In the 1980s, a defensive lineman named Lawrence Taylor entered the NFL and changed the way coaches and players viewed the game. Taylor was a huge man, but he was fast like a sprinter and agile. He made it his mission to sack the quarterback, and he was so successful at it that in 1982, a year after his entry, the NFL created the sack statistic. Taylor had a knack for coming in on a right-handed quarterback’s left side, the blind side, and pummeling him to the ground. His strength and speed made him nearly unstoppable, and he created fear in the hearts of his opponents. Coaches knew they needed someone to be able to guard the blind side and stop Taylor, and the result was the birth of the left tackle specialist.
The left tackle had to be just as quick and dexterous as Taylor and just as big. A position that once belonged to 275-pound men built like brick walls now required a player of over 300 pounds who moved like a 165-pound running back. This combination of size, speed, and nimbleness was rare, and those who fit the prototype were suddenly a hot commodity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Lawrence Taylor wouldn’t have been as much of a threat as he was. Teams in the NFL were more prone to run the ball, rather than pass it. But a man named Bill Walsh changed all of that because of a deficiency in talent. When Walsh joined the Cincinnati Bengals in 1965 as the offensive line coach, his quarterback could barely throw longer than 20 yards. This wasn’t a problem until his teams failed to make the first down and were required to pass the ball.
To address the issue, Walsh designed a system that became known as the “West Coast Offense,” in which the quarterback threw short, quick passes to specific spots on the field where running backs would be waiting. This tactic removed the need to step back and scan the field and reduced the number of turnovers because of the quick release. It also removed the danger of the sack to the quarterback, since the ball was now held for no longer than seconds.
Walsh was successful in his strategy and spent 15 years making less-talented quarterbacks seem like gods, including Joe Montana, considered one of the best quarterbacks ever. With the rise in the quarterback’s status came an increase in their salary, and teams started shelling out big bucks to acquire players with stable and consistent arms. But then Walsh came up against Taylor, whose speed was too great. He was able to dismantle the West Coast Offense in a way that had never happened before.
This intersection of Taylor’s threat to now highly paid quarterbacks increased the value of quick-footed left tackles. The left tackle position turned into the second-highest paid position on the field and the focus of recruiters down in the college and high school ranks. The hunt for these freaks of nature that could fulfill this role was on, and a boy named Michael Oher from Memphis was perfect in every way.
Micheal Oher lived in the worst housing projects in Memphis, known as Hurt Village. The community was riddled with drugs and gang violence. Michael had been in and out of foster care homes between the ages of 7 and 10. Although his mother, who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, lived in the village, she was unable to care for him and his siblings. He was often left to his own devices, went hungry, and didn’t attend school.
As was the norm in many of the public schools in the inner city, Michael was passed up from grade to grade without learning anything. He had a dream of playing in the NBA, but his chances of making it were slim. With his lack of education or resources, the most likely future for Michael was as a member of the local gang.
But that all changed when he met Big Tony. Big Tony was a basketball and football coach who came back to Hurt Village often to recruit young players. He saw potential in this 15-year-old boy who weighed more than 300 pounds and stood at 6’5”. He could see the path Michael was going down and wanted to help. He took Michael in and let him sleep on his floor. Tony had a son named Steven, and he’d promised his dying mother he would take Steven across town to East Memphis where the wealthy Christian private schools were located to get a proper education. Since Michael was staying with him, he decided to take Michael, too.
Steven and Michael enrolled in Briarcrest Christian School. Steven was an excellent student and had no trouble getting in, but Michael was different. He had an IQ of 80 and a GPA of 0.56. The only reason he was let in was that the football coach saw his size and the principal took pity on him. Michael was quiet and shy and struggled to communicate with others. He didn’t know how to learn in a normal way and had a hard time passing his classes. But the teachers could tell that he was not stupid and required allowances to help him learn. When he finally got his grades up from Fs to Ds and Cs, they allowed him to play sports.
Before then, Michael used to hang around the basketball courts watching practice. One day, a man named Sean Tuohy saw Michael in the stands and immediately felt a connection with him. Sean could tell Michael was poor and knew he wore the same clothes every day. Sean had grown up poor in Louisiana but now owned 85 chain restaurants and a private jet. He and his wife, Leigh Anne, were pillars in society, and he often donated money to Briarcrest to help students who couldn’t afford the tuition. He figured Michael probably hadn’t eaten, so he went over and offered him help. When Michael refused the offer, Sean put money in his school account to cover lunches for the rest of the year.
Leigh Anne took a different tack with Michael. After meeting him and seeing that he had no possessions or real home, she took him shopping. That day, Michael and Leigh Anne made a personal connection, and she sort of fell in love with this sweet giant boy. Over the next several months, Michael stayed on the Tuohys’ couch whenever he wasn’t able to make the long trip back to West Memphis. He became one of the family, and Leigh Anne finally decided he would live with them for good.
Michael was a talented basketball player, and before he started to grow into his current size, he practiced day and night in Hurt Village to become the next Michael Jordan. This training made him fast and nimble, and he kept those skills as he grew. But he didn’t have any fire in his belly. When he first joined the football team at Briarcrest, he was afraid to block the other players and was basically ineffective. He spent more of his junior year on the bench.
But a man named Tom Lemming changed everything when he learned about Michael. Lemming was the premier high school football scout in the nation, and his scouting reports were read by nearly every Division I and II college program. When the Briarcrest coach sent him a tape of Michael chasing down a tiny running back during one game like he was a sprinter, Lemming saw right away that this kid was a freak of nature. He was perfect for the prized position of left tackle, and he told the world about Michael Oher.
Suddenly, coaches from the top football programs in the country were showing up to watch Michael play. Leigh Anne and Sean were skeptical because of his docile character, but Michael proved that he had aggression in him if he was pushed enough. In the first game of his senior season, he became so fed up with the heckling of a lineman on the other team, he picked the 220-pound player up like he was a doll and carried him off the field.
Extra training by his coaches helped Michael learn how to play left tackle, and he became one of the best players in the state of Tennessee. Offers were pouring in from different schools, but in the end, he chose to accept a full-ride scholarship to Ole Miss, the alma mater of both Leigh Anne and Sean. The only problem was that his grades had not improved alongside his football skills. He’d been working with a tutor named Sue Mitchell for almost a year and was making more As and Bs than Cs and Ds, but his transcript was so poor, the increase wasn’t enough.
Sean took Michael to see a psychological examiner to determine whether he had a learning disability. If he did, he could get more time to improve his grades. The examiner determined that Michael had never been taught to read properly but had an amazing gift for memorization. She also learned that his IQ was actually 100-110, which made him average. Because of his average IQ, he was now technically learning below where he should be, and he was certified as having a legitimate learning disability. This diagnosis allowed Michael to take extra classes through an online system to boost his GPA. Finally, the summer after his senior year, he became eligible to play NCAA ball.
Michael’s path to college and the NFL seemed a done deal, but his future was put in jeopardy when someone suggested to the NCAA that Sean and Leigh Anne had bribed Michael to play for Ole Miss. A lengthy investigation proceeded, and Michael was forced to answer questions about his past and relationships in East Memphis. Michael hated this. He didn’t like to talk about himself and was secretive to a ridiculous degree. Even Sean and Leigh Anne had a hard time getting any information about his past out of him. But they had officially adopted Michael by this point and had never tried to push Michael’s decision on where to play. Eventually, the investigation was dropped, and he was free to play football at Ole Miss.
Michael struggled his first year at Ole Miss. He had a hard time learning plays like other players and was playing right guard instead of left tackle, a position he’d never played before. The season was a disaster, and he decided to train hard in the offseason to improve his body and performance. He went from benching 225 to 400 pounds and dropped 24 pounds of weight. He was now faster and stronger and ready for next season.
Shortly after he’d started his training, one of Michael’s teammates ridiculed him for his posh life with the Tuohys. Many of Michael’s teammates were black and from impoverished communities, and this player resented the privilege Michael now enjoyed. He made some disparaging comments about Leigh Anne and her daughter, Collins, and Michael attacked him. In the scuffle, a 3-year-old boy was badly hurt and had to be taken to the hospital. Michael was confused and scared, so he ran, like he used to as a boy.
Sean called everyone he knew at Ole Miss, including a former fraternity brother who was the father of the injured boy, and worked everything out. He told Michael to turn himself in to the campus police and promised everything would be OK, and it was. Michael received the kind of treatment saved for the rich white athletes and barely got a slap on the wrist. His reputation was intact, and he went on to start at left tackle his sophomore year.
Once he was famous, Michael stopped going back to West Memphis. He became distrustful of people and leaned in to his new life with his new family. All the sporting publications and analysts were betting the farm on his success as an NFL player, and he wanted to protect himself and his finances from people looking for handouts.
But his absence from Hurt Village didn’t stop other kids from wanting to find a similar path to success. One study of a public high school in West Memphis showed that there were many young black athletes with enough talent to make it professionally, but only 1 of 6 ever would. The others lacked the education required to attend college and didn’t have the resources to change their circumstances. Many of these athletes tried to enroll in Briarcrest, but the school was resistant to increasing their black student population.
Sean and Leigh Anne were conflicted about what to do to help other kids like Michael. They knew their resources had helped Michael succeed, and they knew that if he hadn’t met them, no one would likely know who he was. After reading an article about a dynamic high school football star like Michael who couldn’t accept a full-ride scholarship to play Division I ball because of his grades, they decided to do something about it. Leigh Anne wanted to open a center for young black athletes to help them get the education they deserved and needed to make their dreams come true.
Michael Lewis's The Blind Side is mainly a biography of a young man’s journey to beat the odds and become successful. But within the book’s pages is another story, one regarding the history of the NFL that created a path for Michael Oher’s success. Only a portion of the book’s football history is included in the summary to provide an understanding of the diverging factors that helped Michael succeed. For football fans who want to learn more, there are other examples of games and players affected by the changes in the NFL in the book that don’t pertain to the main story.
We’ve organized the information into seven chapters to keep the summary focused on Michael’s journey.
There’s a moment in the National Football League’s long history that many will never forget. The day was November 18, 1985, and the New York Giants were playing the Washington Redskins. The second quarter was just underway. The score was 7-7, and the Redskins had the ball.
