The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

  The Munford scouting report hadn’t picked up Michael’s size and speed. The Munford defensive end who lined up across from Michael Oher obviously took one look at him and saw a high school football cliché: the fat kid they stuck on the offensive line because there was no place else to put him except the tuba section of the band.

  Hey fat ass! I’m a put your fat ass in the dirt!

  The more he went on, the angrier Michael became, and yet no one noticed, possibly because no one was prepared to imagine the rage inside Michael Oher. Hugh Freeze ordered up plays that called for Michael to block a linebacker, or to pull and sweep around the right end, and leave the defensive end across from him alone. The first quarter and a half of the scrimmage was uneventful—until Hugh Freeze called a different sort of play.

  Leigh Anne could always tell when something angered Michael. “I can tell by his body language,” she said. “You piss Michael off and he looks more like a bull in his stance.” Early in the scrimmage he had a bull-like demeanor, but he hadn’t done anything out of anger. Leigh Anne rose from her seat to beat the crowd to the concessions stand, and so had her back to the action when the people in the stands around her began to laugh.

  “Where’s he taking him?” she heard someone say.

  “He’s not letting go of that kid!” shouted someone else.

  She turned around in time to see twenty football players running down one side of the field, after the Briarcrest running back with the ball. On the other side of the field Briarcrest’s No. 74 was racing at speed in the opposite direction, with a defensive end in his arms.

  From his place on the sideline Sean watched in amazement. Hugh had called a running play, around the right end, away from Michael’s side. Michael’s job was simply to take the kid who had been jabbering at him and wall him off. Just keep him away from the ball carrier. Instead, he’d fired off the line of scrimmage and gotten fit. Once he had his hands inside the Munford player’s shoulder pads, he lifted him off the ground. It was a perfectly legal block, with unusual consequences. He drove the Munford player straight down the field for 15 yards, then took a hard left, toward the Munford sidelines. “The Munford kid’s feet were hitting the ground every four steps, like a cartoon character,” said Sean. As the kid strained to get his feet back on the ground, Michael ran him the next 25 or so yards to the Munford bench. When he got there he didn’t stop, but piled right through it, knocking over the bench, several more Munford players, and scattering the team. He didn’t skip a beat. Encircling the football field was a cinder track. He blocked the kid across the 10-yard-wide track, and then across the grass on the other side of the cinder track.

  That’s where Sean lost sight of him. What appeared to be the entire Munford football team leaped on top of Michael, and the officials raced over to peel them off. All Sean could make out was a huge pile of bodies. “Then Michael gets up,” says Sean. “And it’s like watching Gulliver. Bodies flying everywhere. Flags flying everywhere. And then the referee comes over to scream at us.”

  All the officials knew Sean Tuohy, both as the former star point guard at Ole Miss and as the current radio color man for the Memphis Grizzlies. They read the Memphis sports pages, and so they also knew of Michael Oher, newly heralded as the hottest football recruit to come out of Memphis in some time who, for some strange reason, was now living with Sean Tuohy. Looking for a grown-up to complain to, an official sprinted back across the field. He made straight for Sean.

  “Coach Tuohy!” he hollered.

  Sean stepped out onto the field. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Coach Tuohy, he just can’t do that.”

  “Did the whistle blow?” asked Sean, who could have made a good living as a tort lawyer.

  The whistle had not blown. The Briarcrest running back had kept his feet for a conveniently long time.

  “No,” said the referee. “But he’s got to let go of him when he gets him to the sidelines. He can’t just keep on running with him.”

  “C’mon,” said Sean. “The play wasn’t over.”

  “Sean,” said the ref. “He took that boy across the track.”

  “Okay,” said Sean. “I’ll talk to him.”

  Beyond the Munford bench, the cinder track, and the stretch of grass, was a chain-link fence.

  “So what’s the penalty?” someone else asked.

  “Excessive blocking.”

  As the referee walked off the 15-yard penalty, Sean hollered at Michael to get his ass to the bench, and Michael trotted over, with an air of perfect detachment. He couldn’t have seemed less interested in the ruckus. “Everyone’s freaking out,” said Sean, “the refs are screaming, their whole team is wanting to fight, and he’s totally calm, like he’s out for a Sunday stroll.” Technically, it was Hugh’s job to talk to Michael, as, since Michael’s apotheosis, Hugh had taken a special interest in the offensive line. But in Hugh’s view, Michael was merely doing what he’d taught him to do: block until the whistle blows. Upon reflection, thought Hugh, “You tell Michael, ‘I want you to block until the whistle blows.’ Well, he takes that real literal.”

