The Blind Side (25 page)

“Okay,” said the lady from the NCAA, uneasily, putting pen back to notepad.

“Tyra,” said Michael. Or, perhaps, “Tara.”

“Tyra?” asked the NCAA lady. “T-Y-R-A?”

“Uhhhh…” He was unsure. “Yes,” he finally said.

“Okay,” she said, then began to laugh. “Are these still Oher?”

“Uhhhh—” said Michael, thinking for a moment. “Yes.”

“He dudn’t know that,” said Sean. “Some are.”

“Depthia,” added Michael.

Sean watched Michael. He might not know the length of Michael’s bloodlines but he knew the depth of his anxiety. Confronted by alien authority figures, Michael froze. He was more likely to tell this woman what he thought she wanted to hear than the truth.

“Depthia?” said the lady. “Can you spell that for me?”

“D—” Michael starts, and then gave up. “No.”

“Oher or Williams?” asked the lady—because she knew that Michael’s legal name was Michael Jerome Williams.

“Oher.”

“They can’t all be Oher!” said Sean. He knew that there were at least five different fathers.

“It is Oher,” Michael insisted. Then he thought some more.

“Marcus Young,” he said.

“Okay,” said the NCAA lady. She was now shaking her head in wonder.

“David Young,” said Michael.

“Okay,” she said, scribbling away.

“How many’s that?” asked Sean, with genuine curiosity.

“Thirteen,” said the NCAA lady.

“Thirteen?” asked Michael. It was as if he couldn’t imagine how she’d arrived at such an absurdly big number. Sean Senior took the list and handed it to Michael to study. Michael stared at this list for a very long time. As he did, the NCAA lady giggled nervously. Michael announced, “You put John down twice.”

“So there’s two Marcuses?” she said, taking back her list. “Not two Johns?”

That was right. Or so he said. It had taken ten minutes just to sort out the names of Michael’s brothers and sisters. And that would be the easiest piece of personal information for the NCAA investigator to extract from Michael Oher.

“How did it come to be that—uh—you began living with the Tuohys?” she now asked.

“Uh—” said Michael. “When I came to Briarcrest my tenth-grade year. Uh. Coach Tuohy was—uh—a volunteer coach…. And, uh, I met him there. I decided to live with him summer after my junior year. He talked to me all the time. He was in my situation.”

“Okay,” said the lady, dubiously.

“He didn’t have much growing up and I didn’t have much growing up,” said Michael.

“Okay,” said the lady, even more dubiously.

“It wasn’t the summer,” said Sean. “It was before your birthday. It was about March of 2004….But he lived here off and on all the way to then.”

“Describe your living situation at the time,” said the lady. “Because when you say that, you know, that Mr. Tuohy was in your same situation, I don’t necessarily know what that means. So can you describe a little more about your situation?”

“How he didn’t have a lot coming up,” said Michael. To which he added nothing.

Her boss back in Indianapolis was an NCAA lifer named Dave Didion. Didion oversaw the investigations of the nation’s top football prospects, and said he very much enjoyed the work because “it’s like a jigsaw puzzle that comes in a box with no pictures on it.” This jigsaw puzzle was even more perplexing: the box came locked. When the NCAA investigator asked Michael when he had last seen his father, he said, “When I was about ten,” and left it at that. When she asked him why he didn’t live with his mother, he didn’t say anything at all. When she asked him who had paid his tuition at Briarcrest, he said he had no idea. When she asked him what he had done for food and clothing, his answer suggested he didn’t really need food or clothing. Exasperated, she asked Sean if perhaps he had bought clothes for Michael. To which Sean replied he’d bought him “maybe a T-shirt”—which might have been strictly true, as Leigh Anne did the shopping.