Thirty-six-year-old Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann was a veteran with 163 games under his belt, including two Super Bowl appearances and one championship. He received the snap and looked downfield for a play. He saw no threats in front of him and dodged the few Giant defenders who came at him. But there was activity on another part of the field he couldn’t see, and that activity centered around the Giants’ right-side pass rusher, Lawrence Taylor. Taylor had broken free of the Redskins’ offensive linemen and was coming in hot on Theismann’s left side.
What happened next was memorable for two reasons: 1) The play ended in such a catastrophic way that the images replayed over and over again on ABC would never be erased from memory, and 2) The play was a significant reminder of how the game was changing and the necessity of all teams to adapt because of the work of two men.
Lawrence Taylor changed the game of professional football upon his arrival in 1981. He introduced the element of fear in both the players and coaches that created a shift in priorities.
Fear is not a word often used when describing professional football players. By the time a player has reached the NFL, he’s played in enough games and taken enough hits that fear seems like it should be a distant memory. But when the Giants drafted Taylor and subsequently hired defensive coach Bill Parcells the same year, the combination created fear in the hearts of all coaches, offensive linemen, and quarterbacks across the league.
Parcells understood that fear was a beneficial aspect of the game. His goal was not only to stop the offensive line of scrimmage but also mess with the heads of the opposing quarterbacks. He wanted to instill a sense of panic, a lack of confidence, and an equilibrium disruption that would cause the quarterback to make rushed and misguided plays. And he had the perfect player in Taylor to carry out this plan.
Taylor was not your typical left tackle. He was large, tall, and fast, a combination not often seen. He was driven and believed he was the greatest player to enter the NFL. Where other players saw winning as a way to keep their jobs, Taylor saw it as his way of life. He wanted to win at any cost, and his sole mission was to destroy the opposing quarterback.
Taylor was out for blood and pursued his mission with zeal. He was like a freight train coming full speed down the field, and most offensive linemen couldn’t handle him. The threat of the violent encounters with Taylor created anxiety in them. One lineman who’d played for 11 years actually retired three years after Taylor entered the league. His fear of Taylor had become so great, he became ineffective.
Today, the quarterback sack is a popular play in the NFL, but before 1982, there was no statistic for it. Taylor wasn’t the first player to lock his crosshairs on the quarterback, but he was so good at it during his first season, the league decided to create an official stat for it. A sack is technically when the quarterback is tackled behind the line of scrimmage. But for Taylor, a sack was when the quarterback was hit so hard, he saw triple and forgot where he was.
But more than intimidating the offensive linemen, Taylor’s fury was felt deep in the hearts of the quarterbacks. Quarterbacks became so scared of being hit by Taylor, it messed up their games. They would lose track of plays or snap counts after seeing Taylor line up on the field. One even called a time-out before the play began because he couldn’t see where Taylor was. Taylor was so effective coming from the quarterback’s left side for a surprise sack that players and coaches started referring to it as the blind side. Most quarterbacks were right-handed.
Entire plays were designed simply to stop Taylor. Coaches lined up two or three men to handle him, which often did the job but created other gaps that left the quarterback vulnerable. Everything coaches knew about how to approach the defensive line went out the window because of the freak of nature that was Taylor. A new type of player would be needed to stop that kind of killing machine.
The Redskins’ coach had done everything possible to prepare his team for Taylor. On the whiteboard during practices leading up to the November game, all other players were indicated with either an X for defensive or O for offensive except Taylor. His number “56” was written in red and circled to burn his position into the players’ heads. But it didn’t matter.
During that fateful play in November, Taylor got away from two offensive linemen on Theismann’s blind side, and the quarterback never saw him coming. Taylor jackknifed Theismann from behind, folding him in half, and landed on his leg. The break sounded like a gunshot to the players watching on the sidelines. When the dust had settled, Theismann lay on the ground with a broken tibia and fibula, and the bone was sticking out of his leg. He was carried out on a stretcher and would never play another minute of football again.
This wasn’t the first player’s career Taylor had ended, and everyone knew it wouldn’t be the last if they didn’t do something.
The relationship between Taylor and the need for a congruent left tackle position is clear. But the explanation for why this need was allowed to happen is another story. Conceivably, to thwart the efforts of Lawrence Taylor, NFL coaches could have simply turned to the running game. This strategy would eliminate the need for the quarterback to be open and in danger.
In fact, the running game was the more popular option in the 1960s and 1970s. The passing game was a costly enterprise during those decades. Where a run could yield between 3 and 4 yards on average, the passing game was only providing slightly more yardage at just over 4. And with a league-wide interception rate of more than 6%, running the ball was the safest option. In 1975, most teams threw the ball only 24 times during a game. And if you didn’t have a great quarterback, the rate was lower. So it would seem that the entry of Taylor into the NFL should have made little difference to the way the game was played.
But something else had happened in the ’70s to change how the passing game was played—Bill Walsh introduced the “West Coast Offense” and changed the NFL forever.
Bill Walsh was the assistant coach of the Cincinnati Bengals in 1975. High in a press box during that year’s playoffs, he called plays down to the head coach, Paul Brown, during a game against the Oakland Raiders. In the last few minutes of the game, the Bengals were down by 3 points. Their only hope was to pass the ball downfield, something Walsh had been dreading. The Bengals quarterback pulled back and looked for the open man, which gave the Raiders’ pass rusher enough time to slip his defender and tackle the quarterback. Game over. Season over.
In that moment, Walsh knew he needed to design offensive plays that accounted for the blind side rushers. Where Bill Parcells saw defense as the key to winning, Walsh saw a strategic offense as a dire necessity to the success of any team. He didn’t see the quarterback as the star playmaker. Rather, the quarterback was the King in chess, whose movements were only possible because of the strategic moves made with the other pieces.
In 1968, when Walsh joined the Bengals, his quarterback, Virgil Carter, was anything but a king. He was incapable of throwing the ball longer than 20 yards at a time, but those short passes were always dead on. Coupled with an inadequate offensive line, the running game was also useless. Walsh had to find a way to get the most out of a terrible situation.
Walsh developed a specific passing system to account for Carter’s ineptitudes, one in which he made short, quick passes to locations already determined beforehand. The receivers had specific locations where they were meant to be, timed perfectly with Carter’s steps. After the snap, Carter took either 3 or 5 steps backward, and depending on how many steps he took, a certain number of receivers reacted in kind.
There was no longer the need to scan the field and wait for a receiver to get open. Carter had already decided which side of the field the play would happen on before entering the line of scrimmage. Based on the way the defense lined up, he cut his choices from three to two, and a quick look when play went into motion told him which of the two was the most advantageous. He didn’t have to pay attention to anything else. He took his steps and threw to a spot on the field. The receiver would be there to meet the ball.
The timing for this type of pass game had to be meticulous and automatic. It was tedious work to practice and took most of the spontaneity out of the game. But the advantages were great. First, the short passes were just on the other side of the line of scrimmage, so yards were open to the receiver after the catch, rather than the receiver trying to gain yards before the pass. Second, the quick and short passes lowered the chances for interceptions and incompletions. Third, the less time the quarterback held the ball, the less time the pass rusher had to sack him.
In 1971, under this new system, Carter went from completing less than half his pass attempts to completing 62% of them, leading the league. His yardage also went up by almost two full yards. The next year, a new quarterback took over for the Bengals, and the same thing happened. After Walsh was passed up for the head coaching job when Brown retired, he went to San Diego and helped their quarterback lead the league in passing percentage. This trend followed him through two years as head coach at Stanford, and finally, in 1979, Walsh took over as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, who had a 2-14 record the year before and one of the worst quarterbacks in the league.
Despite helping the 49ers quarterback go from a 45% completion rate on 302 passes to a 60% rate on 578 passes and increasing his yardage by a full yard, no one noticed Walsh’s genius. Enter Joe Montana, arguably considered one of the greatest QBs to play the game. Montana was small and weak, and no one thought he’d amount to much, but his first two years with Walsh delivered completion percentages in the mid-60s. Of course, Montana received all the credit. But when he became sloppy a few years later and was replaced by future hall-of-famer Steve Young, who performed at the same high level, people started to wonder.
But many in the league were not on board with Walsh’s perspective that the system was greater than the individual. It was methodical and dull, and it dampened the ideal of the quarterback god. But over time, with a Super Bowl under his belt with Young, the trend started to catch on. By the mid-90s, the ratio of passing to running shifted toward the former, and teams passed the ball nearly 60% of the time. Along with that increased pass percentage came a decrease in interceptions, which fell from 6% to 3%.
Almost every team in the NFL after 1995 ran the West Coast Offense. But before any of that happened, Walsh almost retired from coaching in 1980. For 15 years, he’d turned feeble and ineffective quarterbacks into passing geniuses with his system, and no one cared. If he’d left the game at that point, things likely wouldn’t have changed. But he decided to stay in the game, and this decision helped Walsh change the NFL forever for a second time.
Walsh had lowered the risk of passing and threat to the quarterback with his system, but that all changed once Taylor stepped on the field. His freakish body type of brawn and speed had never been seen before, and despite the quicker release of the quarterback, Taylor was fast enough to make it basically obsolete.
Walsh realized he had to find a way to stop Taylor from throwing the rhythm of the West Coast Offense out of whack with his speed. He needed someone who could stop him. Before Taylor, a reasonably sized linebacker was enough to create space for the quarterback. Now, he needed someone much bigger and stronger to stop the blind side pass rush. Enter John Ayers, a ranch cowboy from Texas.
Ayers was 6’5” and 270 pounds and fast on his feet. In the off-season, he wrangled bulls and pulled tractor trailers attached to his body around miles of open field. He was used to rooting his feet and dealing with giant creatures, which meant he was perfect to go up against Taylor. In January 1982, the Giants and 49ers competed in the playoffs. Walsh planned to run 17 of the first 22 plays as passes. He told the broadcasters as much, which meant Parcells knew it, too. And everyone knew that Joe Montana would be squarely in the crosshairs of Lawrence Taylor.
