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.
CHAPTER THREE
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.
Big Tony would have preferred Steven to become an NBA point guard. Still, he didn’t consider Betty Boo’s request unreasonable. Steven was one of the best students in his class, and always had been. There wasn’t any difficulty in Memphis finding a school that offered a Christian education: the nation’s largest private school system had sprung up in the mid-1970s, in East Memphis, to do just that. The problem was that Steven wasn’t the only child living in Tony’s small house. Occasionally, one of the boys from Hurt Village would crash on his floor; but a few months before, a boy came to stay the night and never left. His name was Michael Oher, but everyone just called him “Big Mike.” Tony liked Big Mike, but he also could see that Big Mike was heading at warp speed toward a bad end. He’d just finished the ninth grade at a public school, but Tony very much doubted he’d be returning for the tenth. He seldom attended classes, and showed no talent or interest in school. “Big Mike was going to drop out,” said Big Tony. “And if he dropped out, he’d be like all his friends who dropped out: dead, in jail, or on the street selling drugs, just waiting to be dead or in jail.”
Tony decided that as long as he was taking Steven out on this search for a Christian education, he should take Big Mike, too. Just a few days after he buried his mother, he put Steven and Big Mike in his car, and drove east. White Memphis had use for a great variety of Christian schools: Harding Christian Academy, which had been around forever; Christian Brothers, which was Catholic and all male; and the Evangelical Christian School, known as ECS. ECS was as close to a church as a school could get. ECS wouldn’t accept kids unless both parents gave testimony of their experience of being Born Again—and the stories better be good. Finally, and furthest east, was the Briarcrest Christian School. Briarcrest, also evangelical, was as far east as you could get and still be in Memphis. Briarcrest, more than the others, had been created to get away from Big Tony.
From the point of view of its creators, Briarcrest was a miracle. Its founder, Wayne Allen, had long been distressed by the absence of the Bible from public schools; the white outrage over busing was a chance to do something about it. In the year after the court decision—on January 24, 1973—that forced the city to deploy 1,000 buses to integrate the public schools, the parents of white children yanked more than 7,000 children out of those schools. From the ashes arose an entire, spanking new private school system. The Briarcrest Christian School—originally named the Briarcrest Baptist School—was by far the biggest. It was a system unto itself: fifteen different campuses, inside fifteen different Baptist churches. Its initial enrollment was just shy of 3,000 children, and every last one of them was white. By the summer of 2002 Briarcrest had a handful of black students, but these tended to be, like the black families in the fancy white neighborhoods, imports from elsewhere. The school had existed in East Memphis for nearly thirty years and yet no one who worked there could recall a poor black person from the west side of Memphis marching through its front door to enroll his child. Big Tony was the first.
All Tony knew about Briarcrest was that John Harrington was the basketball coach who had coached in the public schools, where Tony had met him. But any doubt that the Briarcrest Christian School served up the sort of education Betty Boo had in mind was allayed by the sight of the passage from the Book of Matthew inscribed on the outside of the main building: With men this is impossible; with God all things are possible. Two very lost-looking boys at his heels, Big Tony marched beneath it and inside the building and went hunting for the basketball coach.
JOHN HARRINGTON HAD SPENT two decades coaching in the public schools and was about to begin his first year at Briarcrest. When Big Tony walked into his office, unannounced, Harrington knew he couldn’t do anything for him. The problem presented by Big Tony was too large for the new guy. They chatted for a few minutes and then Harrington sent him over to see the senior coach at Briarcrest, Hugh Freeze. Freeze was only thirty-three, and with his white-blond hair and unlined face might have passed for even younger than he was—if he weren’t so shrewd. His shrewdness was right on the surface, so it had an innocent quality to it, but it was there just the same. Slow to speak and quick to notice, Hugh Freeze had the gifts of a machine politician. He was a man of God—if he hadn’t been a football coach, he said, he’d have liked to have been a preacher—but he was also, very obviously, adept at getting his way on earth without any help from the Almighty. He’d coached at Briarcrest for eight years, taken the boys’ football team to the Tennessee State Championship game five years in a row, and the girls’ basketball team to the last seven state championship games, where they had won four of them. This year his girls were ranked ninth in the nation. Freeze was at his desk preparing for the first day of the new school year when his secretary alerted him to the presence of someone who insisted on calling himself “Big Tony.”
