“Why not?” she’d asked.
“That’s the one all the little rich kids carry,” he’d said.
“Michael,” she’d said. “You are a little rich kid.”
And he’d taken the backpack to school.
Bing!
The first test of Michael’s senior year was a quiz on the summer reading. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress had been assigned. Michael was incapable of reading it himself. She and Sean had taken turns every night that summer reading it aloud to him. It took two months and nearly killed them both: Sean hadn’t read a book cover to cover since—well, possibly ever. John Grisham had been at Ole Miss Law School when Sean was dazzling people on the Ole Miss basketball court. Grisham was a Sean Tuohy fan and sent Sean signed copies of his thrillers. They just piled up in Sean’s clothes closet, unread. Now Sean was up half the night, every other night, reading The Pilgrim’s Progress…aloud. They had gone over every passage of the book with Michael before the test. Leigh Anne thought he’d score a perfect 100. He got a 59. After that first day of school he brought the test score home with him, along with a long reading list, and an assignment to write a term paper. At that point Leigh Anne had turned to Sean, and Sean said, “Don’t look at me. I majored in basketball.”
She took over Michael’s academic life. Every day, without fail, she went through his North Face backpack. He’d fail a quiz or get a D on a paper and never think it worth mentioning. He wouldn’t throw away his papers and test grades but he wouldn’t volunteer them, either. She’d find the paper balled up at the bottom of the backpack. That was their biggest problem at first: he wouldn’t tell you when there was a problem. He had the most intense desire to please, without the ability to do the things that pleased. He had spent his whole life treating his mind as a problem to be covered up. He had grown so accustomed to not sharing a thing about himself, or perhaps never being asked about himself, that he didn’t even know how to begin.
He now called her “Mama.” (Except when he was pissed off at her for making him do something he didn’t want to do, in which case he called her “Ms. Tuohy.”) When he felt vulnerable, he came to her. She was now, without a doubt, the person on earth in whom Michael was most likely to confide. And in the last thirty-six hours she had learned that she didn’t know either his name or his birthday! Information about himself he viewed either as so totally without value, or so very precious, that it shouldn’t be shared with others. In the Briarcrest locker room before and after his basketball games, he changed in a bathroom stall. He was the single most private person she had ever met. Every now and again when Michael suspected he might have revealed something about himself to her, or after Leigh Anne had made some observation about him, he’d smile and say, “You think you really know me, don’t you?”
All of which raised a question: what was he hiding? The thought had crossed Leigh Anne’s mind: maybe he’s gay.
She didn’t know a lot of gay people. White Evangelical Christian Memphis—which is to say most of East Memphis—wasn’t really designed to make black people feel comfortable in it, but if you had a choice of being black in East Memphis, or being gay in East Memphis, you’d think at least twice about it. White Memphis life was organized around the churches, and the churches, at any rate most of them, viewed homosexuality as either a sin to be expiated or a disease to be treated. The vast and fast-growing Grace Evangelical Church that the Tuohys had been instrumental in creating was no softer on homosexuality than any other. Black people were perfectly welcome at Grace Evan—it’s just that none but Michael Oher ever came. Gay people, unless they were looking to be cured, were not.
Bing!
When Leigh Anne heard the fifth and final mistake she stopped praying and started cursing. “Shit!” she said, and then she began to curse him: Why couldn’t he study? Why didn’t he learn? What more could she possibly do? Then she heard another sound—of the large black woman who’d stayed behind to administer the test.
“Congratulations, Michael!” said a cheery voice. “You’ve passed the test. You come on over here and have your picture made!”
A few minutes later Michael emerged with one of the ladies, climbed into Sean’s BMW 745, and zipped off for a fifteen-minute test drive. When he returned, they handed him the first driver’s license anyone in his family had ever owned. On the way out the door, one of the ladies shouted after him, “Don’t you forget, I’m gonna have that NFL sideline pass off you!”