The first play of the game, Montana stepped back to throw and Taylor charged on his blind side. Then, suddenly, he ran into the brick wall of Ayers. The pass was completed, and Montana was able to complete 15 of the first 22 passes, which led to two touchdowns and a score of 24-10 at halftime. Taylor became so frustrated, he essentially gave up during the rest of the game. The 49ers went on to win the game 38-24, the most points the Giants had given that season. They followed that success all the way to the Super Bowl Championship.
The two coaches came away from that game with new but different perspectives. Parcells realized that moving Ayers over to left tackle to deal with Taylor created holes for other linemen to rush through, which he started to exploit. Walsh also saw these holes and realized he couldn’t borrow from the offensive line. He needed a dedicated player at left tackle whose sole mission was to stop the blind side rusher.
Walsh not only made the passing game the new successful way to gain yardage and win games, thereby increasing the value of the quarterback position. He added value to the need for another equally important position, the left tackle. And although it would take more years and more convincing for other teams to see the light, the light eventually did shine down on this new way of play.
By the early 1990s, the blind side became the biggest concern for all NFL coaches, and that concern was expressed with money. The legacies of Lawrence Taylor and Bill Walsh boiled down to a need for offensive left tackles that could stop a massive pass rusher like Taylor. Taylor had created a prototype of pass rushers, and more and more defensive linemen with size, speed, and agility were recruited. As a result, a prototype of the left tackle position was also created, one who was just as big, fast, and agile. And since this type of combination in a football player was rare, this type of player carried great value.
Where once running backs and receivers were the highest-paid positions just below quarterbacks, the left tackle now held that status. They were paid millions of dollars a year more than those two positions and their right tackle counterparts, which had been unheard of before. Football was a team sport in the purest sense of the word. Every player was important for a play to proceed successfully, and players in the same positions on opposite sides of the field were treated equally. But Taylor’s influence made the left tackle the superstar of the game.
Much of this push in status came as a result of high demand for exceptional quarterbacks. Quarterback contracts skyrocketed in the mid- to late-90s and often included a guarantee. A quarterback might be signed to a $56 million seven-year contract, but even if they experienced a career-ending injury, they would still receive close to half of that salary. Paying an injured quarterback millions of dollars to do nothing was a terrible investment for teams, so protecting the quarterback became more vital than ever.
The need for this special type of left tackle trickled down into the NCAA college ranks. College football once centered around a running game, which required certain types of players that were of no use to the growing popularity of the passing game in the NFL. But as passing became more important in the NFL, colleges started mimicking this strategy, and their teams became essentially farm teams for future NFL players. And because of Taylor, the type of player desired most was the freakish prototype of either the pass rusher or the left tackle.
This change in play in college also meant a change in play for high school football, as colleges started recruiting players that had NFL-level talent. The search for star left tackles ramped up, and one man was the go-to for coaches to find those players.
In 1978, a 23-year-old football fan named Tom Lemming decided he would travel to all the high schools in America in search of the best football prospects. He’d interview the players, watch them play, and find out which colleges they were interested in attending. Then, he’d put his discoveries in a book that college coaches could use to recruit young talent.
With no real money or job, Lemming drove as many miles as he could afford across the country, sleeping in his car to save money. He drove close to 60,000 miles in one year and visited up to 2,000 players. He whittled the list down to the top 150 players and designated 25 as the best in the country.
His newsletters were distributed through subscription to collegiate programs. After a few years, when his picks for top prospects had enough time to prove the keenness of his judgment, colleges started to trust him. More than that, high schools and parents started reaching out to him on behalf of players to try to make this list. It took seven years for Lemming’s business to be profitable, but he was already respected and heralded as the godfather of high school football.
What made Lemming’s work so valuable was that no one else was doing it. Unlike baseball, where high school players could go straight to the MLB, football players were required to play in college if they wanted to advance their careers. Colleges mostly looked at players in their region of the country because the prototypes for each position were fairly general. But with Lemming’s help, coaches in the South could now find out about players in the Midwest or West. And once the focus on positions changed and prototypes became more distinguished, this wider scope became more necessary.
By the beginning of 1990, Lemming was sorting through close to 3 million players. He was dedicated and had strict criteria for the type of player he chose to highlight as the best. The players had to be talented, productive on the field, recipients of special honors or awards, good students, and of good character. Trouble-makers, poor students, and criminals were not healthy prospects for teams, as their behavior was likely to ruin their eligibility.
These parameters had served Lemming well. In 1995, 14 of his top-25 picks became number one picks during the NFL draft. Sports broadcasting stations and polling organizations started using Lemming’s lists to guide their own top picks. And in 2000, Lemming was asked to select the inaugural team for the U.S. Army High School All-American game, a task he was given each year following.
The demand for a certain type of left tackle in the wake of Taylor added a new dimension to Lemming’s standards. Before, a high school lineman who came in at 250 pounds was considered good-sized. But with the rise of massive and fast pass rushers, linemen were now required to be monstrous, and the type of person who could play left tackle was even more defined.
Recruits for left tackle now had to be at least 300 pounds, have long arms and large hands, and be fast like a sprinter and light on their feet like a ballerina. But finding this type of player in the high school ranks was like finding a silver dollar in a heap of quarters.
It was for this reason, and this reason alone, that Lemming took notice when he received a grainy, barely viewable video in Spring 2004. He couldn’t make out much, but what he did see was a large tackle coming off the line like a wall and chasing down linemen half his size and with what should have been twice his speed. Lemming couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He was sure that it was the grainy footage or a trick of the camera. No person of that size should move as quickly as that boy did. That boy was a young black student named Michael Oher, and Lemming had to meet him.
From the start, Michael Oher was a mystery to Lemming. He wasn’t mysterious simply because of his seemingly impossible skills on the field. Lemming also couldn’t find any information on him. In all his years of scouting, any player that sparked his interest could always be researched. There would usually be national stories or local news articles highlighting a player’s accomplishments.
Stranger still was the school Michael attended. Michael went to Briarcrest Christian School in Memphis, a small private school not known for football or black students. When Lemming called the school to ask for Michael’s contact information, he learned Michael didn’t have a phone number or home address, and no one seemed to be representing this kid. This was odd because top players always had a team of handlers, from parents to coaches to informal agents. Lemming knew the only way he was going to learn about Michael Oher was if he drove to Memphis to meet him.
Briarcrest agreed to set up a meeting between Lemming and Michael at the University of Memphis. When Michael walked into the conference room, Lemming was taken aback by his size. He was so big, he almost didn’t fit through the door. But Michael wasn’t a soft 300 pounds. He was solid, built sturdy in all the right ways. He also had long arms and giant hands.
Lemming started the interview, asking the same series of questions about college, the future, and Michael’s goals in life. Michael sat silent. So Lemming decided to have him fill out a questionnaire. Michael took the piece of paper and set it off to the side. Lemming tried again, this time handing Michael what was essentially the golden ticket of high school football—the Army all-star game registration form. Again, Michael took it and set it to the side.
Lemming realized this visit was going nowhere and excused Michael. Never before had he encountered this situation in his life, and he didn’t know how to explain it. He assumed that Michael’s reticence was a sign of a bad attitude or trouble. But he didn’t write Michael completely off because, although quiet, he’d been polite. He also knew that if this kid played left tackle, he’d be a number one pick for the NFL without question.
What Lemming didn’t realize was that Michael had no idea who Lemming was or what he did. He didn’t consider himself a football player, and he’d certainly never played left tackle before. The mystery of Michael Oher continued.
The path that eventually led to Michael’s acceptance on the Briarcrest football team and on Lemming’s radar was paved by the fortitude and kindness of several individuals, the first of whom was Tony Henderson, the closest person to an official guardian for Michael.
Big Tony, as he was called, was from an impoverished, gang-ridden community in Memphis called Hurt Village. The village was once housing for working-class white families, but after desegregation of public schools, white flight took hold. The black community took over Hurt Village and most of the west side of Memphis, and born-again white Christians developed their own communities on the east side. Christian schools sprouted up everywhere, the largest of which was the Briarcrest system.
Briarcrest Christian School was as far east as you could get and still be in Memphis. There were a handful of black students in the school’s history, but most of them were not Memphis natives and were from upper-class families. Never had a poor black child attended the heralded Christian school, but that was about to change in 2002 when Big Tony walked in.
Big Tony was at Briarcrest because of his son, Steven, a highly intelligent black teenager. Big Tony had made a promise to his dying mother to take Steven out of public school and enroll him in a Christian school on the east side so he could become a preacher. But the two weren’t alone as they drove to Briarcrest that first day. Michael was with them.
Big Tony coached youth football and basketball and often recruited young players from Hurt Village. On one of these visits, he saw 15-year-old Michael on the basketball court. Michael’s size and skill level caught Tony’s attention. Big Tony could see that Michael was headed down a bad road and decided to help him channel his energy into sports. Michael had been sleeping on Big Tony’s floor for several months by the time they made the initial visit to Briarcrest.
The decision to enroll in Briarcrest was due to the new head basketball coach, a man named John Harrington, whom Big Tony had known when John coached in the public schools. Big Tony told John about the two boys, and John referred them to the football coach, Hugh Freeze, who’d had an 8-year storied career with both the football team and girls basketball team.
Although Hugh was impressed with Big Tony’s desire to get Steven a better education, he doubted whether the boy’s grades were actually good enough to get into Briarcrest. He also doubted whether Big Tony would be able to afford the tuition. He also didn’t think much when Big Tony told him about Michael, a large kid who played basketball but might be of benefit on a football team. It wasn’t until the boys walked into the office that Hugh had a change of heart.
After shyly peeking around the corner, Michael walked in and filled the room like a house. He was close to 6’5” and around 330 pounds at 16. Hugh told Big Tony to bring him the boys’ transcripts, and he’d see what he could do.
Steven was a shoo-in for Briarcrest because of his excellent transcript, but Michael’s was the antithesis. He’d attended 11 schools in 9 years, was truant often, and had repeated both the first and second grades. Michael tested at an IQ of 80 and had no discernable learning skills. He’d been moved up the chain of the public school system, which tended to give every student the minimum grade required to graduate to become someone else’s problem. Michael’s transcript showed the consequence of this educational history: a 0.6 overall GPA. There was no way this kid was getting into this school.