In walks this 400-pound black man in a mechanic’s shirt with a little white name tag that says: Big Tony. This huge man introduces himself as Big Tony—again, no last name—and proceeds to tell Hugh about Steven. “He told me about his son, and how he wanted more for him than the school he was at,” said Freeze. “I told him how admirable that was but he had to understand that it cost a lot of money to go to Briarcrest, and not everyone got in. You had to have good grades. Big Tony said he knew about the cost and the grades; but Steven was an honor student and he was able to pay whatever the financial aid didn’t cover.” Freeze gave him the financial aid forms and thought: Good luck. That’s when Tony said, “And Coach, I’ve also got one of Steven’s friends.” He told him about Big Mike, a basketball player who, in Big Tony’s modest opinion, might also be of use to the Briarcrest football team.
“Where are his parents?” asked Freeze. He felt a twinge of interest. If a man who weighed 400 pounds was referring to someone else as “Big Mike,” he’d like to see the size of that someone else.
“It’s a bad deal, Coach,” said Tony. “No Dad, Mom’s in rehab. I’m pretty much all he has.”
“Who is the guardian?” asked Freeze. “Who has legal authority over him?”
“The mom.”
Big Tony said he could get Big Mike’s mom to fill in the forms, then just sat there, a bit uneasily. Finally, he asked, “You want to meet them?”
“The boys are here?”
“Right outside.”
“Sure,” said Freeze, “bring ’em on in.” Tony went out and came back with Steven. Hugh sized him up: almost six feet, and maybe as much as 180 pounds. Plenty big enough for the Briarcrest Christian School Saints football team. “But where’s the other one?” he asked.
“Big Mike! Come on in here!”
Hugh Freeze will never forget the next few seconds. “He just peeks around the corner, with his head down.” Hugh didn’t get a good first look—it was just a sliver of him but it suggested an improbably large whole. Then Michael Oher stepped around the corner and into his office.
Good God! He’s a monster!
The phrase shrieked inside Hugh’s brain. He’d never seen anything remotely like this kid—and he’d coached against players who had gone to the NFL. When football coaches describe their bigger players, they can sound like ranchers discussing a steer. They use words like “girth” and “mass” and “trunk size.” Hugh wasn’t exactly sure of the exact dimensions of Big Mike—six five, 330 pounds? Maybe. Whatever the dimensions, they couldn’t do justice to the effect they created. That mass! That…girth! The kid’s shoulders and ass were as wide as his doorway. And he’d only just turned sixteen.
“How can I get their transcri
pts?” asked Hugh.
Big Tony said he’d go get them and bring them in person.
Then Hugh tried to make conversation with this man-child. “I couldn’t get him to talk to me,” he said. “Not a word. He was in a shell.”
A few days later, Big Tony delivered the transcripts to Hugh Freeze. Steven, as advertised, was a model student and Briarcrest could see no reason not to supply him with a Christian education. Big Mike was another story. Hugh was a football coach and so he tended to take an indulgent view of bad grades, but he had no pleasant category in his mind for Big Mike’s. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he said. He sat on the transcript for two days, but he knew that eventually he’d have to hand it over to Mr. Simpson, the principal, to pass judgment. But his wheels already were spinning.
Steve Simpson, like John Harrington, was new to Briarcrest. He’d spent thirty of his fifty-six years working in the Memphis Public School system. When you first met him, you thought that whatever happened next it wasn’t likely to be pleasant. His social manner was, like his salt-and-pepper hair, clipped short. He had the habit of frowning when another would have smiled, and of taking a joke seriously. But after about twenty minutes you realized that though the hard surface was both thin and brittle, beneath was a pudding of sentiment and emotion. He teared up easily, and was quick to empathize. When you mentioned his name to people who knew him well, they often said things like, “Steve Simpson has a heart that barely fits in this building.” When teachers came to Briarcrest from the public schools, they often felt liberated, and took great pleasure in advertising their Christian faith. When Simpson arrived in this new place, he placed front and center on his desk a framed passage from the Bible that he never would have placed on his public school desk. But it was special to him:
The Blind Side Page 4