  Sean and Tim Long took Michael off to one side. “You can’t do that, Michael,” said Long, struggling to keep a straight face. “These guys are after you, and now you’ve made a scene.” Long had never heard of a lineman penalized for “excessive blocking,” but then he’d never seen a block quite so dramatic as this one. For his first time as a volunteer football coach Tim was having difficulty swallowing his desire to giggle. (“I’d never seen that before—the lineman takes his man fifteen yards down the middle of the field, and then he decides to turn him left and take him all the way to his sidelines and through the bench.”) Sean wasn’t laughing; Sean had his stern face on. This incident fell into the ever-expanding category of Things Michael Oher Needed to Understand to Succeed. When Long was finished, Sean explained to Michael that he was now a famous football recruit, and bigger than anyone on just about any football field on earth. Even if he was an offensive lineman, he had to play as if everyone in the stadium was watching his every move. No matter how rude or dirty the opposing player might be, Michael had to swallow his desire for such obvious revenge. He could win, he could dominate, he could even humiliate. He just shouldn’t attract the attention of the legal authorities.

  Michael listened to Sean’s little speech without responding except to grunt “okay.” He was still eerily calm, as if this whole fuss didn’t really concern him. Finishing his lecture, Sean looked over at the Munford bench: Michael had picked up a 220-pound defensive end and moved him at least 60 yards. In seconds.

  “Michael,” said Sean. “Where were you taking him, anyway?”

  “I was gonna put him on the bus,” said Michael.

  Parked on the other side of the chain-link fence was, in fact, the Munford team bus.

  “The bus?” asked Sean.

  “I got tired of him talking,” said Michael. “It was time for him to go home.”

  Sean thought he must be joking. He wasn’t. Michael had thought it all through in advance; he’d been waiting nearly half a football game to do just exactly what he had very nearly done. To pick up this trash-talking defensive end and take him not to the chain-link fence but through the chain-link fence. To the bus. And then put him on the bus. Sean began to laugh.

  “How far did you get?” asked Sean.

  “I got him up against the fence,” said Michael. Now Michael began to chuckle.

  “What did that guy say while you were taking him to the bus?” asked Sean.

  “Nothin’!” said Michael. “He was just hanging on for dear life.”

  As the laughter rose up in him, Sean thought: there might be a fire in this belly after all. He didn’t worry much what might happen if that fire was misdirected, off the football field. He figured football could channel it, usefully.

  THE QUESTION ASKED about Michael Oher by the Washington Redskins’ quarterback still hadn’t been answered to anyone’s satisfaction: Who was t
his kid? Collins Tuohy, Michael’s age and soon to be crowned Homecoming Queen of Michael’s Briarcrest class, was now also functioning, in effect, as Michael’s sister. And Collins thought Michael’s identity was a work in progress. At school a year ago you couldn’t get him to take his eyes off the floor. Now she’d catch him smiling and laughing and bantering with other kids in the halls and, in general, playing Big Man on Campus. He’d told the track coach he wanted to try the long jump, as the shot put and discus were too easy. He’d told the football coaches that he was tired of blocking the opposing team’s extra points: he was going to try to catch one. The senior class was planning a skit. Three of the girls intended to perform a song-and-dance routine, and they were looking for a striking-looking male lead singer. They’d asked Michael to play the part and he’d shocked everyone by agreeing to do it. “After hearing, ‘you’re so good,’ ‘you’re so good,’ ‘you’re so good,’” said Collins, “he’s started thinking, maybe I am good.”

  As Leigh Anne gradually took over the management of Michael’s life, she noticed changes, too. He was a lot more talkative, and a bit more sure of himself, at least on the surface. His point of view began to intrude on the narrative. He now wanted things, and acknowledged that he wanted them, and the first thing he said he wanted was a driver’s license. She handed him the driver’s test prep books, and agreed to take him to the Memphis Department of Motor Vehicles, but immediately there was a problem: he couldn’t prove who he was. To get a driver’s license he needed two forms of identification. He didn’t have so much as a YMCA membership card on him, and he swore that his mother, wherever she was, didn’t have anything either. Leigh Anne thought that the hospital where he was born must have preserved some record of the event, but Michael didn’t know where he’d been born. “We started with nothing,” said Leigh Anne. “There wasn’t a shred of evidence he even existed.” She put the problem to Hugh Freeze, and Hugh told her that it was the easiest thing in the world to drive out to the Social Security Administration Office and get a Social Security card. He’d done it himself.

  So that’s how they began, with the two of them driving out to the Memphis suburbs, and asking a man behind a government computer for proof of Michael’s existence. “To get a Social Security card,” the man explained patiently, “you need to have a birth certificate.” Leigh Anne tried to explain that they only needed the card so that they might obtain a driver’s license, but the man remained firm: with so many terrorists on the loose he couldn’t be handing out Social Security cards to people without other personal identification. Leigh Anne was born knowing how to play the damsel in distress; after she’d done it, the man agreed to help them, on the condition that Leigh Anne provide some evidence that Michael attended school in Memphis. Back they drove to Briarcrest, the only institution Leigh Anne could think of that recognized Michael’s existence. Steve Simpson kindly printed Michael a school I.D. and wrote a letter identifying Michael Jerome Oher as a Briarcrest student. Then they went back to the Social Security office, where the man behind the desk looked at the dummied-up Briarcrest I.D. and got cold feet. He’d said any form of I.D. but he didn’t mean any form of I.D. He meant something a bit more…official.

