The left tackle had become a star, but of a curious kind. He knew he was a star, and his teammates and coaches knew it, too. But to the general fan he remained obscure. The TV cameras still weren’t on Ogden, and their indifference to his work hadn’t escaped him. “There’s a little bit of satisfaction in playing well, but not that much,” he said. “Nobody pays any attention to what I do as a lineman. All those offensive linemen in the Hall of Fame. I mean, they all deserve to be there. But who knows who they are? The first one you can think of is Anthony Muñoz. The only one you can think of is Anthony Muñoz.” Generally overlooked, Ogden offered conspicuous displays of his athletic ability, just for the hell of it. It was as if he wanted the coaches who sat down and studied the game film to know how he measured up against the people getting all the attention.
That game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for example. The Ravens quarterback throws an interception. The cornerback who has picked off the pass flies down the sideline—it’s 60 yards to the end zone and there’s nothing between him and it. Most of the Ravens just watch: there’s no chance they’ll catch the speedster, so why bother? A couple give it the old college try and lumber after him for twenty yards or so, with no real intention of catching him, like old dogs chasing after a new sports car. Jonathan Ogden, however, actually tries. He doesn’t have an angle, and, really, how is a six nine, 350-pound man going to catch a five eleven, 185-pound man employed specifically for his foot speed? The angle is all wrong, and yet…he seems to be catching up. As Ogden runs, you can’t see his facial expressions or read his mind, but his body language is eloquent: you little supposedly fleet-footed sonofabitch. Me and you. One on one. Twenty-yard dash. I’ll leave you in the dust.
There’s no way that Jonathan Ogden, NFL left tackle, can be faster than an NFL cornerback, but don’t tell him that. He knows that he’s special—one of a kind. Or, perhaps, first of a breed. “To be the next me, it’s really not easy,” he said. “’Cause you really can’t teach some of the things I’ve been able to do. You can’t teach someone to be six nine. You can’t teach someone how, when they are off balance, to recover. To be good, you almost have to be born to play left tackle.” To be born to play left tackle you must be born to do a great deal more than play left tackle. With the cornerback 15 yards from the end zone, Ogden still trails him by 10 yards. Between the monster and the midget is a single player, another Tampa Bay defensive back serving, unnecessarily, as an escort. Realizing, finally, that he won’t catch the cornerback, Ogden decides to use this poor unsuspecting fellow as a human missile. Still running at full tilt, he grabs this 200-pound man and launches him at his teammate—and just misses. The cornerback who picked off the pass and ran it back for a touchdown has no idea what nearly hit him. He races into the end zone and celebrates his wonderful self. The crowd cooperates, and gives him all their attention. But they shouldn’t have.
CHAPTER TEN
THE EGG BOWL
IN 1958, WHEN A BLACK TEACHER from Gulfport, Mississippi, named Clennon King tried to enroll in Ole Miss, and was instead carted away by Mississippi state troopers to an insane asylum, the football coach couldn’t have imagined it had anything to do with him. When, in 1962, James Meredith came and stayed, the campus was engulfed in riots, and the football coach watched as his practice field became a staging area for army helicopters—but his team still went 10–0 and ended the season as national champions. But not long after that Ole Miss coaches set out to recruit the black athlete and found that history interfered. “There just aren’t that many white guys in Mississippi who can play,” said one of the Ole Miss football coaches. “The game is so much about speed now. The defense is so much about speed now. We need the best black kids if we’re going to have a chance.” But they seldom attracted the best black players; and since the early 1970s the Ole Miss football team has had about it a delicious fatalism. The civil rights movement achieved many things, and one of them was to create a plausible analogy between Ole Miss football and the Confederate army.
