by Michael Oher
At that point, one of the challenges I was facing was knowing that if I went back to Alabama Plaza, where my mother was living, or if I went back to my favorite barbershop for a straight-razor shave, which helps me avoid painful razor bumps, I was now an outsider.
My mother was fine with the fact that I was going to a different school, but she didn’t really care that it was more demanding and made me responsible for my work in a totally new way, and she didn’t even seem that interested in what I was achieving athletically. If Tony picked her up before a game or a meet, she would go to cheer me on. But otherwise, she simply didn’t get involved. It felt like she didn’t actually have any interest in what I was doing or even where I was living.
I felt like an outsider around a lot of other people, too. I was now going to a fancy private school on the other side of town. Some people wanted to tease me about it and other people saw it as a kind of betrayal—like I wasn’t being true to who I was or where I came from. I just didn’t have much of a place in the old neighborhood. So I owe a lot to the Saunders family and the Sparks family, but especially the Franklin family for opening up their homes to me and letting me stay there for as long as I needed. They will always have a special place in my heart for the amazing kindness that they showed me. I was on scholarship and had enough clothes, so all I really needed was food and a place to sleep, but I know that’s still a lot to ask. If I was an inconvenience, no one showed it.
By my senior year, the scouts had started to notice me and the college coaches had started coming to see me play. So it was pretty clear that my grades mattered more than ever. And more than ever, folks stepped up to help me achieve my dream. Now, it wasn’t just about helping me earn my high school diploma; it was about helping me reach the next level. At 6:30 every morning—an hour before school started—I would take an extra class of foundational study skills to help me make up for the gaps in my earlier education, and sometimes I would review my homework and lessons to make sure that I was staying on task and learning the material at the rate I needed to. This helped give me the learning tools and the confidence to take on the rest of my regular schedule.
But the teachers weren’t just interested in helping to make me NCAA eligible. I could tell that they were teaching me because they wanted me to learn and because they knew I could. It was amazing to have that kind of support.
I’ve never struggled with the question of whether I could succeed; I only struggled with how. I was going to find a way, one way or another. I wasn’t sure of the exact path, but I knew I wasn’t going to give up until I’d achieved a better life for myself. The way that teachers and families at Briarcrest rallied around me finally showed me the missing piece in the puzzle. It was a busy and pretty crazy time, with a lot of moving pieces and a lot of complications.
And one family stepped up to the line to help me steer through it all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Finding a Family
My transition into life at Briarcrest was a rewarding one, but it was still a transition. I was still stuck with the lack of a normal family and though several wonderful ones stepped up and let me stay in their homes, I knew that those arrangements couldn’t be permanent.
So even as I stayed with the Franklins and Sparks and Saunders, I worried about where I could stay for good. I don’t think that anyone really understood the degree to which I had nowhere else to go back to. I didn’t talk about it much. I’m sure if anyone had known I was homeless, they would have called Child Protective Services believing they were acting in my best interest, and I would have found myself right back in foster care. That was the last thing I wanted, so I kept quiet.
I just tried to do my best, was respectful of the house where I was staying, and presented the best face that I could. The best way I knew how was to stay clean-shaven and always—always—ironed my clothes. I still do. It doesn’t matter if it was a shirt for school or basketball practice, I never wanted to look sloppy, so I did laundry regularly and ironed out every last wrinkle. That was one thing I had noticed: The people at Briarcrest always looked neat. If I was going to be a part of their world, I was going to make sure I was neat, too. Over the past few years, I had used my money from selling newspapers to buy myself clothes and I had enough that still fit me, so I just did my best to take care of what I owned and prayed that they wouldn’t wear out before I outgrew them.
In the meantime, strange things were happening at school.
One of the biggest differences between Briarcrest and all the other schools I’d attended was that lunch wasn’t free. In my public schools I always made sure I was in school at lunchtime even if we didn’t go to any classes during the day—at least I was guaranteed one meal a day. But at Briarcrest, everyone had to pay or pack. Free lunch wasn’t an option; my scholarship just covered tuition. So suddenly I found out that the one meal a day I always knew I could count on was gone.
Again, it was a situation where if I had told anyone, I know they would have immediately helped me out. But I didn’t, and I guess it just didn’t occur to anyone that two or three dollars a day for lunch was more than I could afford. It was one thing to bum a bed on the sofa or some food at dinnertime. It was a totally different thing to ask for money for lunch. So I just did my best to make do, having a snack if someone offered me something in the lunchroom and hoarding food whenever I could to always have a little stash I could go to.
But suddenly I discovered that I had a lunch account. I can’t remember who told me, specifically, but I just know that one day I was told that I could just get whatever I needed in the lunch line and it would be covered. The feeling of relief that day was huge. I was starting to see God at work around me; I had a need, it was met. That’s pretty powerful.
