In modern times Ole Miss’s football team had enjoyed only the briefest and most fleeting moments of glory but had always been good at sending offensive linemen to the NFL. In the most recent NFL draft—the draft of 2005—their center Chris Spencer was picked in the first round by the Seattle Seahawks, and one of their guards, Marcus Johnson, was taken in the second round by the Minnesota Vikings. Before that, Terrence Metcalf had gone to the Bears, Todd Wade to the Texans, Stacey Andrews to the Bengals, Ben Claxton to the Falcons, Tutan Reyes to the Panthers, and Key-drick Vincent to the Steelers. None of those players had been in the starting lineup his freshman year. George DeLeone assumed Michael Oher would be treated like any other great offensive line prospect. He’d be red-shirted, sit out a year, and learn the system. In his thirty-six years of college coaching DeLeone had inserted a freshman into his starting lineup just once. And that had been back in 1986, on a losing Syracuse team, in a far weaker college conference than the one Ole Miss played in. Even then, Blake Bed-narz—that was the kid’s name—had started several years in high school, weight trained seriously, and arrived at Syracuse with a good understanding of his position. And he’d stunk! “Blake ended up being a great player for us,” said DeLeone, “but he wasn’t one that year.”
Now Coach O was insisting that Michael Oher start for Ole Miss…immediately! The kid had played a grand total of fifteen high school games on the offensive line. “He’s a kid who has never really been in a weight program,” said DeLeone. “And he’ll be going up against grown men who have been in the weight room for five years. And he’s doing it in the best league in the country for defensive linemen.” To make matters worse, the college game had grown a lot more complicated in the past twenty years. The Ole Miss offense would be a combination of the Atlanta Falcons’ running game and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ passing game. DeLeone assumed that no matter how quickly the kid took to the game he’d need a full season to learn whom to block, and how to block him—and now he was being told by Coach O that Michael had some kind of learning disability, and that he’d have to teach him the plays using ketchup and mustard bottles. “A visual learner,” Coach O had called him. Whatever that meant.
With the first game of the season less than two months away, DeLeone hopped in his car and drove the hour and a half from Oxford, Mississippi, to the Tuohy home in Memphis. Ditching the Ole Miss playbook with its X’s and O’s, he gamely set out to teach Michael Oher what was essentially an NFL offense. The kitchen chairs stood in for linebackers. The fancy dining room chairs—the Tuohy lady had just enough of them, luckily—served as the defensive and offensive lines. Coach O had told him to get the kid out on the field as quickly as possible, so DeLeone turned him into a right guard. It wasn’t the kid’s natural position. His natural position was left tackle. But the right guard had physical help on either side of him, and verbal instructions, from both the center and the tackle. It was the easiest position to learn, but, even so, DeLeone did not believe any true freshman could learn it. “Michael Oher is without question one of the greatest athletes I have ever seen for a guy his size,” said DeLeone. “But what we’re asking him to do is impossible to do.”
In the safety of the Tuohys’ kitchen they made progress—the kid was driving the fancy dining room chairs off the line nicely—when Leigh Anne came through the door. When she saw Michael firing off the line and getting fit with her furniture she took control of the defense. “The linebackers can stay,” she said, tensely. “But you put my two thousand dollar dining room chairs back! Right now!” She then proceeded to tell him that she had examined his playbook with its X’s and its O’s and that it was “never going to work.”
Coach DeLeone had a better idea than changing the playbook: keep Michael on the bench. How could an offensive line coach in good conscience stick any freshman into an SEC football game, much less a lineman who didn’t know the plays? The first few games he actually tried this ploy. Coach O had made him start Michael Oher; but in the middle of the second quarter, when Coach O’s attention was diverted, he’d have an upperclassman tap Michael on the shoulder and quietly inform him he was being replaced. Michael would go sit on the bench until Coach O noticed he was there, and flip out.
Leigh Anne he assumed he could ignore; Coach O he assumed he could not. “Everyone who coaches college football is intense,” said DeLeone. “But O’s intensity is at another level.”
