The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

  Coach O wasn’t lower than dirt. He was a desperate man in a dire situation. Here he was in his first, and possibly only, shot at making it as a head coach in big-time college football. And he had no players! His defense was actually very good—and Coach O, who ran the defense, ran it well. But Coach O had no real experience with a football offense, and his offensive coaches weren’t giving him a lot of help. Each week they trotted out plays that might be run with success only by physically superior football players. And each week the Ole Miss offense ran onto the field without the faintest hope of success. Going into the final game of the season the Rebels were 3–7, but their record did not capture the flavor of their despair. In seven SEC games they were 1–6 and their lone win came against Kentucky, which was seldom a thing to be proud of. Their offense had scored the grand total of 77 points. Of the 117 Division I-A football teams Ole Miss ranked 115th in points scored. “We must have the worst offense in college football,” said Michael, and he wasn’t far wrong.

  The coaching staff had passed through all the stages of grief—denial, shock, anger, sadness, resignation—and entered a stage overlooked by the psychology textbooks: the terror of total humiliation. They were about to travel to Starkville, Mississippi, to face the Mississippi State Bulldogs. The Ole Miss–Mississippi State game was called the Egg Bowl, in honor of the egg-shaped trophy passed back and forth for the previous twelve or thirteen centuries between the two schools. It had been several years since Ole Miss had lost the egg; no senior on the Ole Miss football team had suffered the indignity of surrendering the egg. It had been several years, for that matter, since Mississippi State had beaten any other team in the SEC. As Hugh Freeze, who was now Coach O’s closest confidante and chief aide de camp, put it, “This is a game we don’t need to be losing. You don’t lose to Mississippi State.”

  A football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State was more than just a football game—but then that was thought to be true of many Ole Miss football games. Before the previous game, against LSU, the second-to-last game of the season, Ole Miss’s dean of students, Sparky Reardon, tried to explain the extreme emotions associated with the event. “It’s kind of like the situation in the Middle East,” he told the Ole Miss student newspaper. “Fans of one grow up hating the other and really don’t know why.” The twist to the Mississippi State rivalry was that the fans knew exactly why they hated each other. The game served as a proxy for the hoary Mississippi class struggle, between the white folks who wore shirts with collars on them and the white folks who did not. Mississippi State was a land grant college, originally called Mississippi A&M. The desperate contempt Ole Miss football fans felt for Mississippi State was echoed in the feelings of fans of the University of Texas for Texas A&M and fans of the University of Oklahoma for Oklahoma State—formerly known as Oklahoma A&M. These schools were not rivals; they were subordinates. Theirs was not a football team to be beaten but an insurrection to be put down. This notion was most vivid in the Ole Miss imagination: that the state of Mississippi, with the sole exception of the town of Oxford, was once a Great Lake of Rednecks. In recent decades the earth had warmed, and the shores of Great Lake Redneck had receded, so that, strictly speaking, perhaps it should not be described as a lake. But still, the residue was a very large puddle. And the one place in the puddle deep enough to ruin a shiny new pair of tassel loafers was Starkville, Mississippi.

  And now the only thing between the players and the game was this final morning of preparation. The players stumbled in and parsed themselves into small groups according to their positions. The running backs went off into a room with their fellow running backs, the linebackers disappeared with linebackers. The fourteen offensive linemen herded themselves into what instantly appeared to be an inadequate room, and settled behind desks that seemed designed for midgets. Michael took his usual seat, in the back of the room.

  If Michael Oher felt any social anxiety leaving Memphis for Oxford he hadn’t shown it. Once or twice he’d asked questions of Miss Sue about Ole Miss that suggested a certain vague apprehension. “Is it true they got fraternities that won’t let in black guys?” (It was true.) “Will I be the only person at Ole Miss who doesn’t drink?” (The small club of teetotalers was accepting all applicants.) But his wasn’t the ordinary story of the boy going away to college. He’d left home, but home had come along for the ride. Miss Sue was still his private tutor. Hugh Freeze was still his football coach. Sean and Leigh Anne were, on many nights, in the house they’d built a couple of hundred yards off the Ole Miss campus. Before the first home game of the season Sean Junior had walked just ahead of him through the Grove, hand in hand with Coach O. And when they’d gotten to the stadium Collins was right there on the sidelines, leading cheers.