Yet, Hugh still sent the transcript to Principal Steve Simpson, also new to Briarcrest, who was kind-hearted despite his cool demeanor. Simpson understood what had happened to Michael in the public school system, having come from that system himself, but there was nothing he could do. He told the large mute boy and Big Tony that he couldn’t recommend entry at this time. But if Michael did well in a home-study program for the Fall semester, he could enroll in Briarcrest.
What Principal Simpson failed to realize was that Michael had no understanding of how to study and no support system to help him. Big Tony was too busy with work to help him, and Michael was struggling. Big Tony didn’t know what to do now that it was too late to enroll in regular public school. When Simpson realized that the false hope he’d given them had hurt the boy’s education, he felt compelled to make it up to him. He convinced the school’s president to give Michael a chance. In the middle of the first semester, Michael became a student at Briarcrest on the condition that he couldn’t play sports unless he maintained good grades.
This task was harder than anyone imagined. Michael had been given every test possible growing up to determine why he struggled so much in school. All the tests concluded that he did not have a learning disability and was just stupid. This was the information Jennifer Graves, the special needs program director, was given on Michael’s first day. The fact that Michael didn’t speak or look up from the ground didn’t help matters. She had no idea why Michael was let into the school or how she was supposed to help him, but the task had fallen to her.
Jennifer learned how much Michael didn’t know about everything, not just school. He didn’t know the basic mechanics of the English language, what the ocean was, who the tooth fairy was, or how to interact with others. But he was kind. After she scolded him for scaring a young child who’d tried to talk to him, she saw Michael smiling and engaging with a group of children the next day.
But kindness didn’t pass tests, and Michael rarely even started them. The other teachers were becoming resentful of this large black child incapable of learning, so Jennifer and another teacher decided to administer his next test verbally one-on-one. They quickly saw that Michael was overwhelmed by the complicated questions on the test, but he did better if they broke them down into simple phrases and walked him through them word for word. After an hour, they realized Michael wasn’t stupid. He was absorbing information but didn’t know what to do with it.
Michael scored a C on the test, which brought his semester grade up from an F to a D. He still couldn’t play sports, but he could stay at the school.
Michael had hoped to try out for the basketball team when his grades were good enough, and he spent his free time watching the team practice from the gym bleachers. This was where Sean Tuohy first spoke to Michael. He’d heard of him before from his daughter, Collins, who was a student at Briarcrest, and he’d seen him in the hallways several times. But that day, he decided to approach Michael.
Sean was very familiar with the black students at Briarcrest. Many of them ran track with Collins, and over the years, he’d taken on the role as a sort of life coach and guardian angel for many of them. He’d donated money to the school to be used for scholarships for students who couldn’t afford the tuition and paid for many of the black students to eat lunch daily.
Not having lunch at school was something Sean was familiar with. Sean grew up poor in New Orleans and had attended a private school where his father coached basketball. He received a full-ride scholarship to Ole Miss and was later drafted into the NBA. But his basketball career ended shortly after, and with his college sweetheart, Leigh Anne, he moved back to Memphis and became a self-made man. He owned 85 chain restaurants and a private jet. He was a born-again Christian and started one of the most popular evangelical churches in Memphis. He was also the voice of the Memphis Grizzlies.
Sean was a man of action and was interested in helping others achieve their potential. He often helped the basketball coaches at Briarcrest as a consultant, which was why he was there the day he met Michael. He recognized that Michael always wore the same clothes—cutoff jeans and a large t-shirt—and figured he probably didn’t have money for lunch. After offering Michael money for food and being turned down, he put money in Michael’s school account to pay for lunch for the rest of the year.
Shortly after this first encounter, Sean and Leigh Anne saw Michael getting off a bus on Thanksgiving day wearing the same old clothes. It was freezing out, and they pulled over to ask him what he was doing. Micheal was headed to the school gymnasium to see if he could get in and stay warm. When the Tuohys drove off, Leigh Anne was crying.
Leigh Anne was born and raised in Memphis and was part of the first Briarcrest graduating class. She owned an interior decorating business and often did philanthropic work. When she decided to help Michael the next day, she saw it simply as God’s work. She and her family had plenty of money, and it was their duty to God to use it well.
Helping a young black kid was not what Leigh Anne was raised to do. Her father was a strict racist who taught her to fear black people. But after meeting Sean, she saw how accepting he was and followed suit. She was known for having a big heart and a tough-as-nails personality. When she set her mind to something, there was nothing that could stop her from succeeding. And that Thanksgiving day, Leigh Anne set her mind to helping Michael.
Leigh Anne picked Michael up from school not long after the Thanksgiving encounter. She asked him about his life, but he was silent, like always. She looked at Michael with compassion and said they could do it the easy way or the hard way, but she was going to learn about his home life one way or another. Michael finally opened up and told her he hadn’t seen his father or sisters in years and didn’t know where they were. His grandmother was dead, and his mother was, from what Leigh Anne could surmise, an alcoholic. Leigh Anne wanted to keep digging into Michael’s past, but she was satisfied for now.
Leigh Anne didn’t want to make Michael feel bad or awkward by taking him to high-end stores like Ralph Lauren or Brooks Brothers, so she asked him where he wanted to go. He told her there was a store for big and tall men in his neighborhood, but he thought it was too dangerous for her to go. She said she wasn’t worried. She knew he’d take care of her.
After a day of shopping and finding only a few items that would fit him, including a striped rugby shirt, Leigh Anne drove him home to the west side. When she tried to get out to help with the bags, he told her to stay inside the car and lock the doors.
Something about Michael stayed with Leigh Anne after that experience. She saw that he was kind, sweet, and gentle, and she’d felt safe with him around. She wanted to do more and asked a high-profile NFL client to help gather some clothes from his teammates for Michael. Both were surprised when the client, a Redskins’ quarterback, said no one on the team was as big as Michael. They were dumbfounded and wondered who this kid was.
Everybody knew that Michael was big, but no one was aware of his other talents at first. John Harrington was the first to notice that Michael was more than just a giant. The first time Michael walked into the basketball gym to observe practice, John did what he always did when a new kid entered his practices—threw Michael the ball. John didn’t expect to see this 300-pound kid dribble between his legs, spin, and sink a three-pointer from the deep corner like he was a 6-foot point guard.
The track coach, Mark Boggess, wandered onto the football field one day, where Michael was by himself with a bag of footballs. One after the other, Michael stood at the 50-yard line and threw the balls between the endzone goalposts. Each throw was perfect and traveled around 70 yards, which was 10 yards farther than the average quarterback could throw.
Then, it was Coach Hugh Freeze’s turn to see Michael in action. During football practice, Michael wandered onto the field and picked up a 50-pound tackle dummy and ran with it at high speed like it was no more than a child’s doll. Hugh also couldn’t believe how fast Michael was for his size and had him weighed. After finding a scale that could hold Michael (a cattle scale), they learned Michael weighed a whopping 344 pounds, or the equivalent of a slim cow.
All of these coaches could tell that Michael had a raw physical talent. The only problem—the giant sophomore was still ineligible for sports.
After discovering that Michael could learn and pass his classes if the lessons were developed properly for him, Principal Simpson determined that Michael could stay at Briarcrest. He took him off of probation after the first semester and allowed him to play sports. Michael joined the basketball team toward the latter part of his sophomore year and moved to track and field afterward. At the beginning of his junior year, he was finally able to play football.
Michael excelled at track and field but struggled on both the basketball and football teams at first. Part of the issue was his lack of aggression, which made him weak defensively in both sports. Neither coach could figure out why this huge kid was so docile. Most kids who come from traumatic backgrounds have an inherent aggression that gets channeled through sports. Football, especially, provides these kids opportunities to express their rage in a productive way, but Michael never did. He lacked that aggressive fire, and his teams suffered for it.
In track and field, Michael participated in field events, like discus and shot put. Michael had no training in either event when he competed in the first meet, but his strength and ability to mimic others’ physical movement helped him come in first. That was the moment Coach Boggess realized Michael learned by watching movement. He started showing him performance videos of high-quality field athletes, and by the end of Michael’s track career at the school, he broke the West Tennessee sectional record in the discus and almost broke it for the shot put.
His success as a basketball player would come a different way. Skills and talent weren’t enough to keep Michael in the games his sophomore or first half of his junior year. His lack of defense and inability to play the post position hindered his contributions to the team. Michael thought he was a guard and kept shooting from the outside, instead of posting below the basket.
Then, the team took a trip to Myrtle Beach for a holiday tournament during his junior year, and Michael found his fire. The opposing team’s fans harassed Michael and yelled racial slurs at him. Michael grew angry and didn’t handle it well. He became overly aggressive and, at one point, turned and flipped off the fans. And then something changed. Michael channeled his aggression into action and stayed in his post position. He ended up pulling down 15 rebounds and scored 27 points.
It would take longer for Michael to find his niche in football. The first several games of his junior season were poor. He played defensive tackle because of his speed, but his inability to hit anyone made him virtually invisible on the field. His best contribution was to intimidate the other teams with his size, but that faded when they saw Michael play. In fact, Michael was so docile on the field that he had a meltdown when he cut his hand on another player’s face mask. The mask had sliced the webbing between his fingers down to the bone.
Michael ran off the field screaming like a small child, and he wouldn’t let anyone look at his hand. Leigh Anne was in the stands and watched the coaches fail to calm Michael down and attend to his hand. She walked down to the field, marched over to Michael, and ordered him to show the coaches his hand. He slowly opened his bloody fist and exposed the wound. There was no doubt about it: Michael would have to go to the hospital for stitches.
The athletic trainer took an anxious Michael to the hospital. He was taken to the back to get stitched up, practically having to be dragged there by the nurses. Then, a scream that shook the walls was heard. When the trainer reached the room, Michael was dodging and weaving away from the nurses and doctor trying to give him a local anesthetic shot. That’s when the trainer realized Michael had never been in a hospital or seen a needle in his life. Once again, the trainer called Leigh Anne, and once again, she ordered Michael to let the doctors fix his hand.