In part because of the needs of their local football team, there wasn’t a town in America more concerned than Oxford, Mississippi, with seeming to have dispensed with race as an issue. The effort the locals put into avoiding obvious racism rendered the near-total lack of interaction between black people and white people in Oxford, Mississippi, almost as invisible as it was in the rest of the country. The history of the place was inescapable, however, if for no other reason than all these extremely annoying outsiders kept dragging it into otherwise pleasant conversations. As late as the fall of 2004 coaches from other SEC schools—including the University of Alabama—were phoning up Michael Oher and telling him that he shouldn’t go to Ole Miss because black people weren’t welcome there. And if Michael Oher hadn’t put down the phone and found himself staring at his very own white Ole Miss family, he might have taken an interest in the subject. Mississippi’s past had created the climate for Mississippi’s present, and it would continue to do so until the present was otherwise notified. Bobby Nix, a white Ole Miss graduate from the early 1980s who now tutored football players, made this point routinely. To help the black kids feel as if they belonged at Ole Miss, Nix often took them into the places frequented by the old white affluent Ole Miss crowd. The Grove, say, or the Square. Usually he would end up feeling awkward and self-conscious. “When you show up with them,” he said, “you’ll get this look. It’s like you have the crying baby on the airplane.”
That look could have meant any number of things. The color of their skin was just the beginning of what set the Ole Miss football players apart. They had gold caps on their teeth and blue tattoos on their skins. They wore different clothes: oversized ersatz sports apparel so loose fitting that every stiff breeze threatened to leave them naked in the streets. They drove different cars—these jalopies outfitted with hubcaps worth twice the market value of the entire vehicle. You’d see them driving around in these bizarre-looking rigs with the front seats tilted so far back that the driver appeared to be an astrologist hard at work in a fully reclined Barcalounger. Many of them didn’t speak or write standard English; to all but the most attentive white Ole Miss football fan, the black football players were barely comprehensible. Many of them, according to their tutors, were less well prepared for college than Michael Oher. The typical incoming player in Michael’s class had third-grade level reading skills. Several had never taken math. Ever.
But if they wanted to play college football—if they wanted a shot at “the league”—they had to go through the tedious charade of pretending to be ordinary college students. Of the seventy players who survived Coach O’s first grueling spring practice, more than forty were classified as “academically at risk,” which meant, among other things, that they spent a great deal of their time inside a redbrick building with dark windows on the fringes of the Ole Miss campus, being spoon-fed books by an army of tutors. “We tell them that they are employees of a corporation,” said Nix, one of the more experienced of those tutors. “And that they might be dropped at any time for lack of performance.” A big part of the tutor’s job was to steer the players away from the professors and courses most likely to lead to lack of performance. The majority of the football team wound up majoring in “Criminal Justice.” What Criminal Justice had going for it was that it didn’t require any math or language skills. Criminal Justice classes were also almost always filled with other football players. Of course, football players weren’t the only Ole Miss students majoring in Criminal Justice. But when the Criminal Justice program took the field trip to Parchman Farm—aka the Mississippi State Penitentiary—the football players were the only students with friends on the inside.
When people on the streets looked at the black football players, and made Bobby Nix feel as if he was holding the crying baby on the airplane, they might have had other things in mind but the color of their skin. And in other places, Nix might have discounted those looks. Here in Oxford he couldn’t. Here every look was filtered by the past.
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The perception that Ole Miss’s treatment of black people might not be up to the high standards of, say, the University of Alabama was just one of the many problems Coach O faced when he set out to convince the region’s top high school football players to come play for him—but he couldn’t ignore it. Coach O had been hired by Ole Miss in large part because he had proven himself to be a gifted recruiter of black football players. He’d never been a head coach, or run a football offense. And while he had an obvious knack for firing up a football defense, his single most important career achievement was to have recruited a pair of national championship football teams for the University of Southern California. When Coach O had arrived in the late 1990s the USC football team was faring poorly, and losing the best Los Angeles inner-city athletes to other schools. Coach O decided that what he needed was an example. Talk just one great inner-city high school player into committing to USC, prove that he can have a great experience, and others would follow. His opinion leader had been a defensive lineman named Shaun Cody—a USA Today High School All-American who, after three years at USC, went on to become a second-round draft pick of the Detroit Lions. When Coach O looked at Michael Oher, he saw Shaun Cody. But he was more than that. Not only was Michael Oher black, famous, and the best offensive lineman anywhere near Oxford, Mississippi. Michael Oher had a white sister who was an Ole Miss cheerleader and belonged to one of the snootiest white sororities on campus. The possibilities were endless.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for word to arrive back at Ole Miss that the new head coach was out there saying he planned to build his football team on the back of Michael Oher. Ole Miss’s two starting tackles, Bobby Harris and Tre Stallings, dug out Michael Oher’s high school recruiting tape just to have a look at this new guy everyone was talking about. Stallings and Harris both were entering their senior seasons with at least a shot at playing in the NFL—Stallings would be taken in the sixth round by the Kansas City Chiefs, and Harris would sign a free agent contract with the San Francisco 49ers. Stallings, especially, expected to be the center of attention when people paid attention to Ole Miss offensive linemen. Then he rolled the tape of Michael Oher playing left tackle for the Briarcrest Christian School. “We both just laughed,” said Harris. “I’d have to say he was the best lineman I’d ever seen with my own eyes—Terrence Metcalf [of the Chicago Bears] would be second. He was just maulin’ people. Tre and me just looked at each other and said, ‘He a beast!’”
