“All right, men,” he said, as he fiddled with the overhead projector. “I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me this year.”
No one said a word. Then one of them realized: “Coach, was that a joke?”
They all laughed, even Michael.
“We all set, ready to go, or we gonna laugh?” barked DeLeone, wrong-footing them utterly. “Guys! Can we just have one game where we come in on Sunday, look at the tape, and say, ‘This is how we can play as an offensive line’? Let’s play this game with some frickin’ pride on the offensive line. That means something to me, and I hope it means something to you. We can laugh next week. Laugh Sunday night. Now…”
He calmed down, without any help from his players, and pulled out his plastic sheets—the sheets with the X’s and O’s on them. Then he switched on the overhead projector and assumed his usual position beside it.
Bobby Harris gave a huge yawn.
“Sit up please, Bobby,” said Coach DeLeone.
Bobby sat up.
“Thank you.”
The final lesson of their miserable season took the form of a pop quiz: Coach DeLeone called the name of a lineman and a play. The lineman was meant to respond with his assignment on that play. The air was soon thick with jargon and code. “Rip” and “Liz” and “Willie” and “Philly” and “Rum” and “Pookie” and “Trios” and “A-Gaps” and “3-Techniques.” A gifted student of language would require a month to grasp it all. Throughout DeLeone kept one eye on his most troubling pupil, Michael Oher. Michael was now Ole Miss’s starting right guard. A third of the time he had no idea where he was meant to go, or whom he was meant to block. The other two thirds, when he knew what he was supposed to do, and was sure of himself, he’d beaten up on much older opposing players. He’d pancaked a linebacker at Tennessee, and another at Alabama, both future NFL draft picks. After he’d crushed the Tennessee kid, and as he sat on top of him, he’d gotten into his face and said, “You lucky, if I’d come here to school, you’d be getting this every day.” You had to like the kid’s confidence—taking it that way to a senior all-conference linebacker. And, as confused as he was at times, he’d had games after which the film revealed him as the best performing lineman on the team. “He’s getting by on his raw athletic ability,” said Matt Luke, a former college lineman himself turned Ole Miss assistant coach. “It’s the best I’ve ever seen. And my entire college line except me is in the NFL.”
The games in which Michael had excelled also happened to be the games before which Sean Tuohy had sat down with him for six hours or so and reviewed the plays. Now he sat rubbing his knees, pushing down so hard on them with his hands he seemed to be trying to rip off a layer of his own skin. (“That’s a nervous reaction he has,” said Leigh Anne.)
He’d put fifty hours into this course for every hour he had put into math or English. But of all the courses he had taken, the course in playing offensive line had proved the most difficult. It was the most difficult. The plays were all new to him, and in a code foreign to him, and on each play there were a mind-numbing number of variations. On a football team, only the quarterback experienced the same level of complexity as the offensive line. As Michael struggled to organize inside his mind the blizzard of new material, this sixty-something-year-old coach with his funny East Coast accent kept hollering in his ear. Coach DeLeone prided himself on his rigor and the high expectations he had for his players. “One of my players misses a class I’m here at six in the morning running him,” he said. “I know this: I don’t see a lot of history professors out there running people around the building.”
Today—the last day of preparation for the Mississippi State Bulldogs—is in theory a review. In fact, the coaches, grasping at straws, have put in new plays, with new terminology. Michael Oher isn’t the only lineman who has no clue what’s going on.
“Michael Oher!”
Michael stirred, uneasily.
“Twenty-eight Gem,” barked his coach. “Gem tells the right guard to do what?”
“Go get the Mac,” Michael said. The Mac is the middle linebacker. Unless he’s the Mike. The main thing is he’s not the Willie or the Sam—the nicknames for the other linebackers.
“Go get the Mac,” said DeLeone, approvingly.