Leigh Anne’s success in getting Michael to accept treatment for his hand all stemmed from that first shopping excursion. After that day, whenever Michael saw her at the school, he sought her out. Leigh Anne didn’t know why he trusted her more than anyone else, but he did. She quickly became his person, and the teachers and coaches noticed.
By Michael’s junior year, the Tuohys had started indirectly paying for Michael’s tuition along with his lunches. They were also still procuring clothing for him. Michael knew about the clothes, but he wasn’t aware of the other expenses. Sean was now working with Michael on his basketball game in the few spare moments he had between classes, tutors, and athletic activities. They also covered his medical bills for his hand. The Tuohys believed they were doing everything possible to help this boy, but they found out they were wrong.
Michael didn’t have a stable place to live. He seemed to bounce between Big Tony’s floor and his mother’s rundown apartment most nights. But both were far from the school, and Michael had no reliable transportation. He sometimes took the bus, but he didn’t always have money, so that was not always an option.
Michael often showed up at school not knowing how he would get home or where he would sleep. Sometimes, he asked around for a ride or place to stay, and if he couldn’t find one, he’d figure out how to get across town back to Tony’s. Other nights, he stayed on the Tuohys’ couch. But this situation wasn’t stable, and it became less so after the Myrtle Beach basketball game.
Whatever injustice Michael had felt during the game that brought about his fire changed something in him permanently. When the team landed at the Memphis airport, Big Tony’s girlfriend was there to pick up Steven and Michael, but Michael wouldn’t go with her. He’d overheard her talking about him recently, calling him a freeloader, stupid, and a failure. He refused to spend one more night in her house.
Harrington didn’t know what to do with Michael for the night, so he called the Tuohys. Sean decided it was time to do something about Michael’s situation. Over the next several months, Michael was put up by at least seven families around East Memphis to keep him close to the school. Then, Leigh Anne offered to drive Michael home after a track meet and found herself crossing the border to Mississippi and pulling up to a dilapidated trailer. Inside was a single air mattress deflated on the ground. Leigh Anne took one look at the mattress and made a decision. Michael was coming home with her.
Michael still slept on the couch but was becoming part of the Tuohy family. He and the nine-year-old son, Sean Jr., became good friends. Finally, after several weeks of staying at the Tuohys’ house, Leigh Anne asked Michael if he’d like to stay permanently. She bought a dresser and a futon and showed Michael to his new room. When he saw the bed, he asked if it was his bed. When he learned it was, he told Leigh Anne he’d never had his own bed before.
Leigh Anne set some rules for Michael now that he was staying with them. He could bring friends over if he wanted, even friends from West Memphis, and he was required to visit his mother, even if he didn’t want to. She also tried to get Michael to open up more about his past, but he wouldn’t. Eventually, Sean realized that the past was not important for Michael. He didn’t wallow in what had happened to him, but rather focused on today and making it to tomorrow. He lived in survival mode, and they agreed to let him be.
Still, the Tuohys were able to glean information about Michael’s history from his behavior. For instance, as part of the Tuohy household, Michael could now eat at any of Sean’s restaurants for free. But he always ordered extra food that he brought home for later. After seeing this food sitting in the refrigerator for days, Sean told him he didn’t need to store extra food. He could have fresh food whenever he wanted. Michael said he understood, but he still did it out of habit.
Hoarding stuff was second nature for Michael. He hid clothes, money, and food for safekeeping, as though he didn’t trust that there would be more later. He also still had the habit of wearing the same clothes every day despite having several options. Leigh Anne eventually threatened to rip the striped rugby shirt she’d bought him off his body after he wore it for several weeks straight.
Other things gave the Tuohys insight into Michael. He was a neat freak and kept his room and the rest of the house spotless, which was wonderful for the tight ship Leigh Anne ran. But this neatness went beyond the home. He wouldn’t wear mismatched or unpressed clothes or clothes with the slightest spot of dirt on them. He was also particular about his shoes, refusing to buy a pair of basketball shoes until they could find one with a blue stripe. And he also preferred to wear his shoes a size too small.
But the Tuohys saw that these particularities were just part of who Michael was, not an attitude problem. He was still a sweet kid and had become like their third child. In fact, Michael was such a fixture in the family now, Sean started thinking about what would happen to Michael after graduation and how he could help.
Sean and Leigh Anne knew that Michael’s grades would not be enough to get him into college, but maybe sports could. Sean had some contacts at Division II schools and wrote letters on Michael’s behalf regarding his abilities as a basketball player. They also signed him up for summer basketball camps to improve his skills. What they didn’t know was that Hugh Freeze had sent Tom Lemming a video of Michael playing football.
The day of Lemming’s visit, Michael met with him out of obligation to Coach Freeze, but he had no interest in pursuing football and just wanted to leave. Yet despite how that meeting went, Lemming still wrote in his scouting report that a large junior in Memphis was the most promising left tackle he’d seen since Orlando Pace. Pace had been chosen by Lemming as an All-American pick years before and was now making $10 million a year in the NFL.
A week later, the Briarcrest football team held two weeks of spring training practice. At the first practice, the Briarcrest coaches and players noticed a group of similarly dressed men huddled in a corner of the field. They were assistant coaches at top Division I college programs, an unfamiliar sight for the likes of Briarcrest. No one really knew why they were there, but it became clear after they saw Michael in action.
The first drill they did was called the board drill, where an offensive lineman and defensive lineman face off on a wooden board to see who can push the other off. Michael was chosen as the offensive lineman, and a 270-pound star in his own right, Joseph Crone, faced off with him. The whole drill was over in a matter of seconds. Michael picked Joseph up like he weighed 10 pounds and carried him down the field.
The phones opened with a flurry that day in 2004, and the assistant coaches scrambled to explain what they’d just seen to their head coaches. The assistant coach from Clemson actually handed Hugh Freeze his card and indicated that Michael could have whatever he wanted to come play for Clemson. The Briarcrest coaches were baffled. They’d never seen this type of performance from Michael before. Even Sean was impressed. He didn’t know Michael was any good at football.
After that day, coaches from all over the country, as far away as Oregon, started showing up at practices. Some knew they had no shot at recruiting Michael, but they wanted to see this freak of nature with their own eyes. Shortly after, Lemming wrote that Michael was a pre-season First Team High School All-American candidate, and the vultures began to circle even more.
No one could explain why such a big deal was being made over a player who hadn’t yet proven he was any good in a game and had an unclear history. Not even Coach Freeze understood until the college coaches started talking about the left tackle. With his size, speed, and agility, Michael was the perfect body type for the position that had gradually grown to the second-most important and highest paid in the NFL. After he discovered this, Freeze moved Michael from right tackle to left to cover the quarterback’s blind side.
During one of these spring practices, Michael finished a drill and took a knee in the middle of the field. He stayed there for a long time without saying anything. Sean asked him what was wrong and learned that Big Tony had informed Michael that his father was dead. Michael’s father had been murdered three months before after being thrown off an overpass in West Memphis.
Sean was surprised. He didn’t know that Michael had a father that he was aware of. He asked Michael if he wanted to go home, but Michael said no. Michael was confused about why no one told him sooner, but that was all he said about it. He shoved whatever he was feeling down into the same space where the rest of his past trauma lived. After a few more moments on his knee, Michael stood up and continued practice.
That night, Leigh Anne tried to help Michael deal with this loss. She reminded him that he didn’t know his father. She said it might be cold to say, but he might be better off. Michael was going to make a lot of money in the future through football, and his dad would likely try to claim rights to it. Michael understood and agreed with her. But he also realized something else that night. He was likely to have a future, something that seemed unthinkable before.
By the time football season started in 2004, Michael Oher was a household name among NCAA Division I football programs and just about anyone else who was paying attention. Michael’s realization that he might have a future in football was spawned by thousands of offer letters from various universities, many of which were full-ride offers. He attended summer training camps and received intensive coaching by both Hugh Freeze and the offensive line coach, Tim Long, a former left tackle in the NFL. But Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy both saw two obstacles in Michael’s path to football stardom.
The first was his lack of aggression. The time since his anger during the Myrtle Beach game was long gone, and their memories of his docile football performance from the previous year made them skeptical that he could perform the left tackle role the way he needed to. They settled in for a pre-season scrimmage (Leigh Anne in the stands and Sean on the sidelines as assistant coach) against a nearby town, Mumford, and waited to see what would happen.
Somehow, the Mumford players and fans hadn’t become aware of Michael’s rising status and only saw a giant blob of a player on the field. Right away, a 220-pound defensive end started heckling Michael. He made fun of his weight and taunted him about his play. Michael tried to ignore the taunting at first, but his anger grew.
On the next play, Michael was instructed to block the mouthy kid from the quarterback. Instead, when the whistle blew, Michael picked the player up by his chest plate and ran him down the field. He took a left and headed toward the Mumford bench, knocking players and coaches out of the way. Michael’s path ended when just about every Mumford player tackled him.
The referees blew their whistles and were about to call a penalty on Michael, but they didn’t know what to call. The whistle to end the play hadn’t been blown, so technically, Michael had done nothing wrong. When Sean asked Michael what he’d been thinking during the play, Michael simply said he was tired of hearing the kid’s mouth and was taking him to the team bus. Sean suppressed his laughter and told him that he had to start playing with more discipline now. He was a big deal, and all eyes would be on him. That was the moment everyone saw that Michael had the competitiveness he would need to succeed.
With his growing popularity, Michael started changing. Where once Michael was reserved and afraid of his own shadow, now he was gregarious at school and becoming popular. The more people told him he was special, the more he started to believe it. At home, he was becoming more outspoken, confident, and comfortable asking for things. The first thing he wanted was a driver’s license.
Leigh Anne was willing to get Michael a license, but she didn’t have any documentation for him. He had no birth certificate, social security card, or school ID. On paper, Michael Oher didn’t exist. To start the process of making him official, Leigh Anne collected an ID card and documentation from the school to vouch for his existence. But the man at the social security office said he still couldn’t find anyone named Michael Oher in his system. His hands were tied.