THERE WAS A new force in Michael Oher’s life: a woman paying extremely close attention to him who had an eye for detail, a nose for trouble, the heart of a lion, and the will of a storm trooper. A mother. “When I moved in with Leigh Anne and Sean, I felt loved,” said Michael, “like part of a family. In the other houses I didn’t feel like part of the family. I didn’t feel like they wanted me there.” The feeling was good for Michael and it was also, oddly enough, good for the Briarcrest Christian School football team. The team came out for their first real game in early September 2004. The opponent was Melrose, a public school that would wind up in the state championship game in the division for Tennessee’s biggest schools. The game was in the Liberty Bowl, and it was, from the point of view of the Michael Oher fan club, deflating. At the half, Melrose led 8–0 and went on to win 16–6. Afterwards, Hugh came up to the suite where Leigh Anne and a few of the other mothers and coaches’ wives had watched the game. “So what’d you think?” he asked Leigh Anne, not actually expecting her to have a critical thought.
“I think you have the number one left tackle in America and you ran the ball right eighty percent of the time,” said Leigh Anne, sharply. “I don’t know a lot about football but that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
Hugh Freeze’s authority on football matters was seldom questioned. Hugh had his own style, and it was, by high school and even some college standards, extremely complicated. He ran flea-flickers and fumblerooskis and double reverses and a seemingly endless variety of passing plays involving as many receivers as possible. He had one play where the quarterback hit the running back with a little screen in the middle of the field, the running back pitched it back to a wide receiver looping through the backfield, and the wide receiver chucked it 30 yards downfield to the quarterback. Of course every pro and college and even high school team has a trick play or three they can go to from time to time. The difference was that Hugh went to them routinely.
He had all these elaborate plays, in part, to compensate for what he saw as Briarcrest’s systematic lack of brute force. From time to time he’d get a talented running back or quarterback, but he always found his team overmatched on the line of scrimmage. He couldn’t power his way to victory, so he set out to trick his way to victory, and he had done it, often. He’d led the Briarcrest Christian School Saints to five of the previous six Tennessee State Championship games and, in the bargain, raised the money for a brand-new million-dollar football complex ten miles outside of town, a thirty-thousand-dollar boom on which to place his end zone cameras, and not one but two sets of uniforms (120 green helmets and 120 gold helmets). He had six paid assistant coaches and three volunteers: a former NFL offensive lineman, a former All-SEC defensive end, and a former All-SEC point guard. The only reason he didn’t charter a jet to fly his team to their away games in Nashville is that Sean talked him out of it, on the grounds that it might upset some of the more academically inclined people at Briarcrest who wondered where the football program found all this money. Hugh had just turned thirty-five years old and Sean was willing to bet that by the time he was forty-five, he’d be the head football coach at a major college. Hugh would make that bet, too. “He’s so absolutely cocky,” said Sean, “that if you don’t love him like a brother, you absolutely hate him.”
Sean and Leigh Anne both loved Hugh like a brother; on the other hand, Leigh Anne had watched the game and thought: Hugh doesn’t know how to use his most precious football asset. He had done all his fancy stuff and it hadn’t worked. Only toward the end of that game did he pound the ball over Michael’s side of the field where—lo and behold—huge holes opened up. After Leigh Anne said what she said, Hugh went silent, turned to Sean, and said, “Sean, I think it’s time for me to leave.” With that he walked out—and wouldn’t answer his cell phone when Sean called him. They’d played that game on a Saturday and so the next morning, of course, everyone went to church. After church, Hugh met in his million-dollar football field house with his ten assistant coaches to review film of the game. The lights went down; the room was solemn. For the first hour or so, Hugh didn’t say a word about the outrageous challenge to his authority. Then they came to a play where Michael missed a block. Hugh froze the film.
“Now look at that block Michael Oher just made,” he said. “Call Leigh Anne Tuohy about that one.”
“I can call her all you want, Hugh,” said Sean. “But she’s right.”
