Yet even here, inside the NFL, Michael Oher’s life had become a Rorschach test. To some NFL scouts Michael’s story was a tribute: evidence of determination, adaptability, and intelligence. To others it was a warning flag: the kid had a “troubled past.” Before the draft, an ESPN TV reporter aired a piece on the three most dubious characters in the draft and, without explaining why or citing any evidence, listed Michael Oher among them. The Baltimore Ravens, known for drafting shrewdly, took a different view. They traded up in the first round to take Michael with the twenty-third pick.
Rising from the round table in the green room inside Radio City Music Hall, Michael Oher made his way to the podium. He was now a first-round NFL draft pick. A few weeks later, at the Ravens rookie camp, he would so impress the coaching staff that they’d install Michael on the starting offensive line; a few weeks after that, Michael would sign a $13 million contract. At that moment in the music hall, however, Michael Oher was surrounded by reporters who still wanted to shape his story in a way that was alien to his own experience of it. He was feeling triumphant, and yet the first question to greet him was: “How does it feel to fall all the way to twenty-third in the draft?” Michael seemed perplexed. “Did I fall?” he asked. “I didn’t realize that. I think I landed exactly where I was supposed to land.” It was never the green room that he was worried about getting out of.
I always thought of this as a story with a fairly simple purpose: to examine the many forces—chance encounters with a family, big changes in football strategy—that affected the value of this one unlucky turned lucky boy. Those forces have obviously changed, but the boy remains very much the same.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’M STILL SLIGHTLY EMBARRASSED by how I came upon the story told by this book, and how slow I was to pick up on it. In the fall of 2003, while passing through Memphis, I called Sean Tuohy. Sean and I had been classmates for thirteen years at the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, Louisiana. When very young we’d been good friends—there was a stretch between the first grade and the fourth during which I routinely followed him out of school to a dirt basketball court behind his house, to see how long it would take for him to score one hundred points against me. (Not long, usually.) But I hadn’t seen or heard from him in twenty-five years when I called to tell him that I was writing a magazine article about our former high school baseball coach. That evening I heard about Michael Oher, who was quickly becoming a member of Sean’s family—and paid almost no attention. I wrote the article about our coach for the New York Times Magazine, which became a book called Coach in which Sean appeared briefly, and moved on.
A few months later, kicking around the NFL for another magazine piece, I learned that the left tackle had become much more highly paid than other offensive linemen, and I wondered how that happened and what the left tackles themselves made of it. Then I learned from Sean that Michael was now being hounded by college football coaches who saw in him a future NFL left tackle. Now I was paying attention. Shortly thereafter Sean came to visit me. We went to dinner again, but this time my wife, Tabitha, came along. When we got around to the subject of Michael Oher it took Sean about ten minutes to get her laughing, twenty to get her crying, and thirty to ruin the meal. But it was worth it, because in the car on the way home she said, “I don’t understand why you are writing about anything else.” I had had the same thought but had dismissed it, as it seemed somehow unsporting, like hunting in a baited field, to turn to one’s kindergarten classmate for literary material. It was one thing to include Sean as a foil in my memoir; it was another to ransack his life for a book. So now that it’s time to slice up and distribute my gratitude, my wife deserves an extra big piece. If she hadn’t pushed me to acknowledge my interest in Michael Oher, I’m not sure I’d have pursued it.
I must also thank Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy. To them this book was a matter of some indifference. Actually, that’s not quite right. Sean pretended to be indifferent but was actually a little bit amused; Leigh Anne pretended to be indifferent but was actually a tiny bit dubious. None of the Tuohys ever asked why I was spending so much time hanging around Memphis, or their living room. No one ever asked me what I planned to write; no one ever hinted at a desire to see the manuscript before it went to print. They gave me their time, and their points of view, and left it at that. I’ll always be grateful for their openness and their generosity.