Michael knew that much. But—he was thinking, as he sat there—the Mac moved around. So did every other player on a college defense. What if the Mac wasn’t where he was supposed to be? “The problem is,” he said later, “I got eight guys running in front of me two seconds before the ball’s snapped.” Back at Briarcrest they had three basic running plays, and Michael had been assigned to block the same man no matter what the defense. Ole Miss had dozens of running plays, with half a dozen different blocking assignments on each of them. Whom he blocked, and how he blocked them, depended on where the defenders stood at the snap of the ball. There was a good reason for the new complexity. In high school if some defender came free and went unblocked—well, the team would take that risk for the sake of keeping things simple. In college the coaches couldn’t risk a defender going completely unblocked, because the defenders were so routinely dangerous. A defender who went completely unblocked in the SEC could end the quarterback’s season.
“This is the last time to talk about these assignments,” DeLeone shouted. “We got to nail this, men!”
It was as if Coach DeLeone had read his thoughts. Even though he’d given him the right answer, the coach seemed upset. He was getting himself all worked up again.
“You must step up!” shouted Coach DeLeone.
He’d changed gears. He meant this literally—that when the ball was snapped the linemen needed to step forward, not backward. “Both guards last week stepped on the quarterback,” the line coach continued. “This cannot happen this week.” Last week they’d played LSU and lost 40–7. Against LSU the Ole Miss quarterback had gone down several times, in the most embarrassing way possible, with his foot pinned to the ground by one of his own linemen. At least one of those feet had been Michael’s.
“You must step up!!” He was screaming again. “You must step up!! We got that, Michael Oher??”
Coach DeLeone’s face was red, but his toenail was still black and blue from having been stepped on during practice, two months before, by Michael Oher.
“Yes, sir,” said Michael. He thought: If this old guy doesn’t calm down, he’s gonna have a heart attack right here and die. But, once again, the coach calmed himself. “What’s the deal with Mississippi State?” he asked, innocently.
The linemen searched in each other’s blank faces for the right answer, but failed to locate it. It was Bobby Harris who finally ventured a guess.
“That we hate them?” he said.
“Someone is saying that the Mississippi State coach is guaranteeing a win,” said DeLeone, incredulously. “They think that much of us that they’re guaranteeing a win?”
Ah—that was it. A faint stab at a motivational speech. But that wasn’t Coach DeLeone’s job. Which was just as well, as it was time to go listen to Coach O.
TEN MINUTES LATER Coach O had his football team arranged before him. One final pre-game speech to deliver before he could put this dreadful season behind him. He waited for them to quit horsing around, which they always seemed to need to do for at least ninety seconds, and then strolled with authority to the podium.
“Let me say this about Mississippi State,” he began.
He paused for dramatic effect.
“They hate you, we hate them.”
He paused again. No one could disagree.
“I purposefully have not had much for the other team. ‘Cause I don’t respect them much. I say I respect them in the paper. I don’t respect ’em. I don’t have nuthin’ for them. The other guy has been putting up the scores of last year.”
He hardly needed to explain himself because everyone in the room already understood. They might not have read the papers but they had at least heard the rumor that Sylvester Croom, Mississippi State’s head coach, has been riling up his players by posting the scores from past defeats at the hands of Ole Miss. Croom also stood accused of trash-talking. He’d gone in front of a group of Mississippi State boosters, spoken about Ole Miss, and gotten himself quoted in the papers. All he’d actually said was “I don’t ever think about Ole Miss. If our kids play as well as they can, we’re going to beat their butt.” But every right-thinking Ole Miss football fan and player must agree that Croom has violated football decorum—which is of course only what you’d expect from a Mississippi State football coach. “This is totally wrong,” Coach O now says. “Let’s put these guys way below our program. Think about class and Ole Miss. Think about how we are, think about how they are.”
A Great Lake of Rednecks!
“Understand that their team is going to come out fired up,” he continues. “He [Coach Croom] didn’t even let ’em go home for Thanksgiving. Wanted ’em all living in a hotel in Starkville. Dumpy ass hotel in Starkville. I can just about imagine it.”