ALRIGHTEERIGHTEERIGHTEE righteeerighteeeee!! Hooo!…Hooo!…Hooo!…Hooo! LessgoooooLessgoooooLesssgooooo!”
It was seven o’clock in the morning, and already Coach O was out roaming the halls of the practice facility, hollering at the top of his lungs.
The players filed past him, wearily. The linemen came as a group, a study in ectomorphism. Fourteen 300-pound men lumbering down a narrow hallway was a sight worth seeing. Their movements were regular, synchronized, and slow. Each step was a discrete event, requiring conscious effort. They transferred all their weight onto one leg, paused in preparation for the next three-foot-long journey, and then shoved off. They looked like a herd of circus elephants. All but one, the biggest of them all, who skipped along lightly on the balls of his feet.
Michael Oher now had a swagger about him. A lot of people he didn’t know were talking about him. Before the season Sports Illustrated had named him one of the five freshman football players in the country to watch. At one of his first practices, newly installed at right guard, Michael could only shake his head as a defensive end bull rushed the left tackle and sacked the quarterback. But after the play he walked over to the defensive end and said, “If I was left tackle you wouldn’t know what our backfield looked like. You’d need a road map.” But he wasn’t the left tackle; Bobby Harris was.
“Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Bobbah Harris YouWAKEyet????!!!! C’mon Bobbah Bobbahbobbahbobbah!…WhatyouthinkBobbyHarris??”
“Aw-rye coach,” said Bobby Harris.
“Mikka Oh! Mikka Oh! Howdooosaaaaaa!”
(Michael Oher! Michael Oher! How you doin’ son?)
“ReddostahCOMpeet’n?”
(Ready to start competing?)
“Lessturnbackdaclock. Two a days all over again! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” His voice broke and became a piercing, dog-whistle-like shriek, and then he vanished around a corner.
A human geyser of adrenaline and testosterone, he had maintained this pitch from the first day of spring practice until this morning, the day before the team was scheduled to play its final game of the season. He’d done it in spite of presiding over what had to be one of America’s most dysfunctional football teams. He’d been handed a weak and dispirited group of players and instantly set about trying to determine who among them met his standards. After three grueling weeks of spring practice, seventeen of Ole Miss’s eighty-five football players quit. Some decamped for other colleges; some just went home. Coach O immediately went looking for their replacements. Now, as the season entered its final week, his nose for available football carrion would be the envy of any vulture. He knew by heart the rosters of many junior college teams. He knew where to post ads on the Internet to solicit college football players. When Hurricane Katrina drove the Tulane University football team out of New Orleans, there, at the city limits, stood Coach O, hoping to lure away Tulane’s finest—prompting the Tulane head coach to call him, publicly, “lower than dirt.”
Coach O wasn’t lower than dirt. He was a desperate man in a dire situation. Here he was in his first, and possibly only, shot at making it as a head coach in big-time college football. And he had no players! His defense was actually very good—and Coach O, who ran the defense, ran it well. But Coach O had no real experience with a football offense, and his offensive coaches weren’t giving him a lot of help. Each week they trotted out plays that might be run with success only by physically superior football players. And each week the Ole Miss offense ran onto the field without the faintest hope of success. Going into the final game of the season the Rebels were 3–7, but their record did not capture the flavor of their despair. In seven SEC games they were 1–6 and their lone win came against Kentucky, which was seldom a thing to be proud of. Their offense had scored the grand total of 77 points. Of the 117 Division I-A football teams Ole Miss ranked 115th in points scored. “We must have the worst offense in college football,” said Michael, and he wasn’t far wrong.
The coaching staff had passed through all the stages of grief—denial, shock, anger, sadness, resignation—and entered a stage overlooked by the psychology textbooks: the terror of total humiliation. They were about to travel to Starkville, Mississippi, to face the Mississippi State Bulldogs. The Ole Miss–Mississippi State game was called the Egg Bowl, in honor of the egg-shaped trophy passed back and forth for the previous twelve or thirteen centuries between the two schools. It had been several years since Ole Miss had lost the egg; no senior on the Ole Miss football team had suffered the indignity of surrendering the egg. It had been several years, for that matter, since Mississippi State had beaten any other team in the SEC. As Hugh Freeze, who was now Coach O’s closest confidante and chief aide de camp, put it, “This is a game we don’t need to be losing. You don’t lose to Mississippi State.”
