The Blind Side (23 page)

Now Fulmer was coming alone, more or less. He started his official visit to Michael Oher, accompanied by his offensive line coach and his recruiting coordinator, at Briarcrest. Hugh Freeze found Michael and pulled him out of class, and Michael was immediately struck by how happy the Tennessee coaches, and Hugh Freeze, seemed about the firing of the Ole Miss football coach. That afternoon Fulmer happened to be giving a talk at the Tennessee high school football awards ceremony, at which Michael Oher would be named Player of the Year. Michael needed to go home and don a jacket and tie, but Fulmer asked if he could pick him up there and give him a lift. Michael never said no to anyone, and he didn’t say no to Fulmer.

A few hours later, Fulmer was greeted at the Tuohys’ front door by Ole Miss alumna Miss Sue. Neglecting to mention the human remains buried under his football field, Miss Sue asked him into the house. Miss Sue offered the Tennessee coach a seat in the chair beside the Ole Miss Christmas tree, which he declined. “I’ll just stand here and wait,” he said. Miss Sue took one look at Fulmer. He didn’t have the slightest interest in saying so much as hello to her. He just stood there, awkwardly, in the blue blazer and khaki pants combo familiar to every little boy whose mama dressed him up for church. She decided he was a hick. He might be the head coach of the University of Tennessee but he didn’t have half the wit or charm of Nick Saban, not to mention his looks. (“I happen to think Nick Saban is a very good looking man.”)

Seconds later Collins raced down the stairs, a giant pair of black slacks in hand, chased by Michael, in his underpants, hollering at the top of his lungs, “Give me my pants!” He caught her in the living room, tucked her under his arm as if she were a football, looked up, and saw the head coach of the University of Tennessee. If Fulmer was disturbed by the scene, he didn’t show it.

“Michael wasn’t impressed by anyone who walked through our door,” said Collins. “He just thought: ‘Oh, here comes someone else I don’t want to talk to who’s trying to tell me why I need to go to their school.’” Now, airborne, she looked up at the Tennessee head football coach, said hello, and explained, “Michael is trying to wear black pants with his blue blazer to the awards ceremony. Tell him that doesn’t match.”

Collins watched Fulmer stand there, uneasily. She assumed he was trying to decide if he should agree with Michael or tell the truth. He told the truth. It had no effect.

Fulmer took Michael, in his black pants and blue blazer, away to the banquet, during which Michael had many pictures of his oddly dressed self taken by many newspapers. Afterwards, Fulmer insisted on driving him back home. This time when he and his entourage of assistant coaches walked through the door, Leigh Anne was waiting for them.

Phil Fulmer may not have thought Miss Sue worthy of his attention but he quickly set about ingratiating himself with Leigh Anne. He didn’t notice her Windsor valances and draw drapes. He noticed the swimming pool. (“Y’all gotta pond! Ooooo, look at that pool out there.”) Then he started making promises, and there wasn’t much, it seemed to Leigh Anne, that the coach wouldn’t promise if it meant getting Michael Oher to play for the University of Tennessee. To allay her concerns that she knew absolutely no one in Knoxville, Tennessee, he offered the Fulmer guesthouse as a home away from home. To make her feel better about the fact that Michael might be too far away to get home for Thanksgiving, he suggested they all have Thanksgiving dinner together, at the Fulmers’. Every year!

He couldn’t be nicer in his own hokey way, thought Leigh Anne, kind of like the Andy Griffith character in Mayberry R.F.D. He couldn’t have been phonier, thought Collins, who walked away and said, “That was just a lot of good ol’ country boy hoopla. He was blowing a lot of smoke up our butt.” Leigh Anne didn’t see the point of thinking ill of a football coach just trying his best to get what he most desperately wanted, but it did cross her mind that “the difference between Phil Fulmer and Nick Saban was the difference between dealing with the town mayor and dealing with the White House.”

The town mayor, for a start, didn’t know when to leave. These visits usually lasted a couple of hours. It was ten o clock at night and neither Fulmer nor his retinue showed any signs of tiring. Finally Leigh Anne realized that he was waiting to have a word with the man of the house—so she got on the phone and told Sean to quit hiding and come home, so she could go to bed.

