TO GET INTO THE NFL Michael Oher needed to first get into college, and to get into college he needed to meet the NCAA’s academic standards. The NCAA had a sliding scale of ACT scores and grade point averages; the higher the ACT, the lower the required GPA. Given Michael’s best ACT score (12), to play college football he would need a 2.65 overall GPA. He’d finished his sophomore year with a 0.9. A better performance the back end of his junior year, when he’d moved into the Tuohy home, had raised his cumulative average to 1.564. That’s when Leigh Anne took over more completely. Before Michael’s senior year, she called every teacher at Briarcrest and asked them to tell her exactly what Michael must do to earn at least a B in their class. She didn’t expect them to just hand Michael a grade—though she wouldn’t have complained if they did. But to her way of thinking a B was the fair minimum to give any normal person willing to take the simple steps. She would hound Michael until he took those steps. Just give me the list of things he needs to do, she told the teachers, and he will do them.
And he did. Two days into his senior year he had come home, dropped his massive North Face book bag onto the kitchen table, and said, “I can’t do this.” Leigh Anne thought he was about to cry. The next morning she told him to suck it up and pushed him right back out the door. But that’s when Leigh Anne had brought in Sue Mitchell.
As a tool for overhauling the grade point average of Michael Oher, as well as for broadening his experience of white people, Sue Mitchell had a number of things to recommend her. In her thirty-five-year career she had taught at several of the toughest Memphis public schools. At Bartlett High School, her final stop, she had taken over the cheerleading squad and whipped them into five-time national champions. She had applied to work at the Briarcrest Christian School, but Briarcrest had rejected her out of hand because, though Miss Sue said she believed in God, she had trouble proving it. (“The application did not have one question about education,” Miss Sue said. “It was all about religion, and what I thought about homosexuality and drinking and smoking.”) She hadn’t been Born Again, and she didn’t often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, “We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!”
Still, in spite of these presumed defects, Miss Sue was relentless and effusive—the sort of woman who wants everything to be just great between her and the rest of the world but, if it isn’t, can adjust and go to war. And that’s what she did. She worked five nights a week, four hours each night, for free, to help get Michael Oher into Ole Miss. The Tuohy family looked on with interest. “There were days when he was just overwhelmed,” said Collins, who saw the academic drama unfold both at school and at home. “He’d just close his book and say, ‘I’m done.’” When he did this, Miss Sue opened the book for him. She didn’t care about football, but she cared about Ole Miss football, and it gave her pleasure to think she was contributing, in her way, to the Lost Cause. She also, fairly quickly, became attached to Michael. There was just something about him that made you want to help him. He tried so hard, and for so little return. “One night it wasn’t going so well and I got frustrated,” she said, “and he said to me, ‘Miss Sue, you have to remember I’ve only been going to school for two years.’”
His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael had started out a distant last and instantly fallen further behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He’d caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose, you just ran out of time.” Then they both fell about laughing.
He’d had a truly bizarre academic career: nothing but D’s and F’s until the end of his junior year, when all of a sudden he became a reliable member of Briarcrest’s honor roll. He was going to finish with a grade point average of 2.05. Yet, amazing as that was, it wasn’t enough to get him past the NCAA. He needed a 2.65. And with no more classes to take, he obviously would not get it.
Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene. Watching him pore over the NCAA rule book searching for ways to raise Michael’s grades after grades had ceased to be given out called to mind a rich man’s accountants cracking the tax code. He approached American higher education with cold calculation and joyful cynicism. One of the lessons he had picked up from his own career as an NCAA student-athlete was that good enough grades were available to anyone who bothered to exploit the loopholes. When Sean first arrived at Ole Miss, he learned, just in time, that freshman English had flunked many a jock. He went looking for a loophole and quickly found one: Beginner’s Spanish. For some reason he didn’t care to know, Ole Miss allowed freshmen to substitute a foreign language for the serious English class. He’d had eight years of Spanish in school, so the returns were impressive: two A’s in Spanish without lifting a finger instead of the two D’s in English for which he’d have had actually to read books.
Now Sean had been out of school for twenty-two years and so his grade-rigging skills were a bit rusty, but the skill for avoiding books was among the last to abandon the aging athlete. Plus he had help. Coach O was on board. Having completed his move from USC to Ole Miss, Coach O was now giving speeches to auditoriums filled with Ole Miss boosters. They didn’t understand a word he said, but he could still whip them up into a frenzy. At some point in every speech he’d say that every championship team had a rock on which it was built and the name of his rock was Michael Oher.
From Coach O, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The BYU courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere ten days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the BYU catalogue and his eyes lit upon a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in one of these “Character Courses” was to read a few brief passages from famous works—a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there—and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from Character Courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!
There was a hitch, of course; there was always a hitch. But like every great prestidigitator Sean knew that a hitch was also an opportunity. The BYU courses might be used to replace F’s on Michael Oher’s transcripts with A’s, but only if they were taken during the school year—and the school year was almost over. That’s when Sean discovered, deep in the recesses of the NCAA rules, yet another loophole: the student-athlete was allowed to generate fresh new grades for himself right up until August 1, so long as that student-athlete was “Learning Disabled.”
Whatever that meant, thought Sean. He had no idea if Michael was actually learning-disabled, but now that it was important for him to be learning-disabled, Sean couldn’t imagine any decent human being trying to argue that he wasn’t. But just in case some dark soul wanted to make that case, Sean began to compose the rebuttal in his head. “He’s just got to be LD,” he said, as he flipped through the yellow pages of his mind looking for someone to provide him with the necessary paperwork. “It’s some brain disorder in most people, but in his case it’s ’cause he didn’t sleep in a bed for the first fifteen years of his life.”
