“Son,” he said, in a grave tone. “First game of the season, you and Coach O will be walking through the Grove together.”
“The Grove” was Ole Miss’s answer to the T. Before each home game, tens of thousands of Rebel fans did not so much gather as swarm. They ate and drank and prepared their bodies for the chemical jolt of an SEC football game. The pre-game ritual climaxed with the Ole Miss players marching along a narrow brick path through the Grove that led to the stadium, known, more than a little hopefully, as “The Walk of Champions.” The whole shebang was conducted in the spirit of an ancient rite, when it was in fact the brainchild of an Ole Miss football coach in the early 1980s.
“That’d be good,” said Sean Junior.
On the way out the door, Coach O, obviously anxious to know what sort of impression he had made on Michael, asked Sean, “Whataamoo baadaat kwestON?” (“What did he mean by that question?”)
“He wanted to know what you are going to do about Justin,” said Sean. Justin was Justin Sparks, the Briarcrest placekicker and provider of jet transport to Michael, who was now planning on kicking for Ole Miss. Coach O signaled his relief with a smile and said, “Shaaa! Cudda tow me baaaa fo ahwak-n-heee.” (“Sean! You could have told me that before I walked in here.” )
“Don’t worry. You gave him the right answer.”
Actually, Michael was after something more important than the fate of his Briarcrest teammate. “I wanted to see what type of person he was,” he said later. “If he’s pulling scholarships that they’d promised kids, would you want to play for that kind of person? Be around that kind of person?” Coach O wasn’t that kind of person, he decided; more interestingly, Coach O was the only coach who didn’t promise him he’d crack the starting lineup his freshman year. Michael decided Coach O was all right.
The whole recruiting process had been interesting to Michael, in its way. It told him a lot about the people who had taken an interest in his future. His high school coach had used him to get himself a college football coaching job, and by the end he had taken to calling Hugh Freeze “The Snake.” After Hugh laughed about it—this was the way their world worked—the nickname stuck. Michael had put Sean in a position to pressure him if he wanted, and Sean hadn’t, at least not overtly. Leigh Anne and Miss Sue had pressured him plenty but for what seemed to him to be legitimate reasons—if he went too far away they couldn’t take care of him, and he needed a lot of taking care of. Sean Junior was the most nakedly ambitious, but Michael sort of enjoyed the boy’s naked ambition. “SJ worked it,” said Michael, laughing. “He had locker-room passes, trips through the T. If I’d a kept on, he’d a been playing on a team.”
The Orange Bowl was the cherry on top of the process, at least for Sean Junior. The Tuohys went to the national championship game as a family, and Coach O had arranged for them to attend USC’s pre-game practice. While it was against NCAA rules for Coach O to so much as wink at Michael Oher, there was nothing that said his players couldn’t amuse Michael. At the end of the practice USC’s two biggest stars, quarterback Matt Leinert and running back Reggie Bush, along with the entire USC offensive line, came over to Michael, surrounded him, and offered fulsome praise of Coach O. As he eavesdropped on their banter, Sean Senior noticed a pair of shocking facts: (1) Michael was bigger than all the USC linemen; and (2) Sean Junior had somehow wormed his way into the scrum, and was sidling up to Reggie Bush.
“Hey, Reggie,” Sean Junior was saying. The future Heisman Trophy winner looked down, obviously a little surprised. How did this little kid get in here?
“Whazzup dawg?” said Reggie Bush.
“You know, that’s my brother,” said SJ, pointing to Michael.
“Oh really,” said Reggie Bush, perhaps thinking two words would suffice to abort a weird conversation. They didn’t.
“Can I have your sweatbands?” said Sean Junior.
On February 1, 2005, Michael Oher held a press conference to announce where he intended to go to college. He faced a bank of microphones and explained how he’d decided he’d go to Ole Miss, as that’s where his family had gone. To hear him talk, you’d have thought he’d descended from generations of Ole Miss Rebels. He answered a few questions from reporters, without actually saying anything, and then went home and waited for all hell to break loose. Up in Indianapolis, the NCAA was about to hear a rumor that white families in the South were going into the ghetto, seizing poor black kids, and adopting them, so that they might play football for their SEC alma maters. But it was still weeks before the NCAA investigator would turn up in the Tuohy living room.