In learning about football I had a lot of help from people in college football and the NFL. Bill Walsh and Bill Parcells between them sat patiently through many sessions and countless hours of interrogation. Pat Hanlon and Ernie Accorsi of the New York Giants showed me the inside of an NFL front office several years ago, and both have continued to educate me. At the Indianapolis Colts, Craig Kelley and Bill Polian were more helpful than they know; at the San Francisco 49ers, Paraag Marathe was a steady source of knowledge and insight. Kevin Byrne of the Baltimore Ravens and Patrick Wixted of the Washington Redskins made my life a lot more fun than it should have been in their locker rooms. The Tennessee Titans’ defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz, has been kind enough over the last few years to serve as an occasional sounding board.
I also had help from many current and former NFL players. When I first set out to interview professional football players I was struck by how much easier they were to talk to than professional baseball players, who tend to treat questions as insults. I’d like to thank a few of them here for making an extra effort with me: Lawrence Taylor, Steve Wallace, Jonathan Ogden, Harry Carson, Tariq Glenn, Dwight Freeney, Anthony Muñoz, Tim Long, Joe Jacoby, Lindsay Knapp, Joe Theismann, Dan Audick, Randy Cross, and Will Wolford. To understand the market for football players I had the help of several agents: Tom Condon, Gary O’Hagan, Ralph Cindrich, and Don Yee. Yee’s client, D’Brickashaw Ferguson, the new left tackle of the New York Jets, wound up on the cutting-room floor; but he, too, was generous with his time. Laurel Ayers, widow of John Ayers, offered a moving and indispensable view of her husband. Langston Rogers made it possible for me to interview essentially the entire Ole Miss football team, and made me feel welcome from the moment I first set foot on the Ole Miss campus back in the fall of 2004. Hugh Freeze was a constant source of football insight; if I were the Ole Miss athletic director I’d just hand Hugh the offense and let him run it. There can’t be many coaches who know more about offensive line play than George DeLeone, who has left Ole Miss and now runs the offense at Temple University. I appreciate the many hours he spent trying to explain what he knows to me.
Saleem Choudhry opened his archives at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, and helped me to dig through them. The editors of Total Football II: The Official Encyclopedia of the National Football League have my enduring gratitude for compiling such a fantastic resource. Kevin Lamb’s essay on the evolution of football strategy, especially, was an inspiration. Rick Figueiredo made it possible for me to watch old 49er games. Tony Horwitz, Jacob Weisberg, and Eddie Epstein read the first draft of this book and offered me good conceptual advice. Rob Neyer went through it line by line and repaired a shockingly large quantity of my prose.
Inside W. W. Norton, which has published all but one of my books, I stressed out the production line even more than I usually do. Nancy Palmquist and Amanda Morrison did a wonderful job making sure that the misery I caused them wasn’t in turn inflicted on readers. Don Rifkin was kind enough to triple-check everything. Debra Morton Hoyt created a lovely package.
On the streets of Memphis I also needed a lot of help. Wyatt Aiken proved to be the perfect tour guide of local spiritual life. Big Tony Henderson is one of those people who makes a lot of improbable things happen, and he worked his magic often on my behalf. Delvin Lane would count as my highest-ranking friend in the Gangster Disciples, if he hadn’t relinquished his title as gang leader. When Delvin was Born Again, and decided to dedicate his life to Christ, he assumed he might be killed in the bargain. (The penalty for a senior figure quitting the Gangster Disciples was, typically, d
eath.) So I’m grateful, I suppose, to the other Gangster Disciples for making an exception of Delvin, and permitting him to live, and to educate me. Without the help of Phyllis Betts at the University of Memphis, who spearheads the social science investigation of Hurt Village, this book would have been even less well informed than it is about life in the Memphis inner city. Debra Kirkwood shared her knowledge of the Tennessee foster care system; Pat Williams related his experience helping to found the Briarcrest Christian School; and Liz Marable offered insight into the Memphis public schools, and Michael’s mind—acquired from the many hours she spent teaching basic math to him.
