The Blind Side (7 page)

Woo!

Rather than explain tennis club etiquette, of which he vaguely disapproved anyway, Sean let them have their fun. Between sets they ran over to the concession stand where a little old lady sniffed at them, “I just think y’all are in bad taste.” To which one of the kids replied, “You must be rootin’ for that other little white guy.” The lady went off in a huff and the kids returned to the match, where the Briarcrest player kept on winning. The breaking point came when one of the kids stood up and screamed: “Keep on! You beatin’ him like a two dollar whore!” Sean tried to drag the boy by his oversized jersey back into his seat, but before he could get him down, the boy spotted the little old lady in the stands, glaring at him, and screamed: “It’s got to be killing ya, ma’am! It’s got to be killing ya!”

Afterward, Sean realized that it had been awhile since he had had so much fun. And by the time he met Big Mike, he had a new unofficial title: Life Guidance Counselor to whatever black athlete stumbled into the Briarcrest Christian School. The black kids reminded him, in a funny way, of himself.

Sean knew what it meant to be the poor kid in a private school, because he’d been one himself. First off, none of the rich kids realized that one big difference between public schools and private schools is that, in the public schools, lunch was free. Every day for several years in high school Sean arrived without lunch, or money to buy it, and bummed what he could from friends. “When food is finite,” he said, “you’d be surprised how much time you spend thinking about it.”

He also knew what it was like to think of sports as a meal ticket. His sense that his future depended on his athletic ability was driven home during his freshman year in high school, when his father, a legendary but ill-paid basketball coach, suffered a stroke and ceased to function. Sean had adored his father. From the age of three, when he had grabbed a basketball and followed him to work in the morning, he had spent the better part of his life on his father’s heels, soaking in everything he could about basketball and life. Twenty-five years later he would say, “Everything I do is still all about my daddy.” And yet when he lost his father, he, and everyone around him, went on about their lives as if the earth had not just opened and swallowed the most important person in his life. The fancy New Orleans private school was still, for him, free; lunch was not.

He’d left New Orleans for the University of Mississippi on a basketball scholarship. When he set out for Ole Miss he was a six one, 147-pound exception; he wasn’t even sure he could cut it as a college basketball player. When he walked off the court after his final game, he’d set the NCAA record for career assists; and, twenty-five years later, he still holds all meaningful SEC assist records. After he’d led Ole Miss to its first (and still only) SEC Championship, in 1981, a photograph of him, perched on top of the rim and bleeding from a cut on his chin as he cut down the nets, appeared in the New York Times. At a college still trying to figure out why their white boys were being whipped so routinely by the other team’s black boys, he was an instant legend.

That was the joy; the misery was his essential powerlessness. He was at the mercy of a single man who specialized in tearing his players apart and leaving them in pieces. From the moment he had arrived at the Ole Miss gym, Sean realized that his coach had him trapped: he could only afford to stay in school so long as he played basketball, and he played at his coach’s pleasure. His entire identity hung in the balance. “From the age of five I had been trained to do this one thing, play basketball. And if I couldn’t do that, where did it leave me?” And this coach, who had him by the short hairs, loved nothing more than to give them a yank: threatening to bench him, pull his scholarship, humiliate him in front of his hometown crowd when the Ole Miss team played in New Orleans. Early in his freshman year, for instance, the team had traveled to Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, to play in a tournament. In the first game they beat Loyola Chicago; in the finals they got beaten badly by a nationally ranked Illinois State team. The game ended just before midnight, and they were supposed to drive the four hours to the St. Louis airport, then catch an early morning commercial flight back to Memphis. Sean had played every minute of both games with a torn cartilage in his knee, and afterwards had to be treated by trainers. When he emerged from the locker room, he found a fleet of cars and only one spot left in them, right beside his coach. No one else on the team wanted to sit next to the coach. “For the next four and a half hours,” he said, “not one word was spoken. Not one word. I got a cramp in my leg and I remember holding back a scream because I was afraid of getting in trouble.”

They caught their plane, and returned to Memphis, where a bus picked them up and carried them the rest of the way to Oxford, Mississippi. “We drove onto campus. There isn’t anyone there. It’s Christmas Day. It’s now eleven in the morning and we still haven’t slept. Coach gets up in the front of the bus and says, ‘Dressed, stretched, and taped. Thirty minutes.’ And I just remember going: ‘I don’t know about y’all but I haven’t slept.’”

Still, the players all trudged to the locker room, donned practice uniforms, and set out for the film room. That’s how practice always started: by watching films of their most recent performance and being humiliated by Coach. The players found their seats, the lights went down, and Coach entered the room. He always took a wide circle on his way to his lounge chair in the back: the players felt watched. “I had played forty minutes of both games,” Sean said. “My knee was swelled up as big as Dallas. We hadn’t slept. It’s my first Christmas away from home. Coach walked around so he was right behind me and stopped. Never once in four years did he call me ‘Sean.’ It was either ‘Buddy’ or ‘Twelve.’ Now he comes right up behind me and says,

“‘Hey Twelve. Merry Fucking Christmas.’

“The lights went out and I cried for the next forty-five minutes. The assistant coach literally sat there rubbing my back and patting me.”

For four years he’d played what he called “survival ball.” He had to play, or he couldn’t afford school. The New Jersey Nets drafted him in a late round to play in the NBA, but the desire had gone out of him. He left Ole Miss with a fiancée and a new religion. But he left without a penny.