But Leigh Anne wasn’t one to take no for an answer, so she explained the situation to the man. She told him about Michael’s life and them taking him in, and it worked. The man continued looking and discovered something strange. Michael Jerome Oher didn’t exist, but Michael Jerome Williams did. Leigh Anne was confused until Michael said that was him. Williams was his father’s name.
Despite the victory at the social security office, Leigh Anne knew it was unlikely the DMV would allow him to take the test without a birth certificate. Michael assured her he didn’t have one. She asked about his mother, and he said he doubted she had one either. This mention of Michael’s mother again brought up Leigh Anne’s frustration with his relationship with her. He said he was visiting his mother, but Leigh Anne had her doubts. She told Michael if he wasn’t going to visit his mother, she would. Her threat did the trick.
When Michael returned from West Memphis, he had a crumpled, soiled piece of paper. They’d found his birth certificate. When Leigh Anne looked at it, she saw that his name was, in fact, Williams and his birthday was two days before he’d said it was. When she asked him about his birthdate, he simply said the hospital had gotten it wrong. Although she knew this was unlikely to be true, she didn’t push the matter and kept his birthday as the day he said it was.
Leigh Anne drove to the outskirts of Memphis with both Collins and Michael to get their driver’s licenses. As she suspected, schmoozing the DMV workers was not easy. He needed proof of residence, which they didn’t have. The only thing that would work would be an official letter with his legal name on it. And the only place to get that was back at his mother’s house.
Leigh Anne and Michael drove all the way to West Memphis, leaving Collins behind to stall for time, to his mother’s house. When they arrived, they found his mother friendly but slurring her words. She tried to hug Michael, but he didn’t return it. Leigh Anne asked about a piece of mail, and the mother directed them to the mailbox. When they opened it, months of bills fell at their feet addressed to Michael. Leigh Anne grabbed the first bill she saw. They raced back to the DMV, neither speaking about what had just happened.
Leigh Anne anxiously waited with Collins while Michael took the test. She’d become used to doing everything either with or for him, and leaving him to his own devices was difficult for her. By now, she felt like his mother. He even called her “mama,” and the family treated him like he’d always been there. She was constantly defending her choice to her extended family and friends, who were not shy about suggesting that she was putting Collins in danger by having a black boy in the house. But Leigh Anne’s love for Michael was so deep, she told them all to shove it.
Finally, Michael appeared with a driver’s license. On the way home, he told her he was the first person in his family to have a driver’s license. That’s why it had been so important to him to get one. It had been a day of revelations about this boy she had learned to love. Despite his new confidence and openness, he was still secretive and didn’t talk much about himself. He still said what he thought would please others, and this problem would rear its head again soon when she received his transcripts.
With all the talk of college football, Leigh Anne decided to request Michael’s grades to make sure he was on track. To her surprise, he wasn’t. She’d assumed that since no one had said a word about his academic progress, or lack thereof, that he’d been doing better. What she found was a 1.56 GPA, a full point below the minimum requirement for the NCAA. The same thing that had happened in the previous public schools was happening again. Briarcrest was simply passing him through all his classes without concern for his future.
Leigh Anne knew there was no way he would fulfill his role as top college prospect if he didn’t graduate from high school, but what angered her more was the carelessness of the school administration. She marched to Briarcrest and reprimanded everyone from Principal Simpson down to his teachers. She told them they were going to have to deal with her now, and as always, it was not an idle threat.
Leigh Anne now required Michael to go to school at 6 in the morning for tutoring help and be in class straight through until the end of school, since he was behind in credits. She went through his backpack every day to make sure he didn’t forget to mention a failing grade on a test. His penchant for secrets often kept the details of his schoolwork a mystery if she didn’t ask outright. Leigh Anne started to wonder what made him so secretive, but she didn’t push the matter. She was only concerned with his life now, and she was going to make sure he graduated one way or another.
Despite the fanfare surrounding Michael Oher at the beginning of the 2004 football season, Hugh Freeze still wasn’t sure what to do with him. He was used to coaching a particular way, one that included trick plays meant to confuse the other team. He’d been successful over the years, leading his team to 5 of 6 state championship titles. But after the first regular season game, in which Briarcrest lost 6-16, it was clear his usual strategy wasn’t going to work. Leigh Anne as much as said so after that first game, but it wasn’t until Assistant Coach Tim Long said that Hugh wasn’t using his most valuable weapon that he had a change of heart.
The fourth game of the season was against a powerhouse school called Treadwell, who was more skilled in every way than Briarcrest. Before the game, Hugh brought the players together for their usual pre-game pep talk. He told them they were going to run the Gap play the entire game. The Gap involved the running back moving up the field right behind the left tackle. With Michael at left tackle, it would be like hiding behind a cement truck traveling 100 mph.
By halftime, Briarcrest led by 40 points. The crowd, players, and assistant coaches were overjoyed, but Hugh wasn’t. He was winning, but the game was no longer fun to coach. Still, he couldn’t deny the success of the play, and the Gap became the one and only play the Briarcrest football team used for the rest of the season.
The Briarcrest team lost only one game along the road to the playoffs. By December, they only had three games left to make it to the championships. Finally, the team arrived at the championship game played at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The opposing team was the only team to beat them that season once they started playing the Gap. This time, Briarcrest was ready for them.
The other team’s coach remembers watching Michael on the field and realizing that there was nothing they could do to stop him. But Hugh Freeze could. He didn’t enjoy the beat down they were giving the other team at this level of competition. It was too easy, and he no longer felt like himself on the sidelines. After two months of nothing but the Gap, he decided to change things up. He called a trick play, and the team ran it to perfection and would have scored a touchdown if one of the defensive players hadn’t pushed the fullback out at the one-yard line. This defensive player was supposed to have been blocked by Michael.
When Sean called Michael over to chew him out, he asked Michael why he’d just stood there instead of blocking. Michael said he knew what he was supposed to do, but he was enthralled by how good the trick play was, and he wanted to watch. After a full season of charging through teenage boys like a freight train, Michael still didn’t have a killer spirit. This was shown again when he was tasked with taking down a fullback on the opposing team. Instead of bowling him over, Michael saw the face of a Tuohy family friend behind the mask and greeted him warmly. Then, he picked him up and gently moved him out of the way before returning to the play.
Briarcrest won the game easily, and Michael had his first state title. It was clear to everyone in Tennessee that he was the best player in the state and maybe ever at this level. He’d made his mark as a high school football player. Now, the main questions were whether he’d be able to make that same mark in college and where.
One of the biggest moments in a young college prospect’s life is when he sits behind a row of microphones in a hotel conference room and declares which program will be lucky enough to have him join their team. With Michael Oher currently serving as the best thing to hit high school football since electronic scoreboards, that moment loomed during the fall and winter of 2004. Now that Michael was a senior, he could be formally courted by college programs, but he wasn’t the only person the coaches had to charm. Just like in everything else in Michael’s life, Leigh Anne took a leadership role in Michael’s recruitment, as did Sean Jr., who’d become Michael’s best buddy and sidekick and wanted to make sure he had plenty of access to Michael.
Outside of Tennessee and Mississippi, where both she and Sean were alumni of Ole Miss, most of the coaches had no idea who Leigh Anne Tuohy was. Many of them were surprised to come up against her protective nature over Michael. They thought they were coming to visit a poor black kid and dazzle him with promises of financial rewards, shoes, tickets to elite sporting events, and other extravagances. What they found instead was a now-privileged rich kid who had access to a private jet and shopped at Ralph Lauren.
To avoid any suspicion of favoritism for Ole Miss, Sean stayed out of the recruitment process. He routed all communication requests through Hugh Freeze. This move didn’t fool anyone. The Tuohys were already building a house near the Ole Miss campus, assuming Collins would attend and cheer there. Their house was decorated on a normal day with Ole Miss paraphernalia, which grew to intense proportions with their Ole Miss-decorated Christmas tree during the holidays. Each coach walking through the Tuohys’ front door had to pitch their program under the shadow of this tree.
But Hugh Freeze quickly became a liability in Michael’s decision process, as well, when he started interviewing for a job on staff at the University of Tennessee. He wasted no time in trying to impart to Michael all the reasons UT was the right school for him. Leigh Anne also wasn’t shy about her feelings about Michael attending Ole Miss, but she didn’t pressure him. But his tutor, a woman named Sue Mitchell, who’d been working with Michael on his grades five hours a day, six days a week for several months and also an Ole Miss alumna, did. On the day before Michael was leaving to visit the Tennessee campus, Sue told him that she’d heard it on good authority that the FBI conducted decomposition tests on corpses and buried the bodies under the football stadium.
Many people had a vested interest in where Michael decided to attend college, but he took it all in stride. He never committed to one school or another in a serious way and entertained any and all offers to visit campuses in an official or unofficial capacity. The only caveat was that if he was intending to go to Ole Miss, the Tuohys thought it best to officially adopt him to avoid looking like boosters offering monetary bribes to influence Michael’s decision.
By the time Christmas rolled around, Michael had become accustomed to the good life. Most of the time, he accepted invitations to visit schools simply so he could ride on the private jet around the country. In fact, when he learned he had to fly on a commercial airline for an official visit to North Carolina State, he almost didn’t go. The only reason he went was that Sean thought it would look suspicious for him to skip an official visit.
To Leigh Anne, Michael’s flippant attitude regarding other people’s time was just another indication of how much Michael didn’t understand the world, which only reinforced her desire for him to attend school close to home. His grades had improved thanks to Sue’s help, but grades were not what counted in Leigh Anne’s eyes. Michael wasn’t stupid, and she already knew that, but he was uninformed in the ways of the world. And this ignorance made him vulnerable. She had no idea how he would cope away from her guidance, so she did everything she could to school him in life to prepare him.
She educated him in the things that young people naturally pick up when living as part of an upper-class society. She taught him about shopping for himself and anyone special he might want to spoil with gifts. She explained the rules of golf and exposed him to fine art. She took him to restaurants and ordered everything on the menu just so he could see what the different dishes were and tasted like. He learned the differences between all of the Italian dishes and discovered that chicken alfredo was his favorite.