Michael was a funny subject because, at least at first, he had so little interest in talking about himself. He hoarded personal information the way he hoarded everything else. His memory might be a relative strength in his schoolwork, but it seemed to have neglected to record his own life experiences. When I asked Michael about his past, he claimed not to recall it and couldn’t understand why I found it interesting. He wasn’t happy to let people get to know him, and it didn’t appear he was going to make an exception for me. After a year of pestering him, I felt doomed to learn about my main character exclusively from others. Then one day Michael phoned me out of the blue. “Are you the guy who keeps asking every other person in the world questions about me when you could just come and ask me?” he said. Our conversations soon became a lot more interesting. He remembered much about his past, often in vivid detail. One of the pleasures of working on this book has been those long conversations with Michael. I’ll be cheering for him, I assume, for a long time to come.
* Most NFL teams line up in what is called a 4–3 defense. In the 4–3, the seven defenders closest to the line of scrimmage are arranged like this:
X X X
X’ X X X
In this formation the right defensive end, X’, becomes the leading blind side pass rusher. Bill Parcells—and a few other NFL coaches—prefer to line up their defense in a 3–4, which looks like this:
X’ X X X
X X X
In the 3–4, the outside right-side linebacker (X’) plays the role of lead blind side rusher.
* I’m grateful to Ben Alamar for both his thoughts on this subject and for doing most of the actual work. Alamar, a professor of sports management at Menlo College, did his first football research as a graduate student. He sought to answer the question: which is more likely to lead to team success, a good running attack or a good passing attack? And he found that a team with a relatively strong passing attack was far more likely to make the NFL playoffs. He tried to get a statistics or economics journal to publish his study, but found no takers. Five years later, to fill the void in interest in his football research, Alamar founded the Journal of Quantitative Analyses in Sports. Today he is employed as a consultant to an actual NFL team.
But Alamar is a special case; there are only a handful of people engaged in the statistical analysis of football players, and football strategies, and they don’t meet and argue and review each other’s work, the way baseball people do. (The Society of American Baseball Research has thousands of members and a tradition of peer review and annual conferences, and has, in recent years, supplied Major League Baseball front offices with a great deal of brain power. Its founder, Bill James, has a World Series ring from his work with the 2004 Boston Red Sox.) No doubt there are plenty of reasons for the relative paucity of football research, but a big one is that inquiring minds have been discouraged by the messiness of the game. It’s relatively easy to assign credit and blame on a baseball field. On a football field, there is no such thing as individual achievement. A quarterback throws an interception and it might be his own fault; but it might also be the fault of the receiver who ran the wrong route, or the blocker who allowed him to be hit as he threw. Twenty-two players are involved in every football play. To value precisely the activity of any one of them, it is first necessary to account for the actions of the other twenty-one.
Still, as Alamar points out, there are all sorts of questions about football waiting to be answered as soon as someone bothers to collect the data. One example relevant to this story: how much does the performance of quarterbacks vary with the amount of time they spend in the pocket? A critical part of any passing game—another reason for the extreme importance of left tackles—is the amount of time a quarterback has to throw the ball. The difference between a quick decision-making quarterback and a slow one is typically fractions of a second: a difference impossible to see with the naked eye. In 2004, for example, the New York Giants lost to the Arizona Cardinals, and Giants quarterback Kurt Warner was sacked six times. The New York sports press, with just a couple of interesting exceptions, vilified the Giants’ offensive line. Giants coach Tom Coughlin suspected another culprit. He stayed up that night reviewing game tape, and finally took out a stopwatch and put it on Kurt Warner: 2.5 seconds is a generous amount of time for an NFL quarterback to enjoy before he gets rid of the ball. Anything longer than 3 seconds is an eternity. On thirty of the thirty-seven pass plays the Giants ran against the Cardinals, Warner had held the ball 3.8 seconds or more. Coughlin left his offensive line intact, but the next day he benched Warner and installed rookie Eli Manning in his place.
“Time in the pocket and the rate at which the quarterback is under pressure are the two most important aspects of a team’s performance (both offensively and defensively),” says Alamar. And yet no record of it is kept.