Sean didn’t trust these people. They didn’t think in terms of right and wrong. All they cared about was keeping up appearances. The NCAA rules existed, in theory, to maintain the integrity of college athletics. These investigators were meant to act as a police department. In practice, they were more like the public relations wing of an inept fire department. They might not be the last people on earth to learn that some booster or coach had bribed some high school jock, but they weren’t usually the first either. Some scandal would be exposed in a local newspaper and they would go chasing after it, in an attempt to minimize the embarrassment to the system. They didn’t care how things were, only how they could be made to seem. A poor black football star inside the home of this rich white booster could be made to seem scandalous, and so here they were, bothering Michael. The lady said she was just trying to establish the facts of the case, but the facts didn’t describe the case. If the Tuohys were Ole Miss boosters—and they most certainly were—they had violated the letter of every NCAA rule ever written. They’d given Michael more than food, clothing, and shelter. They’d given him a life.

It didn’t help that his new market value had already led Michael to become more cynical of the people around him. The point the NCAA lady was driving toward was now never very far from his mind: maybe these rich white folks had been so helpful to him the past two and a half years only because they had identified him as this precious asset. Case in point: his own high school coach. The Snake, who had been in quiet negotiations with Tennessee for a coaching job, had tried to talk him into going to Tennessee. Then right after Michael announced he was going to Ole Miss—and not Tennessee—The Snake announced that he, too, was going to Ole Miss. Coach O had offered him a job.

Sean tried to explain to Michael that that was just how the world worked—that Hugh Freeze was born to coach football and Ole Miss was lucky to have him—but Michael reserved the right to dwell on the selfish motives of others. For his senior yearbook, he’d selected his quote, from a rap song, which he’d expurgated for Briarcrest Christian School consumption: “People ask me if I ever reach the top will I forget about them? So I ask people if I don’t reach the top will y’all forget about me?”* He didn’t go so far as to treat Leigh Anne with suspicion but, as Leigh Anne put it, “with me and Sean I can see him thinking, ‘If they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to be flipping burgers at McDonald’s, would they really have had an interest in me?’”

The thing was, you never knew when these doubts would surface. When the NCAA lady finally quit bugging him about his clothes, she turned to the matter of his new pickup truck. (Who had told her about the truck?) She asked Michael if Sean had bought the truck for him as a reward for signing with Ole Miss. Sean had tried to cut her off at the pass, and treated the question as absurd. But Michael had just chuckled. “You mean, I’d a got a truck if I’d gone to Tennessee?” he asked Sean, right there in front of the NCAA investigator. He might have been joking. Then again, he might not have.

The woman let that one go, or seemed to. Putting food, clothing, and transportation to one side, she moved on to shelter. Where, she asked, had Michael slept at night, both immediately before he had come to the Briarcrest Christian School, and immediately after?

“At Tony Henderson’s,” said Michael. Big Tony. The man whose mother’s dying wish had led him to cart his son, and Michael Oher, out of the hood. Now, when Michael thought at all about Tony, he wondered why he was working so hard to stay friends with him. Once a week, it seemed, Tony reminded him of all he had done for him.

“Did you live with Tony all the way from eighth-grade year to sophomore year—or were there stops in between?” she asked.

“Stops in between,” he said.

“And so tell me…” she began.

“You ain’t got enough paper for this,” said Sean.

“You tell me where you lived,” said the NCAA lady to Michael, ignoring Sean. “’Cause that’s what I’m going to ask you. Was it just different stops per night? Who would you be living with?”

Michael began, haltingly, to list families, black and white, who had sheltered him during just the first year and a half at the Briarcrest Christian School. The lady took down the names, as she had taken down the names of his brothers and sisters, with growing incredulity. In how many different homes could one sixteen-year-old boy sleep?

“This is a huge undertaking,” said Sean. “This is like an eighty-five-page document. This is a monstrous undertaking. It was a nomad existence.”

“Okay,” she said, but to Michael, not Sean. “And that’s because of your limited resources growing up.”

Michael didn’t say anything, just nodded.

“That and because his mom was in and out of rehab centers constantly,” said Sean.