Coach O handed the same tape to George DeLeone. DeLeone, in his thirty-sixth year of coaching offensive linemen, in college and the pros, had just arrived at Ole Miss from Syracuse University. He popped in Michael’s tape, and as he watched he thought, Oh my God. “The flexibility in those hips! The arch in that back! That mass! Those feet!” he exclaimed, as he rewatched. DeLeone had seen plenty of future star NFL linemen back as college prospects. “Orlando Pace,” he said, “or Andre Gurode with the Cowboys. In my judgment Michael Oher looks just like those guys did at this stage. It’s a kinesthetic sense. You can’t teach it.”
In modern times Ole Miss’s football team had enjoyed only the briefest and most fleeting moments of glory but had always been good at sending offensive linemen to the NFL. In the most recent NFL draft—the draft of 2005—their center Chris Spencer was picked in the first round by the Seattle Seahawks, and one of their guards, Marcus Johnson, was taken in the second round by the Minnesota Vikings. Before that, Terrence Metcalf had gone to the Bears, Todd Wade to the Texans, Stacey Andrews to the Bengals, Ben Claxton to the Falcons, Tutan Reyes to the Panthers, and Key-drick Vincent to the Steelers. None of those players had been in the starting lineup his freshman year. George DeLeone assumed Michael Oher would be treated like any other great offensive line prospect. He’d be red-shirted, sit out a year, and learn the system. In his thirty-six years of college coaching DeLeone had inserted a freshman into his starting lineup just once. And that had been back in 1986, on a losing Syracuse team, in a far weaker college conference than the one Ole Miss played in. Even then, Blake Bed-narz—that was the kid’s name—had started several years in high school, weight trained seriously, and arrived at Syracuse with a good understanding of his position. And he’d stunk! “Blake ended up being a great player for us,” said DeLeone, “but he wasn’t one that year.”
Now Coach O was insisting that Michael Oher start for Ole Miss…immediately! The kid had played a grand total of fifteen high school games on the offensive line. “He’s a kid who has never really been in a weight program,” said DeLeone. “And he’ll be going up against grown men who have been in the weight room for five years. And he’s doing it in the best league in the country for defensive linemen.” To make matters worse, the college game had grown a lot more complicated in the past twenty years. The Ole Miss offense would be a combination of the Atlanta Falcons’ running game and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ passing game. DeLeone assumed that no matter how quickly the kid took to the game he’d need a full season to learn whom to block, and how to block him—and now he was being told by Coach O that Michael had some kind of learning disability, and that he’d have to teach him the plays using ketchup and mustard bottles. “A visual learner,” Coach O had called him. Whatever that meant.
With the first game of the season less than two months away, DeLeone hopped in his car and drove the hour and a half from Oxford, Mississippi, to the Tuohy home in Memphis. Ditching the Ole Miss playbook with its X’s and O’s, he gamely set out to teach Michael Oher what was essentially an NFL offense. The kitchen chairs stood in for linebackers. The fancy dining room chairs—the Tuohy lady had just enough of them, luckily—served as the defensive and offensive lines. Coach O had told him to get the kid out on the field as quickly as possible, so DeLeone turned him into a right guard. It wasn’t the kid’s natural position. His natural position was left tackle. But the right guard had physical help on either side of him, and verbal instructions, from both the center and the tackle. It was the easiest position to learn, but, even so, DeLeone did not believe any true freshman could learn it. “Michael Oher is without question one of the greatest athletes I have ever seen for a guy his size,” said DeLeone. “But what we’re asking him to do is impossible to do.”
