The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

  Now he found himself in a dark, concrete stairwell. Downward he plunged. “Door here, door there, and I was out,” he said. “Like a thief in the night.” (“We never did figure how he got out of there,” said Bobby Spivey, of the Memphis Department of Children’s Services.)

  When he reached the street Michael still had no idea where he was. He wound up wandering for hours to cover what he later realized had been no more than half a mile between the hospital and a housing project called Dixie Homes. He arrived to find that his mother had moved again, from Dixie Homes into one of the most depressing public housing projects in Memphis: Hurt Village. Hurt Village had been built for white people back in the 1950s. The opening of its 450 units spread over 29 acres had been hailed by the mayor as “a great day in the history of Memphis.” By the late 1980s it was occupied only by blacks, who were fleeing the place as fast as they could. Hurt Village had become an inferno of gangs and drugs and crime. The city had decided to rip it down, but didn’t have the money to do the job. To spare themselves the expense of relocating the residents, the Memphis Public Housing Authority simply stopped maintaining their apartments. Without functioning air-conditioning, stoves, or refrigerators, the units became so unlivable that anyone who could leave, did. Once they’d left, the city came in and boarded up the abandoned apartment.

  It was in Hurt Village that Michael found his mother. He checked in, then ran back to Dixie Homes and hid inside the place she’d vacated. Carlos soon materialized, and together they went on the lam. During the day they remained hidden; at night they came out and foraged. “Every day you were scared that the police might get you,” said Michael. “You see the police, you just duck and dive.” Two weeks later, feeling pretty sure they were in the clear, they left the vacant apartment at Dixie Homes and rejoined their mother at Hurt Village. The Hurt Village apartment had only two bedrooms, and Dee Dee had borne still more children. She kept one bedroom for herself; the seven children now in her charge shared a bed in the other. “Lots of feet, lots of hands, lots of heads—but we managed,” said Michael.

  This place in which Michael would grow up over the next five years was, by 1996, a portrait of social dysfunction. Hurt Village still had roughly a thousand residents. There were no two-parent families: zero. Only a tiny handful of the residents held jobs. They had a mean education level between fourth and fifth grade. Seventy-five percent of the adult residents suffered from some form of mental illness. (Drug addiction counted as a mental illness.) Knowing that Hurt Village was soon to be torn down, and replaced with some other social experiment, a group of social scientists from the University of Memphis, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, began to collect data on the place. “It was its own little community,” said Cynthia Sadler, an anthropologist who worked on the project. “They did not associate with people outside of Hurt Village, and people outside of Hurt Village did not associate with them.” The zip code for Hurt Village, 38105, was social poison outside of Hurt Village. Several residents told the researchers that they’d ceased looking for work because potential employers would see their zip code and reject them out of hand. “In all our travels,” said another researcher, TK Buchanan, “we never came across a single Cadillac welfare queen.”

  By the time Michael arrived, Hurt Village was largely controlled by gangs. The Vice Lords were the biggest gang in Memphis, but the Gangster Disciples were the fastest growing and they ran Hurt Village. Delvin Lane ran the GDs, and he had an army of fifty-eight gang members in Hurt Village alone. In the early 1990s Delvin had been a dynamic quarterback for Booker T. Washington High School. He’d been set to go off to the University of Wyoming on a football scholarship. That opportunity vanished when he was sent off instead to jail, on an aggravated assault charge. He remained a natural leader, a quarterback, and, when he got out of jail, he used his talent to administer a huge and growing drug business. The GDs sold several different drugs but crack was most profitable, Delvin said, because it was the most portable and the most easily hidden. The first of the month, when the welfare checks rolled in, he made sure he had plenty of crack cocaine. Dee Dee would be waiting, cash in hand.