Coach O actually didn’t share the social pretensions of his employer. He was just a good ol’ boy who didn’t present himself as anything but a good ol’ boy—he said his boyhood idea of going out to a fancy restaurant was driving thirty miles to Kentucky Fried Chicken. He’d have been perfectly content in a dumpy ass hotel in Starkville. He was just speaking from the Ole Miss script—and doing it well, in view of the circumstances.
The circumstances were that the Ole Miss football team, like the Mississippi State football team, consisted mostly of poor black kids from Mississippi. When the Ole Miss defense gathered in a single room, the only white people were coaches. On the football field the players became honorary white people, but off it they were still black, and unnatural combatants in Mississippi’s white internecine war. Even as Coach O worked to fire them up for the game, many of the seniors had their bags packed and their cars running. After the game they’d vanish, en masse, from the Ole Miss campus. They’d just walk right out of the locker room and get in their cars and drive away. Several who might have stayed and picked up their degrees will decide it wasn’t worth hanging around five months to do it. They’ll have spent four years shuttling between their off-campus apartments, their Criminal Justice classes, and football practice on the off chance of making it to the NFL.
Coach O was finished imagining the dumpy ass hotel in Starkville. It clearly pained him to dwell on the negative qualities of their opponents; he was by nature a positive man. He wanted to end on a positive note. “You come to school here,” he said, seriously. “You graduate. You go to the NFL. That’s what I want our program to be.” And then he began to ramble, sounding like a man talking in his sleep.
“Just gonna win tomorrow,” he said. “Focus. Details. Let’s focus.”
THE NEXT MORNING the Ole Miss Rebels’ buses rolled into Starkville. At Ole Miss there was money in the air; here there was just hostility, and the sights and sounds of resentment. Every State fan carried a cowbell, and rang it incessantly, as they hurled insults at the Ole Miss players. The players changed into their uniforms on cold concrete floors, and hung their street clothes in old wooden cubbyholes. Once dressed, they crowded into the foyer outside the locker room, like soldiers on a troop carrier about to storm a beach. That’s when one spotted, beneath a pile of cardboard boxes, empty Gatorade bottles, and surgical tape, an oddly shaped trophy badly in need of polishing.
“Dat da egg?” he asked, incredulously.
Another player looked over, then another. The Ole Miss staff had brought the old trophy along with them, in case they lost and had to hand it over.
“Dat is da egg,” said someone else.
With that, they raced out onto the field, to the clanging of cowbells and hoots of derision. Never mind the barnlike quality of the locker room; never mind the rickety old stadium itself: the football field was a work of art. There was no substance on earth more lush or thick or green or beautiful. Turfology, as it happened, was Mississippi State’s great academic strength. At the mention of State’s turf-tending skills, the Ole Miss snob would become serious and acknowledge that, whatever you might want to say about State, they knew how to grow golf courses. “Don’t forget to look down and check out the grass!” had been one of two pieces of advice Sean had given Michael before he left for the game. The other was, “Never take your helmet off in Starkville.”
And Michael didn’t, but more out of shame than fear of being brained by a beer bottle. The game took the Ole Miss team through a speeded-up version of the emotions of their season. First came hope: five plays into the game the Ole Miss quarterback, Ethan Flatt, hit his fastest receiver, Taye Biddle, for a 41-yard touchdown pass. But Biddle, one of the seniors who would quit school immediately after the game, might as well have kept on running out the back of the end zone and into his car. Ole Miss never called that play again. Instead, their offensive brain trust decided to use their unbelievably slow, fifth-string running back to test the strong interior of the Mississippi State defense. In the press box before the game, the Ole Miss offensive coordinator, Noel Mazzone, happened to walk past a TV on which was playing a North Carolina State football game. Six months earlier, Mazzone had left his job running the North Carolina State offense to take the job of running the Ole Miss offense. Seeing his former team on TV he snorted and said, loudly enough for journalists to overhear, “Should have stayed there, at least they had some players.”