The Blind Side (9 page)

Across the field Collins Tuohy, daughter of Sean and Leigh Anne, future Tennessee State champion in the pole vault, watched the discus competition as she waited herself to compete. When Big Mike’s first throw landed, she picked up her cell phone and called her father. “Daddy,” she said, “I think you better come over here and see Michael throw the discus. It looks like a Frisbee.”

Boggess watched, too. “I think I just laughed,” he said. “It wasn’t spinning or doing anything fancy. But, man, it flew.”

Michael’s first throw won him first place in that meet. But it was a crude victory, the track and field equivalent of bludgeoning when a sword was at hand. Big Mike wasn’t spinning, and neither was the discus. “That first time he did it he didn’t really have anyone to watch, because the other kids at that meet weren’t really able to spin either,” said Boggess. Still, he was amazed, even then, how much the kid looked like he knew what he was doing. Even on the first throw, after watching the kids in front of him, he acquired the basic snap release. Boggess had had kids on his team who never even got that far. At the bigger meets, Boggess knew, some of the discus throwers had serious technique, and would offer Michael a more sophisticated model to imitate. To Boggess, the striking thing was how quickly Michael Oher learned. He wasn’t just big and strong and agile; he had a kind of physical intelligence. “He basically taught himself,” said Boggess. “Because we couldn’t teach him. I remember going out on the field one day and saying: Oh my God, he’s spinning. He’s figured it out. Evidently he just figured it out by watching.”

That was the point: Big Mike was able to learn with his body, when he could see other people in action. It wasn’t long before Boggess was watching, with glee, as his professional-looking high school discus thrower hit 166 feet—the longest throw in Tennessee in six years. He never had time to practice, as he had to be tutored after school. He just wandered out to the meets and threw whatever needed to be thrown. By the time he finished his quixotic track career, Michael Oher would break the West Tennessee sectional record in the discus, and threaten it in the shot put. In his spare time! It came so easily to him, said Boggess, that if his talent for throwing the discus did not wind up seeming so trivial when set beside his other talents, “they’d have taken him away and trained him up and he’d have been big time.”

For his first year and a quarter, until the spring of his junior year, there was some question as to the highest use of Michael Oher. Once the teachers figured out he needed to be tested orally, he proved to them that he deserved high D’s instead of low F’s. It wasn’t clear he was going to acquire enough credits to graduate with his class, but Mr. Simpson and Ms. Graves stopped thinking they were going to send him back out on the streets, and they let him play sports. He joined the basketball team at the end of his sophomore year, and soon afterwards the track and field team. In his junior year he finally got onto the football field.

The problem there, at first, resembled his problems in the classroom. He was a blank slate. He had no foundation, no idea what he was meant to do as a member of a team. He said he had played football his freshman year, at Westwood, but there was no sign of it in his performance. When Coach Hugh Freeze saw how fast he could move, he pegged him as a defensive tackle. And so, for the first five games of the 2003 season, he played defense. He wasn’t any worse than his replacement, but he wasn’t much better either. One of his more talented teammates, Joseph Crone, thought Big Mike’s main contribution came before the game, when the opposing team stumbled out of their locker room or their bus, and took the measure of the Briarcrest Christian School. “They’d see all of us,” said Crone, “and then they’d see Mike and say, oh crap.”

That, at first, was his highest use: to intimidate the opposition before the game. During the games he seemed confused. When he wasn’t confused, he was reluctant. Passive, almost. This was the last thing Coach Hugh Freeze expected. Freeze didn’t know much about Michael Oher’s past but he knew enough to assume that he’d had some kind of miserable childhood in the worst part of Memphis. A miserable childhood in the worst part of Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense: it made you angry, it made you aggressive, it made you want to tear someone’s head off. The NFL was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood for sensational acts of violence.