While they waited, Sean Junior seized the moment to take the floor. “Can I ask my question?” he said.

Maybe it was Coach Fulmer’s demotic southern manner, or maybe it was just that SJ was growing bolder with age and experience. But this time he put his question bluntly. “What I want to know,” he said, after explaining the access he’d been promised to various SEC football locker rooms, “is what’s in it for me?”

“Locker room, hell,” boomed Fulmer. “You ever been to a UT football game, son?” He set the scene: one hundred and seven thousand people all dressed in orange and screaming at the top of their lungs. The band forming a capital T on the field before the game. The Tennessee football team bursting out of the locker room and running through the T, led by none other than Phil Fulmer. When he’d finished, he said: “First home game is on national television. It’s me and you running through the T, arm-in-arm.”

“And I’ll have the other arm,” said his recruiting director, Trooper Taylor.

“That’d be good,” said Sean Junior.

And so it was that Sean Senior returned home to find in his living room a very self-satisfied Tennessee football coach. He knew that Fulmer knew that there were only three schools left standing: Ole Miss, LSU, and Tennessee. Ole Miss had just fired its coach, and LSU had just lost theirs to the Miami Dolphins. That left Fulmer as the last man standing. Fulmer gave Sean his pitch—“the minute Michael walks on campus he’s my starting left tackle”—and then told him, in the spirit of Grant consoling Lee, that he understood completely that such a prominent Ole Miss Rebel might have trouble watching his son become a Tennessee Volunteer. “Phil,” said Sean, “if Archie can sit in the Tennessee stands for four years, I can sit in the Tennessee stands for four years.”

Archie was Archie Manning, the Ole Miss football legend whose son Peyton had just been named the MVP of the NFL. Before that he had spurned his father’s alma mater, Ole Miss, to go to Tennessee, where he had one of the greatest careers in the history of college quarterbacking. After Peyton announced he was going to Tennessee, the Manning family had death threats. Ten years later, there were still large numbers of Ole Miss alums with whom Archie Manning was no longer on speaking terms. Leigh Anne heard the exchange and said, “That’s fine. But I don’t look good in orange so I’m not wearing it.”

With that, Phil Fulmer, his assistant coaches, and Hugh Freeze walked out the front door. Fulmer asked Michael to walk him to the car, and Michael—who never said no—walked him to the car. A minute became two minutes became three minutes. Sean turned to Leigh Anne and asked, “You think he’s telling Fulmer that he’s going to UT right now?” Leigh Anne didn’t even want to think about it. At length, Michael came back inside.

“Did you commit to Tennessee?” asked Sean.

Michael just looked at him, and walked upstairs and went to bed.

Sean didn’t leave it at that, of course. He was perfectly happy to seem as if he had no control over the process; he wasn’t at all happy actually to have no control. He picked up the phone and called his friend, and Phil Fulmer’s agent, Jimmy Sexton. Fulmer had only been on the road five minutes and yet Sexton had already spoken to him. “I just hung up with Phil,” he said, “and Phil thinks he has him.”

At that moment Sean decided to drop his pose of indifference. “If he thinks he’s going to Tennessee,” he said, “he’s not going to Tennessee. I’m going to get LSU back in here.”

He couldn’t make Michael go to Ole Miss without crossing some kind of line he didn’t want to cross. But he had no official ties to LSU; there was nothing the slightest bit unethical about putting him on Air Taco to Baton Rouge. Sean was from Louisiana, knew people at LSU, and could control Michael’s experience there, in a way he could not at Tennessee. Hugh Freeze must have sensed Sean’s intent to upset his own best-laid plans. One night when it was just the two of them, Hugh finally broke and hollered at Sean: “Coach Tuohy, you got to let him go to Tennessee!”

But until Michael declared his intentions, Sean would do nothing at all. And, left alone, Michael didn’t declare anything. “I know Michael better than anyone,” said Sean. “And I would look at him and say: what is going on in that head?”