  He felt right at home, in his own way. He didn’t run with a crowd but he had many friends. He floated back and forth between white Ole Miss and black Ole Miss. He enjoyed his own company and kept much of himself to himself. When the other linemen chattered he just sat and watched them.

  “There was a transvestite in Chevron this morning,” said one of the other linemen. “It was scary.”

  Several of them started, at the horror of it. The circus elephants had stumbled upon their mouse.

  “And it wasn’t buying anything either,” said the 300-pound lineman. “It was just standing there. Staring.”

  “Aw, man!” said another gargantuan fellow.

  “Jesus,” said a third.

  Michael just shook his head and said nothing. When the digital clock turned from 7:29 to 7:30 Coach DeLeone came into the room, hunched and limping and deeply weary. T-shirt, sweat pants, reading glasses, gray hair cut in the style of a marine sergeant: if you had to guess what he did for a living you would guess George DeLeone was a retired military man, with a string of Purple Hearts. In fact he was a former undersized college lineman whose knee injuries still plagued him. He didn’t look happy, but then he had no reason to be happy. The offense had been abysmal, and the Internet pundits and the newspaper columnists were pointing to his offensive line as the problem. His situation was grim: he was on the verge of losing his job. Now he hoped to persuade his linemen to join him in grimness and to see the gravity of their predicament.

  “All right, men,” he said, as he fiddled with the overhead projector. “I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me this year.”

  No one said a word. Then one of them realized: “Coach, was that a joke?”

  They all laughed, even Michael.

  “We all set, ready to go, or we gonna laugh?” barked DeLeone, wrong-footing them utterly. “Guys! Can we just have one game where we come in on Sunday, look at the tape, and say, ‘This is how we can play as an offensive line’? Let’s play this game with some frickin’ pride on the offensive line. That means something to me, and I hope it means something to you. We can laugh next week. Laugh Sunday night. Now…”

  He calmed down, without any help from his players, and pulled out his plastic sheets—the sheets with the X’s and O’s on them. Then he switched on the overhead projector and assumed his usual position beside it.

  Bobby Harris gave a huge yawn.

  “Sit up please, Bobby,” said Coach DeLeone.

  Bobby sat up.

  “Thank you.”

  The final lesson of their miserable season took the form of a pop quiz: Coach DeLeone called the name of a lineman and a play. The lineman was meant to respond with his assignment on that play. The air was soon thick with jargon and code. “Rip” and “Liz” and “Willie” and “Philly” and “Rum” and “Pookie” and “Trios” and “A-Gaps” and “3-Techniques.” A gifted student of language would require a month to grasp it all. Throughout DeLeone kept one eye on his most troubling pupil, Michael Oher. Michael was now Ole Miss’s starting right guard. A third of the time he had no idea where he was meant to go, or whom he was meant to block. The other two thirds, when he knew what he was supposed to do, and was sure of himself, he’d beaten up on much older
opposing players. He’d pancaked a linebacker at Tennessee, and another at Alabama, both future NFL draft picks. After he’d crushed the Tennessee kid, and as he sat on top of him, he’d gotten into his face and said, “You lucky, if I’d come here to school, you’d be getting this every day.” You had to like the kid’s confidence—taking it that way to a senior all-conference linebacker. And, as confused as he was at times, he’d had games after which the film revealed him as the best performing lineman on the team. “He’s getting by on his raw athletic ability,” said Matt Luke, a former college lineman himself turned Ole Miss assistant coach. “It’s the best I’ve ever seen. And my entire college line except me is in the NFL.”