  “Look at me,” said Leigh Anne. “We have nothing. He’s had seven addresses and he’s gone to fifteen different schools. He doesn’t know the names of his brothers and sisters. He’s never committed a crime so we don’t even have a criminal record. We…have…nothing.” The man behind the desk either had a soft spot for a pretty woman in desperate circumstances or a hunch that he’d be much safer, long term, if he just gave this lady whatever she wanted. In any case, he began to punch the buttons on his computer. “You know why I’m going to do this,” he said. “I’m going to do this because I want to know why a short white blond lady has got a big black kid in here trying to get him a driver’s license.” So Leigh Anne told him the story, and the man went looking in his computer for evidence of the existence of Michael Oher. She finished her story before he found the evidence. After a few minutes of searching, he looked up and said: “There’s no such person as Michael Jerome Oher.”

  Michael just sat there in silence. Leigh Anne begged the man to keep looking: did he have anything even close? He tried spelling Oher in various ways; he tried spelling Michael in various ways. Finally he said, “There’s a Michael Jerome Williams.”

  “That’s me,” said Michael.

  It is? thought Leigh Anne, but said nothing.

  “You’ve been issued six Social Security cards in the last eighteen months,” said the man from Social Security. He wasn’t happy about it.

  Leigh Anne had no idea what that was about—“someone was probably selling them on the Internet”—and neither did Michael. To the Social Security administrator she said, “I promise if you give us just one more, it’ll be the last time we ask.” Grudgingly, and a bit suspiciously, the man printed out a Social Security card. Only when they were outside did Leigh Anne stop to look at it: “Michael Jerome Williams Junior,” it read.

  “Who the hell is Michael Jerome Williams?” she asked.

  “That’s my dad,” said Michael. He didn’t find anything interesting about that fact, and so didn’t elaborate.

  She now had a Social Security card that said his name was Michael Jerome Williams and a student I.D. that said his name was Michael Jerome Oher. Leigh Anne explained to Michael: No matter how nice the people at the Memphis DMV are, they aren’t going to accept these as two forms of legal identification for one boy. She told him that if he wanted a driver’s license she was going to have to visit his mother, and see if she had a birth certificate. “She doesn’t have any birth certificate,” said Michael. “She doesn’t have anything.” Since Michael had moved in, Leigh Anne had pestered Michael to go and visit his mother. Occasionally, and grudgingly, Michael went, or said he did; but as he had never let any of the Tuohys near his old inner-city home, they couldn’t be sure. The drawbridge might come down between white and black Memphis, but Michael insisted on crossing it alone. “Michael,” Leigh Anne would say. “She is your mother. She will always be your mother. And you are never going to be able to look at me and say, ‘You took me away from my mother.’” Now she said, “If you won’t go, I will.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  He left and returned a few hours later. It was tattered and smeared, and he held it like a piece of trash, crumpled up in a tight ball in his hand, but he’d found a birth certificate. A boy named Michael Jerome Williams was indeed born in Memphis, on May 26, 1986.

  “You told me your birthday was May 28,” said Leigh Anne.

  Michael looked at his birth certificate and frowned. “They must have got the date wrong,” he said.

  “They don’t get the date wrong on birth certificates, Michael,” said Leigh Anne.

  “No, they got it wrong,” he insisted.

  She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins had herself just turned seventeen and so was eligible to have the restrictions removed from her license. The DMV was for some reason miles east, outside the Memphis beltway, on a road lined with anemic maples, porn shops, and churches. They passed a porn shop and then a church and then another porn shop and another church; it was as if the people of Memphis had chosen this place to fight the war between animal nature and the instinct to subdue it. The DMV was a blue wooden shack in the woods, but there wasn’t a trace of nature inside. It hummed with fluorescent lights and automated voices and the bells from the row of testing machines in the back. The walls were white cinder block, the floors speckled linoleum. At the front desk were four large black ladies. Leigh Anne handed all the documents over to one of them, who took one look at them and said in a slow drawl, “Uh-uh. This school letter is a copy. You got to have an orig
inal.”

  And so they left Collins to become a fully authorized grown-up driver, and raced the fifteen miles out to the Briarcrest Christian School, where Mr. Simpson met them in the parking lot, with the original of his letter embossed with the Briarcrest seal. They went back to the DMV, and the large black lady looked at the paperwork again. “Uh-uh,” she said. “To apply for his license, he needs proof of residence, too.” A phone or electric bill addressed to him, or someone whose name might plausibly be associated with his, that placed him more precisely in the world.

  This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a personal letter from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who seemed to want to become Michael’s friend, and a stack of letters from a football coach at the University of Alabama, who seemed prepared to offer his hand in marriage. Leigh Anne had long ago quit counting the letters: more than a thousand, fewer than ten thousand. The trouble was they were all addressed to “Michael Oher,” who, legally, didn’t exist. The only thing to do was to drive west across the city and find Michael’s mother and, God willing, some piece of mail with an address and a more useful name on it. It was now 3:30 p.m. and the DMV didn’t let anyone through the door after four-thirty.