These lessons weren’t just about regular life but about the life she and her family lived. Michael was part of her family, so he needed to understand what it meant to live in affluent society. She taught him how to live in a white world, and Michael absorbed all of it and was becoming spoiled as a result. He drove a black SUV and had no problem walking into one of Sean’s restaurants and requesting special attention as the owner’s son.
As Michael grew more into a Tuohy, Leigh Anne grew more relaxed. She started to feel like her work was accomplished and that Michael would be OK. However, this peace was shattered shortly after it arrived when Michael got into a car accident with Sean Jr. in the car. It was winter, and the roads were icy. He couldn’t stop at an intersection and slid head first into an oncoming van going 25 mph. When Leigh Anne got to the scene, she found Michael overcome with emotion and Sean Jr. lying on the ground with an unrecognizable face.
At the hospital, the doctors were surprised Sean Jr. wasn’t seriously injured. His face was bruised and swollen, but no bones had been broken. For a 10-year-old boy sitting in the front seat, the airbag should have caused more damage. Leigh Anne went home and told Michael the good and perplexing news, and that’s when he showed her his arm. He’d stopped the airbag with his arm, cushioning the impact on Sean Jr. and burning his arm in the process. This came as no surprise for the boy who scored below the 10th percentile in middle school on every aptitude test except for one. For “protective instincts,” he’d scored in the 90th percentile.
Michael was getting better at playing the role of doted-on rich kid, but it didn’t change who he was in his heart. He was still innocent and naive, and because of this, he never spoke to any of the coaches who came to visit. Instead, he’d sit quietly while the recruiters expounded on the great programs and benefits they could offer him and let Sean Jr. ask the hard questions, namely what sort of perks they would offer him as Michael’s brother. The bond between brothers was stronger than ever, and Sean Jr. made it clear that Michael wouldn’t be going anywhere he wasn’t invited along as his entourage.
After months of entertaining coaches and school visits, Michael finally narrowed his choices down to three: LSU, Ole Miss, and Tennessee. Of course, Leigh Anne wanted Michael to go to Ole Miss as much because it was only an hour away as it was her alma mater. She knew people in high positions there and could control Michael’s experience better, but she felt herself become persuaded when the coach from LSU, Nick Saban, made his home visit. He was suave, sophisticated, and well-mannered. He was the kind of person Leigh Anne believed was decent, and she was starting to come around to the idea of Michael attending LSU. Unfortunately, a few weeks after his visit, Saban accepted the head coaching job for the Miami Dolphins in the NFL.
The next home visit was supposed to be from Ole Miss’s head coach, but he was fired only days before he was meant to arrive in Memphis. The only coach left standing was famed Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer, who’d been after Michael since his junior year. The only hitch—Tennessee was the main rival of Ole Miss, and Sean was not happy about the prospect of having Michael play for the enemy. Of course, Sean didn’t share this with Michael. He couldn’t be seen in any way to be influencing Michael toward Ole Miss. Instead, he decided to push LSU, even without a coach.
But things changed when Ole Miss hired a new coach, a Louisiana native who served as defensive line coach for the University of Southern California. Coach Ed Orgeron, or Coach O, announced his intent to assume the Ole Miss head coach position at a news conference, and five hours later, he was sitting in the Tuohy living room. As usual, Michael stayed silent. Then, when Coach O was ready to leave, Michael finally asked his first question. He asked what the coach was planning on doing with the players who’d already committed to Ole Miss.
Sean assumed Michael was asking because his close friend had received a scholarship from Ole Miss as the kicker. But Michael wanted to see what type of character Coach O had. If he was going to release all the players who’d been promised a spot on the team by the old coach, was this the type of person he wanted to play for? But Coach O said he was going to let them stay, and after Sean Jr. was promised full access and the chance to lead the team on the field at the first home game, Michael felt good about this new coach.
In general, Michael had taken a lot away from the five-month recruitment process regarding people. He saw who cared about him and who wanted to profit off of him. Hugh Freeze fell into this latter group, as Michael saw that Hugh had used his relationship with him to secure a position on the Tennessee coaching staff. He also saw that Sean respected him enough not to pressure him, and although Leigh Anne and Sue had made their feelings clear, their intentions were more about his support system than school loyalty.
Finally, on February 1, 2005, Michael announced his choice at a press conference. He told the reporters he was attending Ole Miss because he wanted to continue the Ole Miss tradition of his family. Ole Miss felt like home, which was not a surprise considering his home was one large shrine to the Rebels. Later, Michael confessed to Sean Jr. that he’d known he was going to Ole Miss since September. He’d just enjoyed the wooing from so many other places.
At the same time that Michael Oher was declaring his intention to attend Ole Miss, up at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis, a rumor was starting to spread about an unethical practice happening in the South. The rumor suggested that rich white Southern couples were adopting poor black kids from the inner city so they would play football at their alma maters. How the rumor got started or who it was that called and directed the NCAA’s attention to Michael Oher and the Tuohys is unknown. But a call, or maybe several, had been made, and at least one suggested that the Tuohys had kidnapped Michael. Because of that call, the Tuohys were now under investigation.
In late March, a month and a half after Michael’s press conference, an NCAA investigator named Joyce Thompson sat in the Tuohy household with Michael and Sean. She turned on her tape recorder and started to question Michael. Leigh Anne refused to attend the meeting, finding the whole affair insulting.
Over the course of the next five hours, Joyce questioned Michael about his past, how he came to live with the Tuohys, why he didn’t live with his mother, who paid for his Briarcrest education, who clothed and fed him, and other questions pertaining to Michael’s relationship with the Tuohys. As always, Michael’s answers were mostly one or two words without elaboration or no response at all. Often, Sean jumped in to respond, but Joyce resented his intrusions and told Sean he’d have his turn to be questioned.
Michael found the investigation annoying and upsetting. He didn’t like being asked about his life, but he also started to wonder whether there wasn’t some truth in the accusation. Had the Tuohys realized his future worth and taken him in out of some plot to benefit from his talents? He knew Hugh Freeze had used him to further his career. Michael’s faith in the people around him had been shaken so much that his senior quote in the yearbook was a line from a rap song that asked the question: If he didn’t become a star, would people still care about him?
Leigh Anne noticed a difference in his behavior. He didn’t outright reject the Tuohys or treat them differently, but she could tell he was wondering whether things would have been the same if he was just a poor black kid with no talent. He had also started wondering about Big Tony’s motives. Big Tony still kept in touch and seemed to constantly remind Michael that he was responsible for Michael’s fortunate circumstances.
Joyce didn’t help the matter with her questions. When she asked Michael if his truck was a gift for signing with Ole Miss, Sean blurted out that the idea was ridiculous. But Michael asked him, unclear whether he was joking or not, whether he’d have gotten the truck if he’d signed with UT.
The conversation became more contentious when Joyce tried to nail down the details of Michael’s upbringing before he met Big Tony. He mumbled something about foster care, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t be more specific. Joyce grew frustrated. She didn’t understand Michael or his secretive and pleasing nature and felt she was being taken for a ride. The interrogation ended only when Sue showed up for Michael’s tutoring lessons. Joyce said she would need to question Michael again.
The NCAA investigation was upsetting, but violations were a moot point at the moment. Michael still wasn’t academically eligible, and if he didn’t find a way to improve his GPA, he wouldn’t be playing football at Ole Miss.
With Sue’s help, Michael had worked exhaustively to raise his grades from Ds and Fs to As and Bs his final year, but it wasn’t enough. He was going to graduate with a 2.05 GPA, and the NCAA minimum was 2.65. The problem was that he didn’t have any more credits to earn at school. Time had simply run out, and no one knew what to do. For the first time, Sean took over the care of Michael’s education from Leigh Anne and Sue to find a solution.
Sean went to Coach O to discuss Michael’s circumstances and discovered a loophole in the NCAA regulations. Brigham Young University in Utah offered online courses that could be completed in less than two weeks and count as a grade replacement for a full semester’s grade in high school.
One of the problems with this plan was that the courses had to be taken during the school year to serve as replacements, and the school year was quickly coming to an end. The only caveat was if the student had a learning disability. Those students were allowed to complete courses up until the beginning of August. Michael had never tested positive for a learning disability in the Memphis public school system, but it was clear he struggled with learning. At any rate, it was the only option they had, so Sean set up an assessment.
Sean took Michael to see two female psychological examiners. They gave him several achievement tests. They asked him simple mathematical and logic questions and asked him to perform basic tasks, like drawing a picture of a house. From these tests, the examiners saw that Michael had significant knowledge deficiencies and had never been truly taught how to read. He’d never been taught phonics, which allows children to sound out words and determine what they mean based on their context in a sentence. Michael was a master memorizer, and the only reason he could read was that he’d memorized a large number of words.
Michael was an enigma to these examiners. At 18, he still learned like a child learned, through association rather than knowledge. There had been an opportunity for Michael to learn to read and take in information properly when he arrived at Briarcrest, but his secretive and pleasing nature had hindered that. He’d hidden his deficiencies as best he could, faking his way through to avoid being considered stupid. But the examiners could tell he wasn’t stupid, and this belief was confirmed when they gave him a new IQ test.
His previous IQ test scores as a child stated that his IQ was 80. With this IQ, he was determined to be unintelligent, so his poor performance was not considered a learning issue. He was learning about as well as could be expected with his lack of innate intelligence. But on this new IQ test, Michael scored between 100 and 110, which meant he was of average intelligence.
This result baffled the examiners. IQ wasn’t supposed to change. They explained that IQ is based on both critical thinking in the moment and thinking based on experience. The problem with Michael as a young boy was that he’d had no experiences. There was no way for him to respond through experience or critically because of that. But since arriving at Briarcrest, he’d been immersed in experiences, so his ability to make conclusions was functioning more normally. These results were good for Michael. As a person of average intelligence, his learning achievements were now not in line with what he should be capable of. He legitimately had a learning disability.
With his new diagnosis intact, Michael set to work to build up his GPA through the BYU courses. He took a series of courses called Character Education, which seemed to involve reading famous speeches or passages and answering a few questions. As the weeks went on, Sue helped Michael pass his Character Courses and replace Fs on his transcript with As. They were making progress toward their goal, but there was still the NCAA to deal with.