In the safety of the Tuohys’ kitchen they made progress—the kid was driving the fancy dining room chairs off the line nicely—when Leigh Anne came through the door. When she saw Michael firing off the line and getting fit with her furniture she took control of the defense. “The linebackers can stay,” she said, tensely. “But you put my two thousand dollar dining room chairs back! Right now!” She then proceeded to tell him that she had examined his playbook with its X’s and its O’s and that it was “never going to work.”
Coach DeLeone had a better idea than changing the playbook: keep Michael on the bench. How could an offensive line coach in good conscience stick any freshman into an SEC football game, much less a lineman who didn’t know the plays? The first few games he actually tried this ploy. Coach O had made him start Michael Oher; but in the middle of the second quarter, when Coach O’s attention was diverted, he’d have an upperclassman tap Michael on the shoulder and quietly inform him he was being replaced. Michael would go sit on the bench until Coach O noticed he was there, and flip out.
Leigh Anne he assumed he could ignore; Coach O he assumed he could not. “Everyone who coaches college football is intense,” said DeLeone. “But O’s intensity is at another level.”
ALRIGHTEERIGHTEERIGHTEE righteeerighteeeee!! Hooo!…Hooo!…Hooo!…Hooo! LessgoooooLessgoooooLesssgooooo!”
It was seven o’clock in the morning, and already Coach O was out roaming the halls of the practice facility, hollering at the top of his lungs.
The players filed past him, wearily. The linemen came as a group, a study in ectomorphism. Fourteen 300-pound men lumbering down a narrow hallway was a sight worth seeing. Their movements were regular, synchronized, and slow. Each step was a discrete event, requiring conscious effort. They transferred all their wei
ght onto one leg, paused in preparation for the next three-foot-long journey, and then shoved off. They looked like a herd of circus elephants. All but one, the biggest of them all, who skipped along lightly on the balls of his feet.
Michael Oher now had a swagger about him. A lot of people he didn’t know were talking about him. Before the season Sports Illustrated had named him one of the five freshman football players in the country to watch. At one of his first practices, newly installed at right guard, Michael could only shake his head as a defensive end bull rushed the left tackle and sacked the quarterback. But after the play he walked over to the defensive end and said, “If I was left tackle you wouldn’t know what our backfield looked like. You’d need a road map.” But he wasn’t the left tackle; Bobby Harris was.
“Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Bobbah Harris YouWAKEyet????!!!! C’mon Bobbah Bobbahbobbahbobbah!…WhatyouthinkBobbyHarris??”
“Aw-rye coach,” said Bobby Harris.
“Mikka Oh! Mikka Oh! Howdooosaaaaaa!”
(Michael Oher! Michael Oher! How you doin’ son?)
“ReddostahCOMpeet’n?”
(Ready to start competing?)
“Lessturnbackdaclock. Two a days all over again! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” His voice broke and became a piercing, dog-whistle-like shriek, and then he vanished around a corner.
A human geyser of adrenaline and testosterone, he had maintained this pitch from the first day of spring practice until this morning, the day before the team was scheduled to play its final game of the season. He’d done it in spite of presiding over what had to be one of America’s most dysfunctional football teams. He’d been handed a weak and dispirited group of players and instantly set about trying to determine who among them met his standards. After three grueling weeks of spring practice, seventeen of Ole Miss’s eighty-five football players quit. Some decamped for other colleges; some just went home. Coach O immediately went looking for their replacements. Now, as the season entered its final week, his nose for available football carrion would be the envy of any vulture. He knew by heart the rosters of many junior college teams. He knew where to post ads on the Internet to solicit college football players. When Hurricane Katrina drove the Tulane University football team out of New Orleans, there, at the city limits, stood Coach O, hoping to lure away Tulane’s finest—prompting the Tulane head coach to call him, publicly, “lower than dirt.”
The Blind Side Page 26