  The games in which Michael had excelled also happened to be the games before which Sean Tuohy had sat down with him for six hours or so and reviewed the plays. Now he sat rubbing his knees, pushing down so hard on them with his hands he seemed to be trying to rip off a layer of his own skin. (“That’s a nervous reaction he has,” said Leigh Anne.)

  He’d put fifty hours into this course for every hour he had put into math or English. But of all the courses he had taken, the course in playing offensive line had proved the most difficult. It was the most difficult. The plays were all new to him, and in a code foreign to him, and on each play there were a mind-numbing number of variations. On a football team, only the quarterback experienced the same level of complexity as the offensive line. As Michael struggled to organize inside his mind the blizzard of new material, this sixty-something-year-old coach with his funny East Coast accent kept hollering in his ear. Coach DeLeone prided himself on his rigor and the high expectations he had for his players. “One of my players misses a class I’m here at six in the morning running him,” he said. “I know this: I don’t see a lot of history professors out there running people around the building.”

  Today—the last day of preparation for the Mississippi State Bulldogs—is in theory a review. In fact, the coaches, grasping at straws, have put in new plays, with new terminology. Michael Oher isn’t the only lineman who has no clue what’s going on.

  “Michael Oher!”

  Michael stirred, uneasily.

  “Twenty-eight Gem,” barked his coach. “Gem tells the right guard to do what?”

  “Go get the Mac,” Michael said. The Mac is the middle linebacker. Unless he’s the Mike. The main thing is he’s not the Willie or the Sam—the nicknames for the other linebackers.

  “Go get the Mac,” said DeLeone, approvingly.

  Michael knew that much. But—he was thinking, as he sat there—the Mac moved around. So did every other player on a college defense. What if the Mac wasn’t where he was supposed to be? “The problem is,” he said later, “I got eight guys running in front of me two seconds before the ball’s snapped.” Back at Briarcrest they had three basic running plays, and Michael had been assigned to block the same man no matter what the defense. Ole Miss had dozens of running plays, with half a dozen different blocking assignments on each of them. Whom he blocked, and how he blocked them, depended on where the defenders stood at the snap of the ball. There was a good reason for the new complexity. In high school if some defender came free and went unblocked—well, the team would take that risk for the sake of keeping things simple. In college the coaches couldn’t risk a defender going completely unblocked, because the defenders were so routinely dangerous. A defender who went completely unblocked in the SEC could end the quarterback’s season.

  “This is the last time to talk about these assignments,” DeLeone shouted. “We got to nail this, men!”

  It was as if Coach DeLeone had read his thoughts. Even though he’d given him the right answer, the coach seemed upset. He was getting himself all worked up again.

  “You must step up!” shouted Coach DeLeone.

  He’d changed gears. He meant this literally—that when the ball was snapped the linemen needed to step forward, not backward. “Both guards last week stepped on the quarterback,” the line coach continued. “This cannot happen this week.” Last week they’d played LSU and lost 40–7. Against LSU the Ole Miss quarterback had gone down several times, in the most embarrassing way possible, with his foot pinned to the ground by one of his own linemen. At least one of those feet had been Michael’s.

  “You must step up!!” He was screaming again. “You must step up!! We got that, Michael Oher??”

  Coach DeLeone’s face was red, but his toenail was still black and blue from having been stepped on during practice, two months before, by Michael Oher.

  “Yes, sir,” said Michael. He thought: If this old guy doesn’t calm down, he’s gonna have a heart attack right here and die. But, once again, the coach calmed himself. “What’s the deal with Mississippi State?” he asked, innocently.

  The linemen searched in each other’s blank faces for the right answer, but failed to locate it. It was Bobby Harris who finally ventured a guess.

  “That we hate them?” he said.

  “Someone is saying that the Mississippi State coach is guaranteeing a win,” said DeLeone, incredulously. “They think that much of us that they’re guaranteeing a win?”

  Ah—that was it. A faint stab at a motivational speech. But that wasn’t Coach DeLeone’s job. Which was just as well, as it was time to go listen to Coach O.