* There’s an arcane dispute waiting for anyone who wants to have one about the meaning of the phrase “West Coast offense.” According to Paul Zimmerman, the term came from a piece he wrote for Sports Illustrated; it referred to the passing game created by Sid Gilman, and adopted by Don Coryell, at the San Diego Chargers, and others, including Walsh, mistakenly applied it to Walsh’s offense. The full intellectual history of the passing game is beyond the scope of this book, but Gilman was obviously central to it. “A football field is 53 and a 1/3 yards wide by 100,” Gilman told the Houston Post, in what in the mid-1960s counted as a radical observation. “We felt we should take advantage of the fact that the football field was that wide and that long. So our formations reflected the fact that we were going to put our outside ends wide enough so that we could take advantage of the entire width of the field. And then we were going to throw the ball far enough so that we forced people to cover the width AND the length.” Gilman was the first pro football coach to spread the field and treat the pass as the primary offensive weapon, and Walsh studied his work closely. “I think the difference between me and a lot of other people was that other people really weren’t willing to pick up on what Sid was doing,” Walsh told me. “Except for [Raider coach] Al Davis. Because it was complex.”
Walsh and Coryell followed in Gilman’s footsteps to a fork in the road, then set out in different directions: Coryell went deep and Walsh went wide. In Coryell’s system, the first receiver the quarterback looked for was the receiver going long: the high-risk option. The quarterbacks who played for Coryell passed for many yards, but also threw a lot of interceptions, and took a lot of punishment. To enable the receivers to get downfield they held the ball longer and gave pass rushers more time to get to them. This was the big difference in Walsh’s approach from previous innovators of the passing game: it stripped a lot of the risk out of passing. It was more reliable and less explosive, more mechanical and less obviously artistic. It was also more appealing to other coaches and general managers looking for a passing game to steal. If “West Coast offense” came to refer to Walsh’s passing game, and not Coryell’s, it may have been because the spread of Walsh’s demanded a catch phrase.
People who wish to stress Coryell’s importance point to the success of his Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts. The trouble with this is that Walsh coached Fouts first. When Walsh arrived in San Diego in 1976, says Fouts, “I was a mess. I was on my way to being cut or traded or whatever.” A year under Walsh, and Fouts was on his way to stardom. After Walsh left in 1977, a
nd Coryell took over, in 1978, Fouts indeed passed more frequently, and for more yards, and probably had a lot more fun than he had under Walsh—but he also threw a lot more interceptions. Fouts is reluctant to credit Walsh or Coryell alone for his success: both were instrumental. “I don’t know who gets the credit,” he says. “There’s only one Moses, but I’m not sure there’s a Moses here.” But Howard Mudd, who coached the Chargers’ offensive line at the time, and watched Fouts’s transformation, has no such ambivalence. “Bill Walsh made Dan Fouts,” Mudd says. “He stopped reading all over the field. He was looking for the player to be open rather than reading the defense. He rehearsed this constantly. Walsh created a new efficiency. And that efficiency turned Dan around totally.”
Both Mudd and Fouts note that Coryell, after he came to San Diego, preserved an important element of Walsh’s passing game: the emphasis on routes timed precisely to the quarterback’s movements. “That was the beauty of that offense,” says Fouts. “The rhythm and the timing follows from the steps the quarterback takes.”
* The bias against the pass was deeply ingrained in football. It was illegal until 1906, and even then severely restricted. It wasn’t until 1933 that a quarterback was allowed to throw a forward pass from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage. Once legalized it was disdained, in large part because it had been legalized to make the game safer, and a big point in the game’s favor, to those who played it, was its unsafety. Right up until the mid-1940s, in a rearguard attempt to slow the spread of wussiness, roughing the passer was actually encouraged. A small-college coach named Elmer Berry who had used an innovative passing attack to sneak up and beat bigger schools got so worked up about the anti-pass sentiment that he penned a counterblast, called The Forward Pass in Football. “Apparently many regard the forward pass simply as a valuable threat, something for occasional use, something to take a chance with, something the possibility of which makes the real game still workable,” Berry wrote in 1921. “To a large degree this has been the attitude of the larger colleges. In general they have frowned upon the forward pass; opposed it, sneered at it, called it basketball and done what they could to retard its adoption. It has taken away from them the advantage of numbers, weight and power, made the game one of brains, speed and strategy—even, if you please, of luck—and rendered the outcome of their ‘practice’ games with smaller colleges uncertain.”
The Blind Side Page 33