Later I would find out it was Sean Tuohy who was my cafeteria sponsor. I should have guessed it was him because he seemed especially interested in getting to know me. He was a volunteer coach for the basketball team, so I had gotten a chance to talk with him a little bit at the end of the season my sophomore year, when I first started to play. He did a lot with the track team then because his daughter, Collins, was on the team.
I had noticed him before I even started playing basketball, when I would sit in the bleachers to watch practice and remind myself of why I was working as hard as I was. He seemed like a smart coach and a nice guy. He must have noticed me, too, because he came over and talked to me one day. It wasn’t much—just a little introduction—but then I saw him again when I started playing ball and when track started up; it was nice to feel like I had a connection to one of the coaches. It would still be a long time before I would be a part of his family, though.
SCHOOL HOLIDAYS WERE SCARY TIMES FOR ME. Every other kid would be so excited about the break, talking about where their family was going on vacation or how late they were planning to sleep in. But I dreaded the times when the school would be closed. It was easy to catch a ride home with someone after practice, and then stay the night. But no school meant no practice, which also potentially meant no place to sleep. Like I said, if any one of the families I was staying with had realized that I really had nowhere to go, I know they would have welcomed me without a second thought. But I didn’t volunteer the information. In truth, my mother was back on drugs and I was afraid to go back to my old neighborhood because I felt like it might swallow me up one day and never let me back out.
Thanksgiving break of my junior year was just one of those times. A big winter storm was moving in, with sleet and wind. That was okay, though, because I had decided that I would go to the gym at the old campus to shoot hoops. I bundled up the best I could in long pants and a sweatshirt, and set off. I felt responsible, like I was doing my homework for basketball. And I felt some pride and ownership of that space: It was my school, and since I was part of the team, it was my gym, too. I knew it would be warm there, and sheltered. It seemed to me like heading to the gym was a smart decision, given the situation. It never occurred to me that it might not be open.
I didn’t even notice the silver BMW that drove past me that November morning; the part of town I was walking through is full of BMWs. It wasn’t until the car turned around and pulled up to me that I realized Coach Tuohy was driving, and there was a very tiny, very loud lady sitting next to him. When they told me that the gym was closed, I agreed to let them take me to a bus stop.
A week or two later, once school was back in session, Coach Harrington talked to me after practice one day to tell me that one of the parents at school wanted to take me shopping for some new clothes. Would I be okay with that? I wasn’t sure why anyone would want to go shopping with me, but I agreed. The next day Coach Tuohy’s wife, Leigh Anne, loaded me up in her car and we headed to a big and tall men’s shop I knew of on my end of town.
She still teases me about all the striped rugby shirts I picked out, and that scene made it into the movie. But what the film doesn’t show is the hideous shirt covered in flowers and palm leaves that she pulled for me to try on. It looked like something an old man would wear on the beach in Hawaii. It was truly ugly! I passed on that. But I did end up with some shirts that, for maybe the first time, actually felt like they fit the way they were supposed to fit. I always felt like too-small clothes just made me look bigger, and as a teenager I was still very self-conscious about my size. But clothes that were loose felt like they might hide me a bit more instead of making me look like I was so huge I was about to rip out of them like the Incredible Hulk.
As I got to know the Tuohys, they invited me to come to their house after school, an invitation I ended up accepting pretty quickly. They lived just a couple of blocks from the old campus, so I already was familiar with the area, even though high school classes had moved to the new campus south of the city. Coach Tuohy would drive me over to their house after basketball practice sometimes, and I would stay for dinner (which was whatever they ordered in, since no one in the family liked to cook). Then he would drive me back to wherever I was sleeping at the time, usually stopping at a fast-food place somewhere along the way to order me something to tide me over until breakfast.
One evening after a track meet, when I didn’t give Sean a clear answer as to where I would be staying that night, they invited me to stay the night on the sofa in the game room. And so the Tuohy family became part of my rotation. I would stay with them for a couple of nights, always trying to be sure I was a good guest by making a very neat bed with the sheets and blankets they offered, and folding them up neatly on the corner of the sofa in the morning.
The more time I spent with that family, the more I felt like I had found a home. It might have been a little bit of a crazy home with people who seemed always to be running in and out, between Collins’s friends stopping by all the time and Sean and Leigh Anne’s work schedules, but it was a comfortable kind of crazy.
To be a part of a community at Briarcrest, as well as starting to feel like part of a supportive family, made all the difference in the world for me, because I’d never been around people who were cheering me on. One of the most important things going on for me at that time was building relationships, because that was something that had been lacking in my life. Of course I had my biological family and I loved them fiercely, but as I mentioned, love was something we never discussed much in my family. We never, ever said those words to one another. And yes, while everyone around us, from social workers to foster families, could see that we all had a deep love for one another—and it is more important to show love than just to say it—a child still needs to hear those words, too.