“Is it safe to assume that you didn’t have a permanent address with your mom?” asked the NCAA lady. Michael nodded. The woman became even more curious: then where on earth had he lived before he stumbled so luckily into Big Tony’s house? How had he survived? Had he been homeless as a child? That’s when Michael mumbled something about “foster homes.”

Sean was aware that Michael had had some contact with the foster home system but not because Michael had volunteered the information. Not long before, the Briarcrest football team had thrown a party for itself at the Chickasaw Country Club. The busboy had come by their table, spotted Michael, and nearly dropped his tray. Michael had jumped up and given the busboy a bear hug. Then they both began to weep. When Michael sat back down he explained, in a very few words, that they had been in a foster home together for a year, when he was around eight years old. Further details he declined to offer.

The NCAA lady now wanted the answer to a question the Tuohys had never asked: how many foster homes had Michael been in? Michael sat there thinking to himself.

“How many?” asked Sean. “Two? Three?” He was beginning to wonder why the NCAA needed to know all this stuff.

“Um,” said Michael, finally. “Two, I think.”

“And that’s here in Memphis?” asked the lady.

Michael nodded.

“I’m saying,” said Sean. “It’s a book.”

Not a good one. Michael’s answers were as nourishing as a bag of stale potato chips, and as vexing as a Rubik’s Cube. The lady was now officially frustrated. She’d come all the way from Indianapolis to interrogate Michael Oher, but she was getting no answers from Michael Oher, and too many from this rich white Ole Miss booster whose roof, for some reason, Michael Oher lived under. She stared intently at Michael and said, “Michael, you have to talk to me.” It had no obvious effect. The most basic facts of his own life he either didn’t know or didn’t recall. She must have decided that Sean was the problem because when Sean tried to answer yet another question she’d directed at Michael, she turned on him and said, “I’ll interview you later.” She might as well have said, “Shut the hell up.”

“I’m just concerned,” said Sean. “With Michael, you got to pull it out of him. And I’ll help you pull it out of him.”

If Michael disagreed with this assessment, he didn’t let on.

“Okay,” said the NCAA lady, wearily.

For the next five hours the two of them tried, each in their own way, to coax from Michael Oher his personal history. This investigation obviously turned on the Tuohys’ motives, and his. To understand motives she needed to know, or thought she needed to know, the complete biography of Michael Oher. But the biography of Michael Oher was a slippery subject. Indeed, the more you questioned Michael, the more you understood that his answers depended on the way you’d phrased the question. Ask him how many foster homes he had lived in and he would say he wasn’t sure. Ask him if he had lived in two or three different foster homes, he would treat it as a multiple choice test, with two options, and would answer “two” or “three.” Ask him, instead, if he had lived in nine or ten different foster homes, and he would have said “nine” or “ten.” He treated the NCAA investigator as he treated everyone who asked him about himself: as an intrusion. To his one-word answers he would add nothing—not a scintilla of color commentary or new information.

Five hours into the interrogation, at ten o’clock at night, Miss Sue arrived and announced that she and Michael needed to study for a test. At that moment, late in Michael’s senior year, his grades fell so short of the NCAA’s requirements that whatever crimes against college football recruiting this NCAA lady found him to have committed were irrelevant. He wouldn’t be allowed to attend Ole Miss on academic grounds. “But I’m not finished,” protested the NCAA lady. Sean asked how much more time she needed and she said, “At least five more hours.” Five more hours, both Sean and Miss Sue said, was exactly what Michael didn’t have, and wouldn’t have for many weeks.

And with that, the NCAA investigator walked out the door and past the statue of Colonel Rebel in the Tuohys’ front yard. She’d be running this information by her superiors at the NCAA, she said. If they shared her dissatisfaction, she’d be back for more. When she was gone, Michael shed his stone face for a quivering one and went and found Leigh Anne. “That lady upset me,” he said, tears in his eyes. “I never want to talk to her again.” Leigh Anne’s head swiveled angrily until her eyes found Sean. “Don’t you let that lady back in this house,” she said, as if he had any control over the NCAA. And Sean thought: Chalk this down as another sleepless night.