  TEN MINUTES LATER Coach O had his football team arranged before him. One final pre-game speech to deliver before he could put this dreadful season behind him. He waited for them to quit horsing around, which they always seemed to need to do for at least ninety seconds, and then strolled with authority to the podium.

  “Let me say this about Mississippi State,” he began.

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  “They hate you, we hate them.”

  He paused again. No one could disagree.

  “I purposefully have not had much for the other team. ‘Cause I don’t respect them much. I say I respect them in the paper. I don’t respect ’em. I don’t have nuthin’ for them. The other guy has been putting up the scores of last year.”

  He hardly needed to explain himself because everyone in the room already understood. They might not have read the papers but they had at least heard the rumor that Sylvester Croom, Mississippi State’s head coach, has been riling up his players by posting the scores from past defeats at the hands of Ole Miss. Croom also stood accused of trash-talking. He’d gone in front of a group of Mississippi State boosters, spoken about Ole Miss, and gotten himself quoted in the papers. All he’d actually said was “I don’t ever think about Ole Miss. If our kids play as well as they can, we’re going to beat their butt.” But every right-thinking Ole Miss football fan and player must agree that Croom has violated football decorum—which is of course only what you’d expect from a Mississippi State football coach. “This is totally wrong,” Coach O now says. “Let’s put these guys way below our program. Think about class and Ole Miss. Think about how we are, think about how they are.”

  A Great Lake of Rednecks!

  “Understand that their team is going to come out fired up,” he continues. “He [Coach Croom] didn’t even let ’em go home for Thanksgiving. Wanted ’em all living in a hotel in Starkville. Dumpy ass hotel in Starkville. I can just about imagine it.”

  Coach O actually didn’t share the social pretensions of his employer. He was just a good ol’ boy who didn’t present himself as anything but a good ol’ boy—he said his boyhood idea of going out to a fancy restaurant was driving thirty miles to Kentucky Fried Chicken. He’d have been perfectly content in a dumpy ass hotel in Starkville. He was just speaking from the Ole Miss script—and doing it well, in view of the circumstances.

  The circumstances were that the Ole Miss football team, like the Mississippi State football team, consisted mostly of poor black kids from Mississippi. When the Ole Miss defense gathered in a single room, the only white people were coaches. On the football field the players became honorary white people, but off it they were still black, and unnatural combatants in
Mississippi’s white internecine war. Even as Coach O worked to fire them up for the game, many of the seniors had their bags packed and their cars running. After the game they’d vanish, en masse, from the Ole Miss campus. They’d just walk right out of the locker room and get in their cars and drive away. Several who might have stayed and picked up their degrees will decide it wasn’t worth hanging around five months to do it. They’ll have spent four years shuttling between their off-campus apartments, their Criminal Justice classes, and football practice on the off chance of making it to the NFL.

  Coach O was finished imagining the dumpy ass hotel in Starkville. It clearly pained him to dwell on the negative qualities of their opponents; he was by nature a positive man. He wanted to end on a positive note. “You come to school here,” he said, seriously. “You graduate. You go to the NFL. That’s what I want our program to be.” And then he began to ramble, sounding like a man talking in his sleep.

  “Just gonna win tomorrow,” he said. “Focus. Details. Let’s focus.”

  THE NEXT MORNING the Ole Miss Rebels’ buses rolled into Starkville. At Ole Miss there was money in the air; here there was just hostility, and the sights and sounds of resentment. Every State fan carried a cowbell, and rang it incessantly, as they hurled insults at the Ole Miss players. The players changed into their uniforms on cold concrete floors, and hung their street clothes in old wooden cubbyholes. Once dressed, they crowded into the foyer outside the locker room, like soldiers on a troop carrier about to storm a beach. That’s when one spotted, beneath a pile of cardboard boxes, empty Gatorade bottles, and surgical tape, an oddly shaped trophy badly in need of polishing.