The trouble with Michael Oher as a football player was the trouble with Ferdinand as a bull: he didn’t exhibit the anger of his breed. He was just a sweet kid who didn’t particularly care to hit anybody, or, as Hugh put it, “He just wasn’t aggressive. His mentality was not a defensive player’s mentality.” The depth of the problem became clear during Briarcrest’s fourth game, when the team took buses up into Kentucky to play a pretty tough Calloway County team. Early in the game Michael caught his hand on an opponent’s face mask and gashed the webbing between his fingers. “You’d a thought he was going to die,” said Hugh. “Screaming and moaning and carrying on. I thought we were going to have to go and get a stretcher.” His defensive tackle ran to the bench, clenched his hand, and refused to allow anyone to look at it.

In the stands Leigh Anne Tuohy watched as two, then three, then four grown men tried to subdue Michael Oher, and then coax him into allowing them to examine his hand. “He was in a fetal position,” she said. Men were next to useless in getting Michael to do things, because he didn’t trust men: she knew this about him, and more. After their shopping trip, when she turned up at Briarcrest, Michael had sought her out. He had mentioned that he hated to be called “Big Mike” and so from then on he was, to her and her family, Michael. “I don’t know what happened,” Leigh Anne said. “Whether it was attrition of other people, or whatever. But I became the person Michael came to. At his basketball games he’d just walk over and start talking to me. When I was at school, he’d find me and talk to me. I think everyone kind of noticed that he’d gotten close to me. Maybe before I noticed.”

She walked down from the stands, crossed the track, walked onto the football field, and went straight to the bench.

“Michael, you need to open your hand,” she said, crossly.

“It hurts,” he said.

“I realize it hurts. But your head is going to hurt a lot worse when I hit you upside it.”

He unclenched his hand, one giant finger at a time. The gash went to the bottom of the webbing and down the finger, where the bone was visible. “I wanted to throw up,” said Leigh Anne. “It was gross.” She pretended it wasn’t and told him he needed to be taken to the hospital.

“The hospital!!” he wailed. She thought he was going to faint.

They were a good two and a half hours from home, so Carly Powers, the Briarcrest athletic director, took him to a Kentucky emergency room. “The first question he asked when we got in the car,” said Powers, “and he kept asking it, ‘Is it going to hurt? Is it going to hurt?’ He was a nervous wreck. You could see it in his eyes. When we walked into that hospital, he was scared to death.” Powers sensed that Big Mike had perhaps never seen the inside of a hospital.

A nurse checked them in, told Powers to wait in the lobby, and escorted Big Mike to the back. A few minutes later, Powers heard “this blood-curdling scream. And you can tell it’s Big Mike.” The nurse comes running out and says, “Mr. Powers, I think we’re going to need you back here. We need your help to hold him down.” Powers followed her back to see what the problem was. A needle, as it turned out. The doctors were trying to give Big Mike a simple shot to numb his hand, and Big Mike had taken one look at the needle and leapt off the table. A staff of three had tried to put him back on it, without success. “He’d never seen a needle,” said Powers.

Even a rich private school was ill-equipped to deal with a parentless child. Like all schools, it was hard-wired to call, at the first sign of conflict, a grown-up. In the eight months since she had taken him shopping for clothes, Leigh Anne Tuohy had become that grown-up. Briarcrest teachers knew that, increasingly, Big Mike was spending time with Sean and Leigh Anne. Sean was becoming something like a private basketball coach to him, and Leigh Anne was grappling with the rest of his life. The Tuohys were now covering not only his school lunches but also, indirectly, his tuition. For this reason and one other, when Carly Powers, as athletic director, asked himself which adult he might call to talk reason to Big Mike, he settled on Leigh Anne. The other reason was that he’d never seen Leigh Anne fail to get her way. “She is going to get it done,” said Powers, “or she is going to drive you nuts.”

He called Leigh Anne’s cell phone. She was on the bus with the Briarcrest cheerleaders, riding back to the school. After she had sorted Michael out on the bench, Leigh Anne sensed she had glimpsed another little sliver of his childhood. “I just thought: this kid has never been injured before,” she said. “Or if he has been injured, he said, ‘I’m not gonna tell anyone about it.’” She suspected this might be the first time he had no choice but to allow someone else to do something for him. “When he was sitting on the bench refusing to let those men look at him,” she said, “it was as if he thought: ‘If I just keep my hand clenched tightly to my chest, it’ll go away.’”

Now Carly Powers was in her ear, saying, “Leigh Anne, you got to talk to him because he’s being completely irrational.” Carly handed his cell phone to Mike.