Leigh Anne had just fired the first shot in a war that was waiting to happen. After the film, Hugh got up and showed the coaches the game plan for the following week: a chalkboard that was already a blizzard of new formations and new plays. Tim Long sat in the front row and could no longer contain himself. Long had played in the NFL, and yet he had the classic lineman personality: he laid low, said little, followed orders, and insisted on his own relative unimportance. He was six five, 300 pounds, and yet had spent the past two years feeling intimidated by five-foot ten-inch Hugh Freeze, who had maybe played in high school. “He’s the sharpest football guy I’ve ever known, so I just got so I felt kinda inferior to him,” said Long. The night before, depressed after the loss to Melrose, Long had flipped on the TV. The movie Tin Cup was on, and he sat and watched the whole thing until one in the morning. Why weren’t they running the ball behind Michael Oher? He had never seen an offensive lineman who was such a force of nature that he might control an entire football game, if used properly. Now he had. In two years Long had never had the nerve to get up in front of the coaches and speak. Now he did.
“Coach Freeze, I got something to say,” he said.
“All right,” said Hugh.
Long rose. “I’m not a man of many words,” he said. “But last night I watched Tin Cup. And I watched that boy par the entire back nine using nothing but a seven-iron.”
He let that sink in.
“Well, that’s nice, Tim,” Sean said from the back of the room. “But what the hell are you talking about?”
“We can win football games running one play,” Long replied.
“All right, Tim,” said Hugh. “What play would that be?”
“Coach Freeze,” said Tim. “I think we can run Gap.”
The play was called Gap because each lineman was responsible for his own gap, defined as the space between his inside eye and the head of the defender inside of him (the eye and the defender closest to the center). The quarterback handed the ball to the running back. The running back ran at the right butt cheek of the left tackle, Michael’s gap, and followed it as far as it would take him. Michael’s job was simply to run straight down the field and destroy everything in front of him.
Michael had brought to Briarcrest an argument that ran right through football on every level—high school, college, the NFL. It was the argument Bill Walsh met when he first stressed the passing game as it had never before been stressed. It was the argument between the football fundamentalists and the football liberals. The fundamentalists reduce football to a game of brute force—and some of them do it so well that they appear to have found the secret to football success. The liberals minimize the importance of brute force and seek to overcome brute force with guile—and some of them do it so well that they, too, appear to have found the key to football success. That was Hugh: small, blond, looking nothing like a football coach but every ounce the crafty chess master, or the military strategist. Whatever his politics, Hugh was, by nature, a football liberal.
Sean Tuohy thought there was another reason, apart from his desire to win, why Hugh made everything so complicated: the pleasure of thinking up new things. “Hugh thinks football is supposed to be fun,” said Sean. “We’ve got a quarterback who is average at best. No running back. No speed at receiver. And Hugh wants to run the triple reverse.”
Hugh wanted to run a triple reverse because in his seven years as head coach of the Briarcrest Christian School Hugh had never had a player he could count on to physically overpower the bigger kids from the bigger schools. Now he had one of the most awesome forces ever to walk onto a Tennessee football field; and he didn’t at first grasp the implications of that. He thought he could keep coaching the way he had always coached, and win a state championship. He was furious at Leigh Anne because, as he later put it, “she don’t know what she’s talking about, so she should keep her mouth shut. She was speaking out of ignorance. Fact being, the entire first half, whenever we went Michael’s side, Michael was going the wrong way. He lost focus, or wasn’t thinking.” To which he added: “When you’re on the sidelines you don’t know what’s happening. It took me until halftime to figure it out.” Now he had this giant looking down at him telling him he should give the ball to the goddamn running back and let God’s gift to head football coaches escort him to the end zone.
“All right,” said Hugh.
But he didn’t mean it. It took him a full two weeks to suppress his true nature and coach football in a way he’d never coached before. (“It had to be his idea,” said Long.) Briarcrest won the next two games, but against weak opponents. The fourth game they faced another big public school, called Treadwell. Treadwell had just humiliated another white Christian school about the size and caliber of Briarcrest, the Harding Academy; and the Treadwell coach, and several Treadwell players, were quoted in the Memphis newspaper saying that they had taken care of one of the Christian schools and didn’t think the other would be much of a problem. Hugh had a problem on his hands: Treadwell was better than Briarcrest, if he played the style of football he preferred to play. Every one of Treadwell’s skill players would have started on the Briarcrest team. If they were going to win, he’d have to change; and all the coaches knew it. The day before that game, Tim Long came to practice with a 7-iron tucked in his belt.