The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

  It didn’t help that his new market value had already led Michael to become more cynical of the people around him. The point the NCAA lady was driving toward was now never very far from his mind: maybe these rich white folks had been so helpful to him the past two and a half years only because they had identified him as this precious asset. Case in point: his own high school coach. The Snake, who had been in quiet negotiations with Tennessee for a coaching job, had tried to talk him into going to Tennessee. Then right after Michael announced he was going to Ole Miss—and not Tennessee—The Snake announced that he, too, was going to Ole Miss. Coach O had offered him a job.

  Sean tried to explain to Michael that that was just how the world worked—that Hugh Freeze was born to coach football and Ole Miss was lucky to have him—but Michael reserved the right to dwell on the selfish motives of others. For his senior yearbook, he’d selected his quote, from a rap song, which he’d expurgated for Briarcrest Christian School consumption: “People ask me if I ever reach the top will I forget about them? So I ask people if I don’t reach the top will y’all forget about me?”* He didn’t go so far as to treat Leigh Anne with suspicion but, as Leigh Anne put it, “with me and Sean I can see him thinking, ‘If they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to be flipping burgers at McDonald’s, would they really have had an interest in me?’”

  The thing was, you never knew when these doubts would surface. When the NCAA lady finally quit bugging him about his clothes, she turned to the matter of his new pickup truck. (Who had told her about the truck?) She asked Michael if Sean had bought the truck for him as a reward for signing with Ole Miss. Sean had tried to cut her off at the pass, and treated the question as absurd. But Michael had just chuckled. “You mean, I’d a got a truck if I’d gone to Tennessee?” he asked Sean, right there in front of the NCAA investigator. He might have been joking. Then again, he might not have.

  The woman let that one go, or seemed to. Putting food, clothing, and transportation to one side, she moved on to shelter. Where, she asked, had Michael slept at night, both immediately before he had come to the Briarcrest Christian School, and immediately after?

  “At Tony Henderson’s,” said Michael. Big Tony. The man whose mother’s dying wish had led him to cart his son, and Michael Oher, out of the hood. Now, when Michael thought at all about Tony, he wondered why he was working so hard to stay friends with him. Once a week, it seemed, Tony reminded him of all he had done for him.

  “Did you live with Tony all the way from eighth-grade year to sophomore year—or were there stops in between?” she asked.

  “Stops in between,” he said.

  “And so tell me…” she began.

  “You ain’t got enough paper for this,” said Sean.

  “You tell me where you lived,” said the NCAA lady to Michael, ignoring Sean. “’Cause that’s what I’m going to ask you. Was it just different stops per night? Who would you be living with?”

  Michael began, haltingly, to list families, black and white, who had sheltered him during just the first year and a half at the Briarcrest Christian School. The lady took down the names, as she had taken down the names of his brothers and sisters, with growing incredulity. In how many different homes could one sixteen-year-old boy sleep?

  “This is a huge undertaking,” said Sean. “This is like an eighty-five-page document. This is a monstrous undertaking. It was a nomad existence.”

  “Okay,” she said, but to Michael, not Sean. “And that’s because of your limited resources growing up.”

  Michael didn’t say anything, just nodded.

  “That and because his mom was in and out of rehab centers constantly,” said Sean.

  “Is it safe to assume that you didn’t have a permanent address with your mom?” asked the NCAA lady. Michael nodded. The woman became even more curious: then where on earth had he lived before he stumbled so luckily into Big Tony’s house? How had he survived? Had he been homeless as a child? That’s when Michael mumbled something about “foster homes.”

  Sean was aware that Michael had had some contact with the foster home system but not because Michael had volunteered the information. Not long before, the Briarcrest football team had thrown a party for itself at the Chickasaw Country Club. The busboy had come by their table, spotted Michael, and nearly dropped his tray. Michael had jumped up and given the busboy a bear hug. Then they both began to weep. When Michael sat back down he explained, in a very few words, that they had been in a foster home together for a year, when he was around eight years old. Further details he declined to offer.

  The NCAA lady now wanted the answer to a question the Tuohys had never asked: how many foster homes had Michael been in? Michael sat there thinking to himself.

  “How many?” asked Sean. “Two? Three?” He was beginning to wonder why the NCAA needed to know all this stuff.

  “Um,” said Michael, finally. “Two, I think.”

  “And that’s here in Memphis?” asked the lady.

  Michael nodded.

  “I’m saying,” said Sean. “It’s a book.”

  Not a good one. Michael’s answers were as nourishing as a bag of stale potato chips, and as vexing as a Rubik’s Cube. The lady was now officially frustrated. She’d come all the way from Indianapolis to interrogate Michael Oher, but she was getting no answers from Michael Oher, and too many from this rich white Ole Miss booster whose roof, for some reason, Michael Oher lived under. She stared intently at Michael and said, “Michael, you have to talk to me.” It had no obvious effect. The most basic facts of his own life he either didn’t know or didn’t recall. She must have decided that Sean was the problem because when Sean tried to answer yet another question she’d directed at Michael, she turned on him and said, “I’ll interview you later.” She might as well have said, “Shut the hell up.”