“Michael, you have to let them take care of you,” she said.

“But it really hurts,” he said.

“Michael, you’re being a baby! You’re acting like Sean Junior!” Sean Junior was nine.

“They trying to stick me with a needle!”

“It’s better than getting your hand cut off when gangrene sets in.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“Michael,” she said, “people lose limbs because of things like this. You want to lose your arm?”

No, he didn’t want to lose his arm.

“Okay,” she said. “And please don’t make it hard on Coach Powers because he’s just trying to help. And if I have to drive down there, it’s going to be bad news.”

“All right.”

Powers came on and asked Leigh Anne if she thought Big Mike had medical insurance, and Leigh Anne said there was no chance he had medical insurance or any other kind, and he should just put Sean’s name on all the forms.

To food, clothing, and tuition add medical care. It was an odd situation. A boy without a nickel in his pocket, no private mode of transportation, no change of clothes, no history of medical care, had stumbled into one of the more expensive private schools in Memphis. Lunch materialized, courtesy of Sean Tuohy, though Michael never asked, and so never learned, where it had come from. Clothes materialized, courtesy of Leigh Anne. He still exhibited an odd tendency to show up at school in the same clothes every day, but now they were different clothes: long pants and the brown and yellow Rugby shirt Leigh Anne had bought for him. That shirt became so worn that Leigh Anne, the fiftieth time she saw him in it, threatened to rip it off his back. She noticed all the details. One of these was that the Rugby shirt was fitting him more snugly. “I’m not sure he’s stopped growing,” she told Sean.

Michael’s biggest need—a place to sleep at night—wasn’t, at first, an issue. He spent most nights on Big Tony’s floor. But because Big Tony lived such a long way from school, Michael had bivouacked some nights here and there in East Memphis, several of them on the Tuohys’ sofa. There were also nights when he took the express bus back to the poorest neighborhoods on the west side of town. There he stayed, Leigh Anne assumed, with his mother.

Transportation was the big issue: Michael had no money and no reliable way to get around. He was totally dependent on whoever might give him a lift, and he had no idea, when he arrived at school in the morning, where he might spend the night. He sort of shopped around every day for the best deal he could find. If he had no place else to stay, he went home with Big Tony. But then his safety net vanished, suddenly. It happened the night the team returned from Myrtle Beach.

The Briarcrest basketball team had flown to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in the winter of 2003 to play two games. It had been Michael’s first trip on an airplane, and also his first trip outside of Memphis. The first game had been traumatic, and both he and his coach, John Harrington, came to think of it as the moment Michael began to accept who he was, and fit himself into the team. The back end of his sophomore year and the front end of his junior year he had been an obviously physically gifted but disappointing basketball player. “He had no concept of his role,” said Harrington. “Basketball’s all about players accepting their roles. You want to know why the Lithuanians beat the Americans? It’s because the Lithuanians know and accept their roles.” Michael, now six five and a half and 350 pounds, was built to control the area under a high school basket. (To put his width into perspective, Shaquille O’Neal, the Miami Heat center who is seven one and seemingly wide as a truck, weighs 330 pounds.) But he insisted to everyone that he was a shooting guard, and if they put him at center, he stepped out, dribbled around, shot threes, and generally pissed off his coach, as well as the parents of his teammates. Plus, he didn’t play defense. “He was a liability on the defensive end,” said Harrington. “That’s why he didn’t play but about half of most games.”

That changed at Myrtle Beach. At Myrtle Beach, something happened. “At Myrtle Beach,” said Harrington, “Big Mike got angry.” The minute he walked onto the court for their first game, the crowd was on him. They called him names. Black Bear. Nigger. They called him names that neither he nor his coach cared to repeat. Harrington wasn’t shocked by more subtle forms of racism away from the basketball court, but it had been a long time since he’d seen the overt version on it. “I don’t think there’s a white coach with a black kid on his team, or a black coach with a white kid, who could have any racism in him,” he said. Big Mike responded badly; Harrington hadn’t seen this side of him. He began to throw elbows. Then he stopped on the court, turned on the fans, and gave them the finger.