  For Michael’s first three years in Hurt Village, Delvin was the closest thing to the man in charge. Delvin didn’t actually live in Hurt Village but he held meetings there, and when he and his army rolled in for these they were an impressive sight: a caravan of twenty to thirty fancy cars from which emerged these expensively dressed guys completely unarmed. Everyone knew they had no guns on them, in case the police showed up; everyone also knew that within yards they had stashed an arsenal of Uzis and 380s and sawed-off shotguns, in case the Vice Lords showed up. A twelve-man security squad armed with 17-shot 9mm pistols—two clips apiece—controlled key positions. Flanking Delvin were his two biggest bodyguards. One was called “Tombstone.” Tombstone was six four, 310 pounds, and the most frightening human being anyone had ever seen—until they caught sight of Delvin’s second bodyguard, Rico Harris. Rico was known as “Big Brim,” and he stood six seven and weighed 450 pounds. Big Brim’s official title was “Chief of Security,” and his job, literally, was to watch Delvin’s back. His blind side. “Big Brim was extremely valuable to me,” said Delvin. “Especially in a club environment. Big Brim could hit one person and knock five of them down. If I’m in a club and Brim is there, I got no worries. But if it’s a smaller guy there, I got to find other guys to help.”

  For the first eighteen months after he’d fled St. Joseph’s, Michael stayed away from school, for fear of being taken by the authorities. For that year and a half he played what he thought of as a game of hide and seek with the Department of Children’s Services. In retrospect, it was never clear that the State of Tennessee knew the game was on. The amazing thing, thought Michael, was that no grown-up ever turned him in, or even questioned his status. Hundreds of adults saw him on the streets day and night—people from Hurt Village, people who knew his mother—and no one ever wondered what he was doing running around in the middle of a weekday. “No one ever said, ‘What are you doing out of school?’ he recalled. “No one made me do anything.” He guessed that if he hid out for long enough, the bad people at the Department of Children’s Services would give up looking and forget about him. And they did.

  By the time he turned twelve years old Michael Oher was completely free of social obligations. He might as well have been alone on a raft floating down the Mississippi River—which flowed, unnoticed, less than a mile from Hurt Village. He stole a bike and rode it wherever he wanted to. He played games from morning until late at night. Every now and then the older guys started shooting their guns at each other—but that was just pure entertainment. “We’d sit on the hill and watch them shoot it out,” Michael recalled. “It was like being in the Wild West.” He didn’t feel himself unsafe; the older guys with the guns left him and the other little kids alone. He played basketball ten and twelve hours a day, and grew ever more certain that he was destined to be the next Michael Jordan. Hurt Village had long since come to epitomize the despair of inner-city life, but it didn’t occur for a minute to Michael to leave. “It was fun,” he said. “Everything was fun. Nobody stopped me from doing anything.”

  He still had the old problems: where to find food and clothing. But now that he was older he was more capable of caring for himself. He got better at foraging for food, from neighbors and churches and the street. “I knew that on the first of the month you were supposed to have money to eat,” he said. “Everyone else got food and you got nothing.” He was growing so fast in every direction. Often he’d fall, and sometimes when he’d fall he’d hurt himself. Once he went over the front of his bike and opened a great gash on his elbow. He never went to the hospital; he didn’t even know what stitches were. Instead, he assumed that there was no injury, left untreated, that would not heal. The insight extended into his internal well-being. He must have calculated that emotional connections with other people were more trouble than they were worth, for, w
ith one exception, he stopped making them. The exception came when his basketball got away from him and broke a neighbor’s flower pot. The lady was nice about it; it turned out she was new to Hurt Village and had a son named Craig. Craig Vail was a shy, quiet, small boy, who also loved to play basketball. He and Craig soon became inseparable; and Michael would later say that Craig was the one person in the whole world he fully trusted.

  He also now had a kind of shadow brother: Big Zach. Zachary Bright lived a few doors down from Michael in Hurt Village. Big Zach was ten years older than Michael, but their resemblance was a constant source of wonder to the neighbors. “Everybody used to say, ‘Zach, you got a brother!’” recalled Zachary Bright. “‘Guy down the sidewalk looks just like you!’” Zach went and had a look at Michael Oher for himself and couldn’t deny the family resemblance. Their skin color was an identical dark chocolate. Their features, in the context of their huge selves, seemed small and delicate. They both had ears designed for men half their size, and narrow eyes that closed almost shut when they laughed or became angry.