It had been a challenge for me up to that point to feel real relationships with anyone outside of my immediate circle. I never developed relationships with other foster care kids because I knew we probably wouldn’t be together long. After all, my view of the world was that if you had family bonds, you all got split up eventually. And with foster parents, it was hard for me to believe that they loved me even if they were kind and welcoming. They didn’t birth me; they didn’t hold me when I was little. They might come to love me like their own eventually, but it was hard to believe anyone could feel that way about me right off the bat.
But I felt like the Briarcrest community wanted me there, wanted to build relationships with me, wanted to make me feel welcomed into the school’s family. And I started to feel like the Tuohys really wanted me there, too, and that they might really love me.
I didn’t start out by staying there every night. It would just be a night or two at a time before I went somewhere else. But the Tuohys started asking questions. Leigh Anne isn’t a lady who just lets things go. She asked about my family, and while I wasn’t ready to open up, I did like how she was concerned about me. I liked that she wanted to know where I was going when I left their house, even if I didn’t want to tell her. I liked that she and Sean noticed me. I didn’t feel invisible when I was with them. I liked that Collins was down to earth, not snobby like so many other girls. I liked that S.J., their son, who was just seven at the time, treated me like a big brother when I was over there, just like I had treated my own big brothers, way back when we were all still together.
They didn’t crowd me with emotion, but they also made sure I knew I was always welcome. They didn’t treat me like I was fragile, or with curiosity like I was a strange creature they had to figure out before we could get close. They treated me just like they treated everyone else, and I think that helped me feel so at home there so quickly.
I also got the sense that they seemed to understand what I was trying to do, but that I just didn’t have the tools—or even know what the tools were—that I needed to get there. I wasn’t dumb and I wasn’t lazy. I was lost and hurt and I wanted to work hard but hardly knew where to start because ambition just wasn’t anything I’d ever really seen modeled in my life.
For me just to see how those families lived—all the Briarcrest families that took me in—what their neighborhoods were like, what the rules and expectations were in their homes, had a huge impact because I was able to understand what I’d suspected, that a life like mine in childhood wasn’t normal and it wasn’t okay. And I started to get a much clearer picture of what I was aiming for.
Because my dream wasn’t about making the big bucks, it was about making a better life than what my brothers and sisters and foster siblings and I had all known. Those different families I stayed with all showed me that it was possible to feel safe from violence at night and that there actually are adults who work hard during the day and take care of their kids and encourage them to succeed in school and whatever their dreams are. And the Tuohys were the ones who were able to pour themselves into my life to help me make the most of the doors that I was trying to open.
That partnership was important for all the pieces to fall into place. I was trying to open doors and they were trying to show me the way through. It never would have worked if it had been one-sided: just me pushing but not knowing what to do with the opportunity; or them trying to guide me but me not being willing to do any of the work. There had to be a give and take.
The summer before I began my senior year of high school, the Tuohys invited me to live with them full-time. My mother didn’t really care one way or the other that I was moving out, but I was thrilled. I had started staying there most of the time, but occasionally I still would stay at other homes, too. Having a place where I could say, “I’m going home” was exciting for me. They cleared out the loft room above S.J.’s bedroom. It had been his playroom, but I didn’t mind if the pop-a-shot basketball game stayed, since he and I could (and have) played it for hours at a time. The room had high ceilings, which was nice for me to not feel like I might bump my head if I stood on my toes.
Leigh Anne drove me around to all the different homes where I’d stayed and I collected the clothes or shoes I had left there to always have something to wear for school. And when I carried everything upstairs to put it in the closet, I felt like I finally had a place in a normal home. Every night, Leigh Anne would tell the kids good nigh
t by saying, “I love you.” She said it to me, too, and I started to believe she meant it.
Everything was so different from how it had been when I’d been placed with foster families. The Tuohys treated me like a member of the family—a real family—and not just as another mouth to feed or the reason for a monthly support check. I was building real relationships with the people around me; I wasn’t just a special project to them. I was a kid who wanted to feel loved and supported and to know that my dreams and my future were just as important as anyone else’s.
It didn’t take long to adjust to life there. In no time, Collins and S.J. became as real a brother and sister to me as the ones I was related to by blood. I bonded with both of them quickly—and bonding between siblings can mean fighting, too. I would wake up early and be ready to leave for school by six o’clock. Collins, on the other hand, would roll out of bed ten minutes before first period was supposed to start. I love that she is not a high-maintenance girl who needs hours to get ready, but it would drive me crazy. Just like when I had AAU basketball practice as a kid and would always be the first one to practice, I wanted to be the first one to school. That was where I was supposed to be and it was my responsibility to be there on time. Even on mornings when I didn’t have my extra class before school started, I wanted to get there early, and if she and I were driving together, I would start to get nervous and impatient, pacing back and forth and calling upstairs every two minutes, “COME ON!!!” Days we didn’t drive together, she would often meet me in the hallway to hand me my helmet or cleats or something I had forgotten in my rush to get out the door.