Now, by the fall of 2002, he’d become, by just about every way they measured it in Memphis, a success. He’d been Born Again, and helped to create one of the fastest growing evangelical churches in Memphis, the Grace Evangelical Church. He’d married the Ole Miss cheerleader who, twenty-five years later, could still pass for an Ole Miss cheerleader. He owned a chain of eighty-five Taco Bells, KFCs, and Long John Silver restaurants, along with a mountain of debt. His financial life remained risky. If everything broke right, he might soon be worth as much as $50 million. If everything did not break right, he could always call games for the Memphis Grizzlies. What Atlanta was to the American South, Sean Tuohy was to the white southern male. Prosperous. Forever upgrading the trappings of his existence. Happy to exchange his past at a deep discount for a piece of the future.

It wasn’t enough. The restaurants ran themselves, the Grizzlies gig was a night job, church was on Sundays. He needed overt drama in his life. He was a person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands. He’d played the role for so long that he’d become the role. And he now had all the time in the world for what he still loved more than anything: hanging around school gyms and acting as a kind of consultant to the coaches at Briarcrest in their dealings with their players. Sean was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interested in opera singers or a Jesuit scholar in debaters. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. “What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,” he said, “was what not to do: beat up a kid. It’s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.”

Collins had mentioned Big Mike to him. When she tried to pass him on the stairwell, she said, she had to back up to the top, because she couldn’t fit past him. Without uttering a peep, the kid had become the talk of the school. Everyone was frightened of him, she said, until they realized that he was far more terrified of them. Sean had seen Big Mike around the halls three or four times. He’d noticed that he wore the same clothes every day: cutoff blue jeans and an oversized T-shirt. Now he saw him in the stands and thought: I’ll bet he’s hungry. Sean walked over and said, “You don’t know me, but we have more in common than you might think.”

Michael Oher stared intently at his feet.

“What did you have to eat for lunch today?” Sean asked.

“In the cafeteria,” said the kid.

“I didn’t ask where you ate,” said Sean. “I asked what you ate.”

“Had a few things,” said the kid.

Sure you did, thought Sean. He asked if he needed money for lunch, and Mike said, “I don’t need any money.”

The next day, Sean went to the Briarcrest accounting department and arranged for Michael Oher to have a standing charge card at the lunch checkout counter. He’d done the same for several of the poorer black kids who had come to Briarcrest. In a couple of cases he had, in effect, paid their tuition, by giving money to a school fund earmarked for scholarships for those who couldn’t afford tuition. “That was my only connection with Michael,” he said later. “Lunch.”

Sean left it at lunch, and at lunch it might have ended. But a few weeks later, the Briarcrest Christian School took its Thanksgiving Break. One cold and blustery morning Sean and his wife, Leigh Anne, were driving down one of the main boulevards of East Memphis when, off a bus just ahead of them, steps this huge black kid. He was dressed in the same pair of cutoff jeans and T-shirt he always wore. Sean pointed him out to his wife and said, “That kid I was telling you about—that’s him. Big Mike.”

“But he’s wearing shorts,” she said.

“Uh-huh. He always wears those.”

“Sean, it’s snowing!”

And so it was. At Leigh Anne’s insistence, they pulled over. Sean reintroduced himself to Michael, and then introduced Michael to Leigh Anne.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To basketball practice,” says Big Mike.

“Michael, you don’t have basketball practice,” says Sean.

“I know,” says the boy. “But they got heat there.”

Sean didn’t understand that one.

“It’s nice and warm in that gym,” said the boy.

As they drove off, Sean looked over and saw tears streaming down Leigh Anne’s face. And he thought: Uh-oh, my wife’s about to take over.

The next day afternoon, Leigh Anne left her business—she had her own interior decorating outfit—turned up at Briarcrest, picked up the kid, and took off with him. A few hours later, Sean’s cell phone rang. He picked up and heard his wife’s voice on the other end of the line:

“Do you know how big a fifty-eight long jacket is?” she asked.

“How big?”

“Not big enough.”

Leigh Anne Tuohy had grown up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but had shed them for another—and could not tell you exactly how it happened, other than to say that “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color.” Her father, a United States Marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. (Friends who saw Tommy Lee Jones in the movie U.S. Marshal would say to her, “Oh my God, that’s your father!”) The moment the courts ordered the Memphis Public School system integrated, in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she’d become a member of the first graduating class. “I was raised in a very racist household,” she said. As her father walked her up the aisle so that she might wed Sean, he looked around the church, filled with Sean’s black ex-teammates, and asked, “Why are all these niggers here?” Even as an adult, when she mentioned in passing that she was on her way into a black neighborhood on the west side of Memphis for some piece of business, he insisted on escorting her. “And when he comes to get me, he shows up with this magnum strapped to his chest.”

Yet by the time Michael Oher arrived at Briarcest, Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t see anything odd or even awkward in taking him in hand. This boy was new; he had no clothes; he had no warm place to stay over Thanksgiving Break. For Lord’s sake, he was walking to school in the snow in shorts, when school was out of session, on the off chance he could get into the gym and keep warm. Of course she took him out and bought him some clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before, and would do it again. “God gives people money to see how you’re going to handle it,” she said. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.