After his press conference, Michael had to attend to the important business of playing miniature basketball with Sean Junior. Up they went into SJ’s room, whose walls were a shrine to his father’s Ole Miss playing career: trophies, pictures, flags, newspaper articles. Over the bed was a beautifully framed basketball net, with bloodstains on its cords. This was the net Sean Senior had cut down on national television, right after he’d led Ole Miss to its first and only SEC Tournament Championship. The net said something that never would be put into words, about the relationship between Ole Miss and the Tuohys—that the school was less source of identity than foil. Sean was always the smallest man on the court, and he was forever taking cheap shots and rising bloodied from the floor. Blood dripped from his chin as he cut down the net, sullying and sanctifying his prize. The moment he’d come down from the rim, however, his coach had grabbed the net from him, and claimed it as the property of the University of Mississippi. Into the Ole Miss trophy case the net went. The next night Sean had gone out to a playground, cut down another net, broken into the Ole Miss trophy case, and swapped the net he’d stolen for the one he’d earned. “That’s my blood,” he said simply. “And so that’s my net.”
Under the bloody net Sean Junior and Michael resumed their endless struggle for supremacy in miniature basketball. SJ was far less interested in old school ties than his private haul of booty. “I was hoping to go to LSU,” he said. “I had a locker and a field pass for the whole season.” Special access to the hallowed ground of SEC football, inside the T and the Grove, was nice, but it didn’t beat having his own locker in the locker room of the national champions. About Michael’s motives, or his thinking, SJ couldn’t have cared less. He never prodded him with the questions that obsessed the grown-ups, because they never occurred to him. But now he was, faintly, curious.
“When d’you decide?” asked Sean Junior.
“Back in September,” said Michael. As the wooing of Michael Oher had started, in earnest, in September and run all the way to February, a lot of other people’s valuable time had been wasted: all along Michael had known he was going to Ole Miss. “It was running across my mind to go to Tennessee, because everyone was saying I shouldn’t go to a place in transition,” he said. “But deep down inside I wanted to go to Ole Miss. It just felt like home.” It felt like home, of course, because home now felt a lot like Ole Miss.
“But,” he now told the little boy he loved like a brother, “it was kind of cool having all those coaches around here.”
“Uh-huh,” said Sean Junior, and promptly lost what little interest he’d had.
(The Tuohy family)
A photo of Michael Oher when he was around ten years old.
(The Tuohy family)
Michael (#50) going up for a basket during the Briarcrest versus U.S.J. game in 2003.
(The Tuohy family)
Michael during a Briarcrest Christian School game.
(The Tuohy family)
Michael leaving a game with Leigh Anne.
(The Tuohy family)
The Tuohy Christmas card (Sean Jr., Michael, and Collins).
(The Tuohy family)
Family lunch at the country club.
(The Tuohy family)
High-school graduation, May 2005.
(The Tuohy family)
Michael and Leigh Anne.
(Ole Miss Athletics Media Relations)
Michael (#74) playing during the Ole Miss-Kentucky game in 2005.
(Photograph by Tabitha Soren)
(Photograph by Neal Slavin)
Michael’s freshman season playing for Ole Miss.
(Photograph by Neal Slavin)
Michael Oher and his lineup: (left to right) Big Tony Henderson; Collins Tuohy; Sean Tuohy Jr.; Hugh Freeze, Michael’s football coach at Briarcrest and now assistant coach at Ole Miss; Sue Mitchell, Michael’s tutor; Leigh Anne Tuohy; Sean Tuohy; and Steven Payne, one of Michael’s friends and Big Tony’s son.