  “I’m just concerned,” said Sean. “With Michael, you got to pull it out of him. And I’ll help you pull it out of him.”

  If Michael disagreed with this assessment, he didn’t let on.

  “Okay,” said the NCAA lady, wearily.

  For the next five hours the two of them tried, each in their own way, to coax from Michael Oher his personal history. This investigation obviously turned on the Tuohys’ motives, and his. To understand motives she needed to know, or thought she needed to know, the complete biography of Michael Oher. But the biography of Michael Oher was a slippery subject. Indeed, the more you questioned Michael, the more you understood that his answers depended on the way you’d phrased the question. Ask him how many foster homes he had lived in and he would say he wasn’t sure. Ask him if he had lived in two or three different foster homes, he would treat it as a multiple choice test, with two options, and would answer “two” or “three.” Ask him, instead, if he had lived in nine or ten different foster homes, and he would have said “nine” or “ten.” He treated the NCAA investigator as he treated everyone who asked him about himself: as an intrusion. To his one-word answers he would add nothing—not a scintilla of color commentary or new information.

  Five hours into the interrogation, at ten o’clock at night, Miss Sue arrived and announced that she and Michael needed to study for a test. At that moment, late in Michael’s senior year, his grades fell so short of the NCAA’s requirements that whatever crimes against college football recruiting this NCAA lady found him to have committed were irrelevant. He wouldn’t be allowed to attend Ole Miss on academic grounds. “But I’m not finished,” protested the NCAA lady. Sean asked how much more time she needed and she said, “At least five more hours.” Five more hours, both Sean and Miss Sue said, was exactly what Michael didn’t have, and wouldn’t have for many weeks.

  And with that, the NCAA investigator walked out the door and past the statue of Colonel Rebel in the Tuohys’ front yard. She’d be running this information by her superiors at the NCAA, she said. If they shared her dissatisfaction, she’d be back for more. When she was gone, Michael shed his stone face for a quivering one and wen
t and found Leigh Anne. “That lady upset me,” he said, tears in his eyes. “I never want to talk to her again.” Leigh Anne’s head swiveled angrily until her eyes found Sean. “Don’t you let that lady back in this house,” she said, as if he had any control over the NCAA. And Sean thought: Chalk this down as another sleepless night.

  TO GET INTO THE NFL Michael Oher needed to first get into college, and to get into college he needed to meet the NCAA’s academic standards. The NCAA had a sliding scale of ACT scores and grade point averages; the higher the ACT, the lower the required GPA. Given Michael’s best ACT score (12), to play college football he would need a 2.65 overall GPA. He’d finished his sophomore year with a 0.9. A better performance the back end of his junior year, when he’d moved into the Tuohy home, had raised his cumulative average to 1.564. That’s when Leigh Anne took over more completely. Before Michael’s senior year, she called every teacher at Briarcrest and asked them to tell her exactly what Michael must do to earn at least a B in their class. She didn’t expect them to just hand Michael a grade—though she wouldn’t have complained if they did. But to her way of thinking a B was the fair minimum to give any normal person willing to take the simple steps. She would hound Michael until he took those steps. Just give me the list of things he needs to do, she told the teachers, and he will do them.

  And he did. Two days into his senior year he had come home, dropped his massive North Face book bag onto the kitchen table, and said, “I can’t do this.” Leigh Anne thought he was about to cry. The next morning she told him to suck it up and pushed him right back out the door. But that’s when Leigh Anne had brought in Sue Mitchell.

  As a tool for overhauling the grade point average of Michael Oher, as well as for broadening his experience of white people, Sue Mitchell had a number of things to recommend her. In her thirty-five-year career she had taught at several of the toughest Memphis public schools. At Bartlett High School, her final stop, she had taken over the cheerleading squad and whipped them into five-time national champions. She had applied to work at the Briarcrest Christian School, but Briarcrest had rejected her out of hand because, though Miss Sue said she believed in God, she had trouble proving it. (“The application did not have one question about education,” Miss Sue said. “It was all about religion, and what I thought about homosexuality and drinking and smoking.”) She hadn’t been Born Again, and she didn’t often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, “We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!”

  Still, in spite of these presumed defects, Miss Sue was relentless and effusive—the sort of woman who wants everything to be just great between her and the rest of the world but, if it isn’t, can adjust and go to war. And that’s what she did. She worked five nights a week, four hours each night, for free, to help get Michael Oher into Ole Miss. The Tuohy family looked on with interest. “There were days when he was just overwhelmed,” said Collins, who saw the academic drama unfold both at school and at home. “He’d just close his book and say, ‘I’m done.’” When he did this, Miss Sue opened the book for him. She didn’t care about football, but she cared about Ole Miss football, and it gave her pleasure to think she was contributing, in her way, to the Lost Cause. She also, fairly quickly, became attached to Michael. There was just something about him that made you want to help him. He tried so hard, and for so little return. “One night it wasn’t going so well and I got frustrated,” she said, “and he said to me, ‘Miss Sue, you have to remember I’ve only been going to school for two years.’”