A football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State was more than just a football game—but then that was thought to be true of many Ole Miss football games. Before the previous game, against LSU, the second-to-last game of the season, Ole Miss’s dean of students, Sparky Reardon, tried to explain the extreme emotions associated with the event. “It’s kind of like the situation in the Middle East,” he told the Ole Miss student newspaper. “Fans of one grow up hating the other and really don’t know why.” The twist to the Mississippi State rivalry was that the fans knew exactly why they hated each other. The game served as a proxy for the hoary Mississippi class struggle, between the white folks who wore shirts with collars on them and the white folks who did not. Mississippi State was a land grant college, originally called Mississippi A&M. The desperate contempt Ole Miss football fans felt for Mississippi State was echoed in the feelings of fans of the University of Texas for Texas A&M and fans of the University of Oklahoma for Oklahoma State—formerly known as Oklahoma A&M. These schools were not rivals; they were subordinates. Theirs was not a football team to be beaten but an insurrection to be put down. This notion was most vivid in the Ole Miss imagination: that the state of Mississippi, with the sole exception of the town of Oxford, was once a Great Lake of Rednecks. In recent decades the earth had warmed, and the shores of Great Lake Redneck had receded, so that, strictly speaking, perhaps it should not be described as a lake. But still, the residue was a very large puddle. And the one place in the puddle deep enough to ruin a shiny new pair of tassel loafers was Starkville, Mississippi.
And now the only thing between the players and the game was this final morning of preparation. The players stumbled in and parsed themselves into small groups according to their positions. The running backs went off into a room with their fellow running backs, the linebackers disappeared with linebackers. The fourteen offensive linemen herded themselves into what instantly appeared to be an inadequate room, and settled behind desks that seemed designed for midgets. Michael took his usual seat, in the back of the room.
If Michael Oher felt any social anxiety leaving Memphis for Oxford he hadn’t shown it. Once or twice he’d asked questions of Miss Sue about Ole Miss that suggested a certain vague apprehension. “Is it true they got fraternities that won’t let in black guys?” (It was true.) “Will I be the only person at Ole Miss who doesn’t drink?” (The small club of teetotalers was accepting all applicants.) But his wasn’t the ordinary story of the boy going away to college. He’d left home, but home had come along for the ride. Miss Sue was still his private tutor. Hugh Freeze was still his football coach. Sean and Leigh Anne were, on many nights, in the house they’d built a couple of hundred yards off the Ole Miss campus. Before the first home game of the season Sean Junior had walked just ahead of him through the Grove, hand in hand with Coach O. And when they’d gotten to the stadium Collins was right there on the sidelines, leading cheers.
He felt right at home, in his own way. He didn’t run with a crowd but he had many friends. He floated back and forth between white Ole Miss and black Ole Miss. He enjoyed his own company and kept much of himself to himself. When the other linemen chattered he just sat and watched them.
“There was a transvestite in Chevron this morning,” said one of the other linemen. “It was scary.”
Several of them started, at the horror of it. The circus elephants had stumbled upon their mouse.
“And it wasn’t buying anything either,” said the 300-pound lineman. “It was just standing there. Staring.”
“Aw, man!” said another gargantuan fellow.
“Jesus,” said a third.
Michael just shook his head and said nothing. When the digital clock turned from 7:29 to 7:30 Coach DeLeone came into the room, hunched and limping and deeply weary. T-shirt, sweat pants, reading glasses, gray hair cut in the style of a marine sergeant: if you had to guess what he did for a living you would guess George DeLeone was a retired military man, with a string of Purple Hearts. In fact he was a former undersized college lineman whose knee injuries still plagued him. He didn’t look happy, but then he had no reason to be happy. The offense had been abysmal, and the Internet pundits and the newspaper columnists were pointing to his offensive line as the problem. His situation was grim: he was on the verge of losing his job. Now he hoped to persuade his linemen to join him in grimness and to see the gravity of their predicament.