(Photograph by Tabitha Soren)
(The Tuohy family)
The Tuohy family on the Ole Miss football field.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHARACTER COURSES
“THIS IS JOYCE THOMPSON, assistant director of enforcement at the NCAA. Today’s date is March 30, 2005. And I am currently talking to prospective student-athlete Michael Oher. There are other individuals in the room at this time and I would like for them to state their names for the record.”
“Sean Tuohy,” said Sean.
So began the investigation of Michael Oher. Leigh Anne refused to participate, on the grounds that the whole thing was offensive. Collins was busy. Sean Junior failed to see the upside. But then, the upside was hard to see. Some college football coach, and quite possibly more than one college football coach, had gone to the NCAA and accused the Tuohys of abducting Michael and showering him with possessions in exchange for becoming the future left tackle of the Ole Miss Rebels. The NCAA had sent this lady to investigate. The lady was young, black, intelligent, childless, private school-educated, and with a manner and an accent that made her impossible to place as anything other than generically American. She had an off-the-rack professional quality about her, too, and if she didn’t make a good living shining a faint light on the shady dealings between high school football players and the college boosters who love them, she probably could have made a better one reading the news at any local television station in the country.
She settled into one of Leigh Anne’s antique English chairs and took in her surroundings. On a cabinet behind her stood a framed copy of the page in USA Today on which Michael Oher had just been named a First Team High School All-American football player. Joyce Thompson politely explained that she had come to find out if Michael Oher had violated any NCAA regulations. If he had, and she could prove it, he could put aside his football career for a while.
Then she switched on her tape recorder, and asked Michael for his name, address, phone number, and the names of the people with whom he lived. These he effortlessly supplied. It was the next question that tripped him up: “And who are your siblings?”
“Collins Tuohy and Sean Junior,” said Michael.
She was about to move on but Sean, unbidden, jumped in. “That’s his siblings here,” he said. “He’s got other siblings.”
“And so who are your other siblings?” she asked.
Michael looked at her. “Uh—name ’em all?” he said, as if she had asked him to recite the Kama Sutra in the original Sanskrit.
Miss Joyce Thompson laughed. Yes, she said, could he please name them all. Michael sat with his hands folded in his lap—and now his fingers were extended. He was trying to count, without seeming to. It was humiliating not to be able to come out quickly with the names of his brothers and sisters, especially before this well-dressed, privately educated black lady from the NCAA.
“Marcus Oher. Andre Oher, Deljuan Oher,” he blurted out.
The lady scribbled as fast as she could to keep up. “Deljuan?” she asked. “Can you spell that?”
“D…E…L…” the letters came slowly at first, then charged out of him in a wildly uncertain bull rush. “J-U-A-N?”
“Okay,” she said, with a big smile.
“Rico Oher,” he continued.
“Okay,” she said.
“Carlos,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
“John,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
He’d stopped. Still staring at his hands in his lap, he repeated: Marcus, Andre, Deljuan, Rico, Carlos, John. He sounded like a small child reciting the alphabet from the beginning in an attempt to propel his mind to whatever follows “G.”
“All brothers?” asked the lady from the NCAA.
Michael nodded and relaxed, and it was clear to Sean that he was going to seize on the finality in her voice to leave it at that. Marcus, Andre, Deljuan, Rico, Carlos, John. Sean didn’t know how many there were, but he knew there were more than those six.
“No,” said Sean. “We’re not finished.”
Michael thought. “Denise,” he said, finally.
“Okay,” said the lady from the NCAA, uneasily, putting pen back to notepad.
“Tyra,” said Michael. Or, perhaps, “Tara.”
“Tyra?” asked the NCAA lady. “T-Y-R-A?”
“Uhhhh…” He was unsure. “Yes,” he finally said.
“Okay,” she said, then began to laugh. “Are these still Oher?”
“Uhhhh—” said Michael, thinking for a moment. “Yes.”
“He dudn’t know that,” said Sean. “Some are.”
“Depthia,” added Michael.