  His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael had started out a distant last and instantly fallen further behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He’d caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose, you just ran out of time.” Then they both fell about laughing.

  He’d had a truly bizarre academic career: nothing but D’s and F’s until the end of his junior year, when all of a sudden he became a reliable member of Briarcrest’s honor roll. He was going to finish with a grade point average of 2.05. Yet, amazing as that was, it wasn’t enough to get him past the NCAA. He needed a 2.65. And with no more classes to take, he obviously would not get it.

  Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene. Watching him pore over the NCAA rule book searching for ways to raise Michael’s grades after grades had ceased to be given out called to mind a rich man’s accountants cracking the tax code. He approached American higher education with cold calculation and joyful cynicism. One of the lessons he had picked up from his own career as an NCAA student-athlete was that good enough grades were available to anyone who bothered to exploit the loopholes. When Sean first arrived at Ole Miss, he learned, just in time, that freshman English had flunked many a jock. He went looking for a loophole and quickly found one: Beginner’s Spanish. For some reason he didn’t care to know, Ole Miss allowed freshmen to substitute a foreign language for the serious English class. He’d had eight years of Spanish in school, so the returns were impressive: two A’s in Spanish without lifting a finger instead of the two D’s in English for which he’d have had actually to read books.

  Now Sean had been out of school for twenty-two years and so his grade-rigging skills were a bit rusty, but the skill for avoiding books was among the last to abandon the aging athlete. Plus he had help. Coach O was on board. Having completed his move from USC to Ole Miss, Coach O was now giving speeches to auditoriums filled with Ole Miss boosters. They didn’t understand a word he said, but he could still whip them up into a frenzy. At some point in every speech he’d say that every championship team had a rock on which it was built and the name of his rock was Michael Oher.

  From Coach O, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The BYU courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere ten days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the BYU catalogue and his eyes lit upon a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in one of these “Character Courses” was to read a few brief passages from famous works—a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there—and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from Character Courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

  There was a hitch, of course; there was always a hitch. But like every great prestidigitator Sean knew that a hitch was also an opportunity. The BYU courses might be used to replace F’s on Michael Oher’s transcripts with A’s, but only if they were taken during the school year—and the school year was almost over. That’s when Sean discovered, deep in the recesses of the NCAA rules, yet another loophole: the student-athlete was allowed to generate fresh new grades for himself right up until August 1, so long as that student-athlete was “Learning Disabled.”

  Whatever that meant, thought Sean. He had no idea if Michael was actually learning-disabled, but now that it was important for him to be learning-disabled, Sean couldn’t imagine any decent human being trying to argue that he wasn’t. But just in case some dark soul wanted to make that case, Sean began to compose the rebuttal in his head. “He’s just got to be LD,” he said, as he flipped through the yellow pages of his mind looking for someone to provide him with the necessary paperwork. “It’s some brain disorder in most people, but in his case it’s ’cause he didn’t sleep in a bed for the first fifteen years of his life.”

  Of course he couldn’t just declare Michael learning-disabled himself: he needed a document signed by some pointy-headed shrink. Sean had no idea where to find such a person, and so he called the Briarcrest academic counsel
or, Linda Toombs, who came up with the name of a bona fide licensed psychological examiner—a woman named Jakatae Jessup. A few days later Sean wrote a big check to cover the cost of a battery of tests, and dropped both it and Michael at the front door of Jakatae Jessup’s office in East Memphis.

  Jakatae Jessup was white. She and her colleague, Julia Huckabee, also white, had no interest in God, or in football, or in the vast majority of East Memphis defined by both. They were, by Memphis standards, charming oddballs. “Krogerites,” they called themselves—and defined the term as people who shopped at the Krogers grocery store on Sunday mornings, while the rest of Memphis went to church. Most of the children they tested came referred by public or private school administrators. These kids would be dropped off right after school and stay for several hours, with a break for dinner, which, as a part of the deal, the psychologists supplied. When Michael came through their door to have his brain examined, they were shocked by the implications. “My first thought,” said Huckabee, “was that we’re not going to have enough money to feed him.”

  They gave him the Wechsler Intelligence Test, and then a series of achievement tests. They asked him what 1 plus 1 equaled. They showed him a picture of an apple and asked him what it was. They asked him to draw a picture of a house. (Michael later told Leigh Anne he thought they were testing him for insanity.) The holes in his mind were obvious enough. He was still working well below grade level. He would probably never read a book for pleasure. He’d never been taught phonics or, if he had, he’d been taught so badly that he might as well have not been taught at all. When a child knows the sound that goes with the letter, depending on its position in the word, and knows the sense of the word, depending on its position in the sentence, he can instinctively decode the language. A child who had been taught phonics can be given a nonsense word—“deprotonation,” for example, or “mibgus”—and still be able to pronounce it. Michael had no idea. “I don’t think he knows how to read yet,” said Jessup. “I think he’s just memorized a tremendous number of words.” When he sat down with a reading assignment, he was like a man with a partial combination trying to open a locked safe.