Michael flew off to San Antonio on Air Taco and played in Tom Lemming’s U.S. Army All-American game. Lemming invited him after Hugh Freeze called and told him “it was Michael’s lifelong dream to play in the Army all-star game,” and that the reason he hadn’t filled in the forms was that he was embarrassed by his penmanship. Sean thought Michael had fled his meeting with Lemming in haste because “he thought that to play he was going to have to join the Army.” Lemming didn’t actually believe any of this, but he had a last-minute need for someone to play center for the East squad. Michael had never played center in his life, but he did the job beautifully. After the game, Lemming forgot his dark suspicions of Michael’s character and declared in print that Michael Oher was far and away the nation’s finest offensive line prospect. At the all-star game, ESPN reporters poked microphones into the faces of the nation’s top prospects and asked them to declare their plans for college. Michael declined to answer.

Two weeks later, Ole Miss found itself another head coach. With USC about to play for the national championship, the USC defensive line coach, Ed Orgeron, formally agreed to replace David Cutcliffe. He flew to Mississippi for the press conference, where he announced that his first order of business was to persuade Michael Oher to become an Ole Miss Rebel. The press conference began in Oxford at one in the afternoon; at five Coach O was marching through the Tuohys’ front door in Memphis. Memphis had never before seen or heard anything like him. This new coach had a neck that ran like a drainage pipe from his chin to his chest, and a chest that seemed to extend all the way down to his ankles. The ankles were thin and strangely feminine, and so the effect of the whole was of a great wooden barrel teetering on toothpicks. From the depths of the barrel emerged sounds so clotted and guttural that, when you first heard them, you did not recognize them as English, or, for that matter, human speech.

“YAAAWWW BEEE BAAWWW!”

Huh?

“YAAAWWW BEEE BAAWWW!”

That’s what he bellowed as he burst through the door and got his first look at Michael in the flesh: “YAAAWWW BEEE BAAWWW!” (“You a big boy!”) Then he gave Michael a huge bear hug, followed by the sales pitch.

Michael listened to the hearty Cajun coach for a good thirty minutes, as he listened to the other coaches, only in Coach O’s case there was a twist: Michael couldn’t understand a word he said. He seemed to be saying something about being a really good recruiter, who planned to turn the Ole Miss football program around, but that he needed a star recruit like Michael Oher to kick-start the process. “It was scary,” said Michael later. “I never heard anything like that.” Leigh Anne, Collins, and Sean Junior were equally lost. Only Sean, who grew up in southeast Louisiana, could understand what Coach O was trying to say. “Coach O is pure one hundred percent coon-ass,” he explained, “and I grew up surrounded by coon-asses.”

Still, as Michael never said anything to the coaches, or even signaled nonverbally his interest in what had been said, he was, in his way, Coach O’s ideal listener. He sat in silence and pretended to understand. When Coach O finally finished, Michael asked his first sincere, formal question of the entire five months’ recruiting process.

“What,” he asked, “are you going to do for the kids that already committed to Ole Miss?”

“My jaw about hit the floor,” said Collins, who had been fixing something in the kitchen. “Michael spoke!”

Coach O sensed, shrewdly, that there was a right answer and a wrong answer to this. “Lemsday!” he bellowed. “Let them stay!”

“That’s all I want to know,” said Michael. With that Coach O, who apparently had been forewarned, turned on Sean Junior, and beat him to the punch.

“All right big boy what you got for me?” he boomed. “I know you got something.”

Even SJ was startled: word traveled fast. Apparently Coach O had heard that if he wanted to dance with Michael Oher, he’d need to pay the little fiddler. SJ’s speech grew longer with each passing coach. He now explained that Ole Miss had initially offered a locker-room pass, but then LSU had topped that offer with the offer of not merely a locker-room pass but a locker. But then Coach Fulmer came along and tossed in his wild card: running with the team through the T in front of 107,000 screaming fans. When he was done, Coach O was ready to join the bidding war.

“Son,” he said, in a grave tone. “First game of the season, you and Coach O will be walking through the Grove together.”

“The Grove” was Ole Miss’s answer to the T. Before each home game, tens of thousands of Rebel fans did not so much gather as swarm. They ate and drank and prepared their bodies for the chemical jolt of an SEC football game. The pre-game ritual climaxed with the Ole Miss players marching along a narrow brick path through the Grove that led to the stadium, known, more than a little hopefully, as “The Walk of Champions.” The whole shebang was conducted in the spirit of an ancient rite, when it was in fact the brainchild of an Ole Miss football coach in the early 1980s.