  They shared a similar athletic ability, too. In 1994, two years before Michael turned up in Hurt Village, Zachary Bright had graduated from Kingsbury High School. After his junior year he’d been one of the most highly sought after college football prospects in Tennessee. He’d had scholarship offers from nearly every major football school in the country. In a high school all-star game Big Zach’s backup was Cletidus Hunt—who eventually went on to play for the Green Bay Packers. And in that game Big Zach had played defensive tackle, which wasn’t his natural position. His natural position was left tackle on offense. He was six six and, while he weighed only 265 pounds, he had a frame that would support a lot more, once he received proper nutrition. He had great long arms and the grace and agility of a star basketball player. “Zachary Bright has the potential to be a big-time offensive tackle,” Tom Lemming had written in his annual review of high school football stars.

  Coach Bobby Bowden of Florida State had the same thought. Bowden had flown Big Zach down to Tallahassee, where he’d spent two days and nights being wined and dined by Heisman Trophy winner and future NBA guard Charlie Ward and future NFL superstar Derrick Brooks. Florida State had his locker ready and a jersey (No. 71) with BRIGHT stenciled on the back. But Big Zach’s girlfriend had already given birth to their first child. She didn’t want to go to Florida State, and the truth was he didn’t really feel like doing his schoolwork or making his grades. Surrounded by friends who told him that he’d be wasting his time to even try college, he quit. He never even finished high school. When the next school year started, and Big Zach didn’t show up for it, Bobby Bowden himself came up from Florida State to Hurt Village, in search of his prized recruit. Big Zach hid out with his girlfriend and their new baby until Bowden was gone.

  Big Zach would one day reflect upon that strange and wasteful period in his life. “Guys who were around said, ‘Everyone can’t make it to the NFL,’” he said. “Telling me I wasn’t really gonna make it. Years passed by. I was still thinking I was at the top of my game. But my time was passing me on by. After a while I decided I was too old for it.” He’d shake his head in wonder at all he had thrown away and say, “I feel like I could a did something, if I were to start over and do it again. I didn’t know how close I was. All I had to do was knock on the NFL door.”

  But the wisdom, and the sadness, came much later; in 1996 he was just two years out of high school and still having fun. And suddenly all these people started coming up to him to ask if that kid now living a few doors down the block was his little brother. He grabbed the kid and took him out on the basketball court to see how he handled himself.

  Well, as it turned out. (“But it was more like football than basketball,” said Zach.) Michael Oher was no longer Michael Oher: he was “Big Mike.” Michael loathed that nickname; it was the enemy of what he hoped to become. “I didn’t want to be big,” said Michael. He wanted to be lithe and fast; he wanted to be Michael Jordan. The wider he became the more preposterous was that ambition, but it proved easier to ignore his width than to abandon his dream. Everyone might be calling him “Big Mike,” but no one ever took a picture of him. There weren’t many mirrors around, either. He seldom was faced with his own reflection. He fiddled with optical illusions, and took to wearing his shoes too small and his clothes too big. He did push-ups and sit-ups, thinking they kept him thin. He developed the odd habit—for a boy his size—of always looking for something high over his head to jump up and hit, or tap, or jump up on. Every game they played he arranged it so that his role in it stressed, and trained, his quickness and his agility. Craig was his only real friend, and Craig reassured him that no matter what anybody called him he was still, like Jordan, a born outside threat. He just had to keep working on his quick first step and his crossover dribble.

  Of course, Michael could sense his own swelling mass, but only by its effects. He was pleasantly shocked when one day, while wrestling, he just picked up a kid as if he weighed nothing and hurled him across the yard. On the other hand, he was no longer winning the foot races against the other kids—but at least he was still running them. They’d go out into the turning lane on Danny Thomas Boulevard like they always did, but now he’d be given a head start. He devoted so much time and energy to defying his own size that it couldn’t help but yield results. Even as he became one of the biggest human beings in Hurt Village, he remained quick and agile. He willed himself to be graceful—to remain a little man, inside a big man’s body. Later, college coaches who came to watch him would see a freak of nature. But where had nature left off, and nurture taken over? It was, as always, hard to say.