Sean watched Michael. He might not know the length of Michael’s bloodlines but he knew the depth of his anxiety. Confronted by alien authority figures, Michael froze. He was more likely to tell this woman what he thought she wanted to hear than the truth.
“Depthia?” said the lady. “Can you spell that for me?”
“D—” Michael starts, and then gave up. “No.”
“Oher or Williams?” asked the lady—because she knew that Michael’s legal name was Michael Jerome Williams.
“Oher.”
“They can’t all be Oher!” said Sean. He knew that there were at least five different fathers.
“It is Oher,” Michael insisted. Then he thought some more.
“Marcus Young,” he said.
“Okay,” said the NCAA lady. She was now shaking her head in wonder.
“David Young,” said Michael.
“Okay,” she said, scribbling away.
“How many’s that?” asked Sean, with genuine curiosity.
“Thirteen,” said the NCAA lady.
“Thirteen?” asked Michael. It was as if he couldn’t imagine how she’d arrived at such an absurdly big number. Sean Senior took the list and handed it to Michael to study. Michael stared at this list for a very long time. As he did, the NCAA lady giggled nervously. Michael announced, “You put John down twice.”
“So there’s two Marcuses?” she said, taking back her list. “Not two Johns?”
That was right. Or so he said. It had taken ten minutes just to sort out the names of Michael’s brothers and sisters. And that would be the easiest piece of personal information for the NCAA investigator to extract from Michael Oher.
“How did it come to be that—uh—you began living with the Tuohys?” she now asked.
“Uh—” said Michael. “When I came to Briarcrest my tenth-grade year. Uh. Coach Tuohy was—uh—a volunteer coach…. And, uh, I met him there. I decided to live with him summer after my junior year. He talked to me all the time. He was in my situation.”
“Okay,” said the lady, dubiously.
“He didn’t have much growing up and I didn’t have much growing up,” said Michael.
“Okay,” said the lady, even more dubiously.
“It wasn’t the summer,” said Sean. “It was before your birthday. It was about March of 2004….But he lived here off and on all the way to then.”
“Describe your living situation at the time,” said the lady. “Because when you say that, you know, that Mr. Tuohy was in your same situation, I don’t necessarily know what that means. So can you describe a little more about your situation?”
“How he didn’t have a lot coming up,” said Michael. To which he added nothing.
Her boss back in Indianapolis was an N
CAA lifer named Dave Didion. Didion oversaw the investigations of the nation’s top football prospects, and said he very much enjoyed the work because “it’s like a jigsaw puzzle that comes in a box with no pictures on it.” This jigsaw puzzle was even more perplexing: the box came locked. When the NCAA investigator asked Michael when he had last seen his father, he said, “When I was about ten,” and left it at that. When she asked him why he didn’t live with his mother, he didn’t say anything at all. When she asked him who had paid his tuition at Briarcrest, he said he had no idea. When she asked him what he had done for food and clothing, his answer suggested he didn’t really need food or clothing. Exasperated, she asked Sean if perhaps he had bought clothes for Michael. To which Sean replied he’d bought him “maybe a T-shirt”—which might have been strictly true, as Leigh Anne did the shopping.
Sean didn’t trust these people. They didn’t think in terms of right and wrong. All they cared about was keeping up appearances. The NCAA rules existed, in theory, to maintain the integrity of college athletics. These investigators were meant to act as a police department. In practice, they were more like the public relations wing of an inept fire department. They might not be the last people on earth to learn that some booster or coach had bribed some high school jock, but they weren’t usually the first either. Some scandal would be exposed in a local newspaper and they would go chasing after it, in an attempt to minimize the embarrassment to the system. They didn’t care how things were, only how they could be made to seem. A poor black football star inside the home of this rich white booster could be made to seem scandalous, and so here they were, bothering Michael. The lady said she was just trying to establish the facts of the case, but the facts didn’t describe the case. If the Tuohys were Ole Miss boosters—and they most certainly were—they had violated the letter of every NCAA rule ever written. They’d given Michael more than food, clothing, and shelter. They’d given him a life.
The Blind Side Page 19