. “Probably,” she figured, “that I’m some nice lady who wanted something from him.” So when he thanked her, she made a point of saying, “Michael, it was my pleasure. You don’t owe me anything.” And that, she thought, was that.

It wasn’t, of course. He was different from the other children that she and Sean had helped out. For a start, he was obviously more destitute. And she couldn’t explain why just then, but she was drawn to him and felt the urge to do things for him. He was just this big ol’ kid who could have been mean and scary and thuggy, but everything about him was soft and gentle and sweet-natured. With him she felt completely safe; even if he wasn’t saying anything, she sensed he was watching out for her.

She went home and thought about the problem still at hand: how to clothe the biggest sixteen-year-old boy she had ever laid eyes on. She flipped through her Rolodex. Several of her interior decorating clients were professional athletes. All but one were basketball players, and all of them were tall and thin. The other was Patrick Ramsey, the Washington Redskins’ new starting quarterback. “I know how these athletes are about their clothes,” she said. “They’re very particular and they’re tossing them out and getting new ones all the time.” What more fertile source of extra-large hand-me-downs than the NFL? She called Ramsey, who said he was more than happy to dun his teammates for their old clothing. She gave him Michael’s measurements, and Patrick Ramsey took them down.

A few days later, he called back. “You’ve got these measurements wrong,” he said, matter-of-factly. She explained that she had taken the measurements herself, and written them down on a piece of paper. It must be Patrick who had them wrong. He read them back to her—20-inch neck, 40-inch sleeve, 50-inch waist, 58-inch chest, etc.—nope, he had them right.

“There’s no one on our team as big as he is,” Ramsey said.

She thought he was kidding.

“Leigh Anne,” said the Redskins quarterback, “we only have one player on this team who is even close, and he wears Wrangler blue jeans and flannel shirts and no black kid is going to be caught dead wearing that stuff.” That would be Jon Jansen, the Redskins’ starting right tackle.

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line.

“Who is this kid?”

The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER FOUR

The Blind Side

THE BLANK SLATE

EVERY ONE OF THE COACHES at Briarcrest can recall the moment they realized that Big Mike was not any ordinary giant. For Hugh Freeze the moment was a football practice at which this new boy, who had just been admitted on academic probation, had no business. He just wandered onto the field, picked up a huge tackling dummy—the thing weighed maybe fifty pounds—and took off with it, at high speed. “Did you see that!!!? Did you see the way that kid moved?” Hugh asked another coach. “He ran with that dummy like it weighed nothing.” Hugh’s next thought was that he had misjudged the boy’s mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. “That’s when I had them weigh him,” said Hugh. “One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.” The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later informed was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow, delightfully beefy for a high school sophomore football player. Especially one who could run. “I didn’t know whether he could play,” said Freeze. “But I knew this: we didn’t have anyone like him on campus.”

The basketball coach, John Harrington, had a similarly incidental encounter with Big Mike in action, inside the Briarcrest gym. Whenever a new kid he thought might play on his team showed up, Harrington tossed him a ball, unexpectedly, just to test his reactions and instincts. The first time Big Mike walked onto the Briarcrest court he was wearing his cutoff blue jeans and grubby sneakers. Harrington tossed him a ball anyway, just to see. Instead of taking it to the rim, or kicking it into the stands, as you might expect a boy his size to do, he caught it and swirled. He dribbled three times between his legs, spun, and, from the dead corner of the floor, nailed a three-point shot. “Walking into the gym he sort of became a different person,” said Harrington. “He was doing things a guard would do. Here’s this kid—what, six five and three hundred-something pounds, and he’s moving like he’s a hundred sixty-five pounds. My head’s spinning.”

Coach Boggess, the track coach, who doubled as the weightlifting instructor and tripled as an assistant football coach, had his own shocking encounter with the boy’s freakish physical gifts. It came on the Briarcrest football field. Big Mike wasn’t allowed to play, but every now and then he came out onto the field and played, in effect, by himself. One afternoon he took a sack of footballs out to midfield. Standing on the fifty-yard line he threw them, one by one, through the goalposts at the back of the end zone. As a rule, a good college quarterback’s range was 60 yards—from midfield to the line along the back of the end zone. Here was this kid, a sophomore in high school, shaped nothing like a quarterback, chucking the ball 70–75 yards. And making it look easy.

From the moment he’d laid eyes on Michael Oher, Coach Boggess thought he might invite him onto the track team as a shot putter. He was shaped like a shot putter, and also like the shot itself, round and heavy. It hadn’t occurred to Boggess to ask Big Mike to throw anything else until he saw him chucking these footballs and realized he was not merely huge and strong, but flexible and long-armed. There was elegance about him. High school track didn’t have the javelin. That was a pity, Boggess thought, as he watched the footballs rocket through the goalposts. Still, there was the discus. “I hadn’t thought of him throwing the discus,” said Boggess, “because with the discus it’s not how big you are, it’s the technique you use. The discus is not physiologically suited to the football lineman-type body, in the way the shot put is. Those bodies don’t have the grace to do it.”

Throwing a discus is more complicated than it appears. The discus thrower needs to separate his lower half from his upper half so that the lower half rotates faster than the upper and creates a torque effect. To achieve the proper spin on the discus requires the body control of an ice skater. None of the Briarcrest coaches was able to teach “spinning” by example, as none of them could do it themselves. When they had a kid who was ambitious enough to try it, they showed him instructional videos.

In Michael Oher’s case, the coaches’ ignorance hardly mattered. When the first track meet rolled around that first spring, he hadn’t spent a minute with the coaches. He was earning straight D’s in the classroom and spending five hours a day with tutors, in exchange for being allowed to finish up the basketball season on the Briarcrest team. When Coach Boggess led him out Briarcrest’s back door and onto the old grass field for that first meet, he sensed, rightly, that Michael Oher was witnessing track and field for the first time in his life. “He didn’t know what a discus was,” said Boggess. “He’d never seen one.” The track coach inserted Michael at the back of the queue of discus throwers from the other schools, and left him to give it a whirl. Michael, for his part, never said a word, or asked a question. “I just watched them a couple of times,” he said, much later, “and then I threw it.”