  Between the ages of ten and fifteen Michael Oher was left alone with his fantasy. He learned nothing in school, confined himself to the incredibly narrow life available inside Hurt Village, and developed nothing in himself apart from his athletic ability. No one told him he should be doing anything other than what he was doing. If Hurt Village was an island in the Memphis economy, Michael’s home was a hidden cave on that island. It probably helped that Delvin Lane’s Gangster Disciples discouraged its members from messing with little kids. At any rate, Michael didn’t have anything to do with the gangs or anyone else but Craig. He dipped in and out of school, and was moved along from one grade to the next, meaninglessly. He watched every one of his older brothers drop out. Marcus quit after the ninth grade, Andre and Deljuan and Rico after the eleventh, and Carlos after the tenth. Each had fathered at least one child, and among them they had fathered ten. But Michael remained happy and free, without the faintest premonition that anything would ever change, or needed to.

  Then, just before his fifteenth birthday, he met Tony Henderson. Big Tony had grown up in Hurt Village, too. He came back often in search of kids to play for the football and basketball teams he coached. If you had the skills and the size, it was hard to hide from Big Tony. Big Zach had played for Big Tony; so had Tombstone and Big Brim.

  Big Tony’s first impression of Big Mike was that his family life was unusually troubled, even by the standards of Hurt Village. His second impression was that Big Mike had no friends. “I never saw him hanging around nobody,” said Tony. “He was real quiet.” He quickly figured out that Big Mike, like half the other kids he knew, was living to be the next Michael Jordan, and Tony did what he could to help him realize the dream. The summer before Michael’s freshman year in high school Tony, through a friend, sneaked Michael into the basketball camp run by Carver High School. The first day Tony’s friend called him to say that Big Mike had fled the camp. Big Tony hustled on over and found Big Mike walking the streets, a mile away, with tears streaming down his face. He was fifteen miles from Hurt Village and he didn’t have a dime in his pockets. He was walking home, he said. The coaches had taken one look at him and told him he wasn’t a perimeter player—that he wasn’t Michael Jordan. And once he’d taken his newly assigned position in the low post, the bigger older kids alongside him had started sh
oving and hitting him. “Mike was a big ol’ kid,” said Tony, “but he didn’t want to be touched. They got mad at him because he wouldn’t knock the other kids down. The coach told him he’d never be nothing, and Mike started crying.”

  Big Tony was friends with Harold Johnson, the basketball coach at Westwood High. Westwood was a long way from Hurt Village, but Tony figured if he was driving his son Steven to Westwood he might as well drive Big Mike, too. At Westwood Big Mike played football, too, but his heart wasn’t in it. The coach just threw out the balls and went and sat in the shade, and Big Mike coasted through the year as a defensive tackle on a bad team.

  That was a shame, thought Big Tony, because Big Mike was getting seriously big. He reminded Tony of Big Zach: his size alone meant he’d attract the attention of college football coaches. For that to happen, however, he needed to get through high school, and that didn’t seem even remotely possible. He was failing his freshman classes and, on many days, didn’t even bother to show up for them. Other days Big Tony would drop Steven and Big Mike at school, and return that afternoon to find only Steven waiting. “He wasn’t going back,” said Big Tony. “Big Mike was going to drop out.” The only reason Big Mike hadn’t already gotten himself into a world of trouble, Big Tony thought, was that he was so loosely connected to the people around him. He wasn’t at the same risk as Big Zach for the simple reason that he didn’t have a crowd of friends tempting him with the fast life.

  Still, there was only so much distance any young man who dropped out of high school could put between himself and the ’hood. “He didn’t have nothing to turn to,” said Big Tony. “What chance did he have to go straight? He had no chance.” As Michael neared the end of his freshman year in high school, he had before him one obvious career path. Once he quit school he would have waiting for him a single, well-paying, high-status job: bodyguard to Delvin Lane. Or rather, since Delvin had moved on, to Delvin’s successor. The job was to watch the back of the guy who ran the only real business in the neighborhood. Left tackle of the ghetto.