Of course he couldn’t just declare Michael learning-disabled himself: he needed a document signed by some pointy-headed shrink. Sean had no idea where to find such a person, and so he called the Briarcrest academic counselor, Linda Toombs, who came up with the name of a bona fide licensed psychological examiner—a woman named Jakatae Jessup. A few days later Sean wrote a big check to cover the cost of a battery of tests, and dropped both it and Michael at the front door of Jakatae Jessup’s office in East Memphis.
Jakatae Jessup was white. She and her colleague, Julia Huckabee, also white, had no interest in God, or in football, or in the vast majority of East Memphis defined by both. They were, by Memphis standards, charming oddballs. “Krogerites,” they called themselves—and defined the term as people who shopped at the Krogers grocery store on Sunday mornings, while the rest of Memphis went to church. Most of the children they tested came referred by public or private school administrators. These kids would be dropped off right after school and stay for several hours, with a break for dinner, which, as a part of the deal, the psychologists supplied. When Michael came through their door to have his brain examined, they were shocked by the implications. “My first thought,” said Huckabee, “was that we’re not going to have enough money to feed him.”
They gave him the Wechsler Intelligence Test, and then a series of achievement tests. They asked him what 1 plus 1 equaled. They showed him a picture of an apple and asked him what it was. They asked him to draw a picture of a house. (Michael later told Leigh Anne he thought they were testing him for insanity.) The holes in his mind were obvious enough. He was still working well below grade level. He would probably never read a book for pleasure. He’d never been taught phonics or, if he had, he’d been taught so badly that he might as well have not been taught at all. When a child knows the sound that goes with the letter, depending on its position in the word, and knows the sense of the word, depending on its position in the sentence, he can instinctively decode the language. A child who had been taught phonics can be given a nonsense word—“deprotonation,” for example, or “mibgus”—and still be able to pronounce it. Michael had no idea. “I don’t think he knows how to read yet,” said Jessup. “I think he’s just memorized a tremendous number of words.” When he sat down with a reading assignment, he was like a man with a partial combination trying to open a locked safe.
Still, it didn’t take his testers long to see that the new subject was highly unusual. They saw lots of children with glitches in their hard wiring, but they’d never seen anyone like Michael. He was eighteen years old, and he obviously hadn’t learned very much—yet he had both the ability and the desire to learn. “You can watch somebody taking an IQ test and see how they learn from experience,” said Jessup. “They get a problem, then a slightly harder version of the problem, and they can apply what they learned from the first problem to the second. Michael learned something from every single thing I put in front of him.”
Reptile eggs look a lot like bird eggs. Some are____while others are oblong.
Michael knew the answer—“round”—but he wanted them to confirm it for him. “You’re not supposed to tell a kid whether he’s right or not,” said Jessup, “but it was life or death for Michael. And it was clear we weren’t going to go on until I wrote it down. I’ve never seen kids this old still absorbing knowledge the way he is. You see it in seven-year-olds.”
At the age of sixteen, when he arrived at Briarcrest, Michael could still have been taught phonics. He wasn’t, the psychologists surmised, because he had worked very hard to disguise his grotesque deficiencies from his teachers. “He was not letting people at Briarcrest know what he could or couldn’t do,” said Jessup. “Only Michael knew that there was a big gap between where he was and where he was perceived to be.” Fearing that he wouldn’t be given the chance to catch up on the sly—that he’d be outed as stupid—he was faking it, and hoping no one noticed. But he wasn’t stupid. Far from it. “He’s great if there is any context at all,” said Jessup. “He can figure it out. He just needs a basic literacy program to decode words.”
But that’s not what most interested his intelligence testers. Michael Oher had been tested, and more than once, as a child. Those tests had pegged his IQ at 80. Now the two psychological examiners established that his IQ was currently somewhere between 100 and 110—which is to say that he was no more or less innately intelligent than most of the kids in his class at Briarcrest. The mind described by the new IQ test was not recognizably the same mind that had been tested five years earlier. “I compare it to photographs,” said Jessup. “If you put Michael then side by side with Michael now, you would not be able to recognize these two people as the same.”
That wasn’t supposed to happen: IQ was meant to be a given, like the size of one’s feet. It wasn’t as simple as that, of course, but Jessup had never seen such concrete evidence of the absurdity of treating intelligence as a fixed quantity. “We speak of fluid and crystallized intelligence,” she said. “Fluid is your ability to respond on the spot to a situation. Crystallized is what you’ve picked up along the way. The two are obviously related—how can you respond if you have no experience? When they tested Michael in the Memphis City Schools he was probably already deficient—both of those things had become compromised. He had so little experience. Then he had this rich drowning in experience that fed both of those.”
Neither she nor her partner had ever seen anything like it, and they’d both been administering these sorts of tests for twenty years. She knew the literature and so she knew that studies of the effects of environment and nurture on mental development tend to create two study groups, the haves and the have-nots. “The have-nots learn whatever words they happen to hear on TV, the haves hear a million different words by the age of three,” said Jessup. “But you only get to compare the two groups. You almost never see a case where the subject moves from one group to the other.” Those low IQ scores Michael generated as a child, they guessed, were caused by his encountering, inside the problems, a hole in his experience, and then simply giving up. Problems on the page, he’d come to assume, were problems beyond his ability to solve. “What they [Briarcrest] taught Michael was not just reading and writing and math,” said Jessup. “They taught him how to solve problems and how to learn. He stopped giving up.”