Toward the end of April, Joyce returned for her second interview. Again, she pressed Michael about any rich white person who had given him something over the course of his time at Briarcrest, whether money, a place to stay, or material gifts. As before, Joyce grew frustrated with Michael’s unwillingness to answer her questions or expound on his answers.
At this point, the conversation became heated. Joyce was suspicious and thought it strange that Michael wasn’t answering for himself. She didn’t understand the BYU situation, how Michael had survived so long without a home, and why he was with the Tuohys. Eventually, it was time for Michael to go study, and Joyce and Sean were left alone. Joyce suddenly changed her demeanor and admitted that she was pressing Michael so hard because she was truly curious about his living situation and couldn’t understand why the Tuohys had done what they did for him.
Sean explained his relationship with Michael and told her what he could about Michael’s past. He also said Michael had ruined them to some extent; they couldn’t look at a poor black kid now without wondering whether there was something they could do to help. Should they take in another kid after Michael left for college? Joyce almost fell out of her seat at the suggestion that they would do this again, but that was the last conversation she had with Sean or Michael. Whether she was satisfied or simply didn’t have enough evidence to support a case is unclear, but the matter was over.
A month after the end of the NCAA investigation, Michael walked across the stage at Briarcrest’s graduation to receive his diploma. Big Tony and Sue were both in attendance, but Michael’s mother was not.
A couple of months later, Michael finished his final BYU course and successfully upped his GPA to NCAA standards. Sean turned in the paperwork a day before the deadline, and the next day, Michael was given the green light to play collegiate sports. His future was again on track.
When Coach O heard the news, he called Sean and told him how happy he was. His plan was to build an entire offensive around Michael, which was unusual. Most college freshmen don’t start their first year. They are given an extra year of eligibility to practice at the higher level and learn from the upperclassmen. Sean was concerned when he heard this news. Michael wasn’t ready to face off against 22-year-old men who’d been playing college football for years.
Sean went to Coach O’s office to explain exactly who Michael was. He explained that he’d never weight-trained like other players and had only played offense for one season. He also didn’t learn plays like other players. Michael couldn’t learn by staring at a series of drawn-up plays on a whiteboard or in a binder. The Xs and Os wouldn’t make sense to him. He would say they did to please the coach, but come game day, he’d be lost.
Micahel learned by seeing, and he had the gift of memorization. Once he saw something, he never forgot it. If Coach O wanted Michael to learn plays, he had to use props and videos to show him what to do. Coach O took three pages of notes and thanked Sean for this valuable information. He would take these issues to heart. Michael would be in good hands.
Michael’s freshman year at Ole Miss was not what he or the Tuohys expected. Despite Coach O’s insistence that Michael would start at left tackle, the offensive lineman coach, George DeLeone, had different ideas. In his 36 years coaching at the collegiate level, he’d only started a freshman once. He believed Michael should red-shirt―when new players practice but don’t play or lose a year of eligibility―like all other freshmen and learn the ropes. He didn’t think he should be driving up to Memphis before the season to teach Michael the offensive plays using Leigh Anne’s dining chairs as props. But that’s what he did, and it seemed to be working. Michael’s lesson only stopped when Leigh Anne came home and was displeased to see her $2,000 chairs being run off the line by her giant son.
DeLeone still didn’t want to play Michael, but he did what his head coach asked with a small modification. Michael would not start at left tackle, but at right guard, which was flanked by other linemen who could help guide Michael on the field. The only problem was that the rest of the offensive line was made up of big, slow players who were just as confused by the plays as Michael was.
Many of the Ole Miss players were also inner-city black kids with little education or critical-thinking skills. DeLeone’s plays were vast and complicated, and the team never got the hang of them. Often, they would run in the wrong direction on the field or misunderstand which play was being called. By the final game of the season, Ole Miss had a 3-7 record and little confidence in their ability to win. Their offense was the worst in the conference, and they ranked 115th in the country of 117 Division I football programs.
It seemed as though things couldn’t get worse for the Rebels, but their final game was more important than any game of the year. They were playing in-state rivals, Mississippi State, a school considered the headquarters of redneck nation and stuck in the old South. Compared to the wealthy and seemingly tolerant Ole Miss, they were the lowly working-class school. And the two teams hated each other.
The rivalry game was called the Egg Bowl because of the egg-shaped trophy passed back and forth depending on who won the game. Ole Miss hadn’t lost the game in more than four years, and they didn’t want to start now. It would not only be an embarrassment in front of the rival crowd. It would be national humiliation. And it would also mean death for the offensive coaches, especially DeLeone.
For Michael’s part, he did his best to follow the plays and support his team. He mostly caught on and performed exceedingly well in his new position. But he also struggled and was lost and confused on the field during play. Usually, his good games came after hours of extra practice with Sean, who ran through all the plays with Michael beforehand. Playing in the SEC was a far cry from the three-play offense at Briarcrest, and an error meant more than simply an open player. It was the difference between the quarterback walking off the field or being carried off the field. The pressure was high, and it was intensified for this final game.
The embarrassment started immediately and swiftly. The inability of the Ole Miss offensive coaching squad to come up with a strategy that could harness the low skills of their players was no more apparent than that day. They ran the same plays over and over again, swapping players out rather than changing strategies. When Michael and two other linemen all defended the same player in the third quarter, Michael was yanked from the game and rode the bench for the remainder. He watched the rest of his first college season go down the drain with a 14-35 loss, and from the stands, Leigh Anne and Sean were already plotting to rectify this situation.
The terrible season at Ole Miss did little to decrease the excitement surrounding Michael. He’d done enough during those games where he understood what was happening and performed well, and the accolades came flooding in during the postseason. He was named First-Team Freshman All-American and All-SEC. He was considered the best offensive player on the team and received national attention in sports publications. It seemed there was nothing Michael Oher could do wrong.
Sean and Leigh Anne recognized that Michael’s rising status meant he was more beneficial to the Ole Miss team than they were to him. They used that as leverage with Coach O, threatening to transfer Michael if the entire offensive coaching staff wasn’t fired. Whether it was this threat or common sense, Coach O fired the staff and went in search of new coaches and new talent.
Michael started to feel an obligation to appease all of the people who had so much faith in him. He didn’t want to ride on his laurels as a great prospect. He wanted to be a great player. He started to apply himself to his training, including spending hours in the weight room during the offseason. By the start of his sophomore year, Michael had sculpted his body into a lean machine. He could bench press 400 pounds now, a massive jump from the 225 he started with. And he’d dropped 24 pounds and turned his flesh into muscle.
His prospects for the new season were high, and Coach O had decided that he would play nothing other than left tackle, as he should have been playing all along. His future seemed bright and shiny as ever if he could stay out of trouble.
Michael may have left home for college, but he never truly moved into a new life. His tutor, Sue, followed him to Ole Miss, Collins was a cheerleader for the football team, Hugh Freeze was still his coach (having moved to Ole Miss from Tennessee after Michael enrolled), and the Tuohys often stayed in their new home only a few blocks from campus. Not much had changed in his life except his location.
Michael’s character also didn’t change. He had a bit more swagger now from all the press he was receiving, but he was still quiet and shy. He didn’t hang out with the other football players much. Michael sometimes brought players home to Memphis for dinner, but for the most part, he kept to himself.
Part of the problem was that Michael had one foot in both the white crowd and black crowd at Ole Miss, which was different than at Briarcrest. He’d been removed from his old world by a racial border in Memphis, and he’d worked so hard to graduate, he’d rarely had time for much else. But now, Michael was surrounded by others who’d grown up in similar poor black neighborhoods as he did as a boy, and that part of him was sprouting to life again.
He started going back to his old neighborhood more and more, and trouble often followed. For instance, he was handcuffed on one visit to see his mother when the police arrested her for driving a truck owned by a man whose dead body had recently surfaced. Michael called Sean from jail, and Sean cleared the mess up. But he explained to Michael that the police were likely to treat him differently because he was black, and he needed to show them respect.
Sue was also caught up in this part of Michael’s life. She was now tutoring several of Michael’s black teammates, much to his chagrin. He grew jealous of her relationship with one friend and accused her of loving the other player more than him.
Leigh Anne tried to keep a close eye on Michael. She accepted his friends’ criminal histories or poor upbringings, but she also told Michael if he got into any trouble, her wrath would outweigh any other consequence. She did her best to keep Michael on the straight and narrow, but even the great Leigh Anne Tuohy couldn’t stop Michael’s innate child-like behavior.
Late into Michael’s second semester freshman year, he was accosted by one of his teammates, Antonio Turner. Turner was like Michael, black with a troubled background. He’d visited the Tuohy Memphis home once and thought the whole situation was off. On this day, he caught Michael hanging with some other players on the steps of a campus building and started insulting him. He called the Tuohys derogatory names and extended those to Michael, as well, suggesting that Michael was a sellout for moving in with rich white people.
In response, Michael shoved him and received a punch in the face. They chased each other around campus for a while, but then Antonio said something that unhinged Michael. He made some sexually explicit statements about Michael’s white mom and sister, and Michael saw red. Antonio ran to the tutoring center to hide, but Michael found him and charged him with all his strength. Michael had been training for months by now and was stronger and faster. He picked up 230-pound Antonio by the throat like a sack of rice and threw him across the room.
The tutors and athletes in the room hid under desks and screamed. When Michael calmed down, he saw a three-year-old white boy on the ground bleeding from the head. The boy was so small, he hadn’t seen him before. He was the son of one of the tutors and had been playing on the ground. The boy had been in the line of fire of Michael’s tirade and been badly injured. Michael stared at the boy for a few seconds in shock. Then, he turned and ran.
Hugh Freeze called Leigh Anne and asked her to help. She and Sean knew they were unlikely to find Michael. By now, they knew that Michael was a runner. Whenever there was trouble, his first instinct was to run. They’d learned this after Michael disappeared for two days after an argument with Sue.
A few weeks before the Sue incident, Sean had finally heard back from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, which he’d been calling unsuccessfully for months to find out more about Michael’s past. The woman on the other line said she remembered Michael and told Sean that Michael had been taken from his mother at the age of 7.
Michael spent time in foster homes, but he always ran away. The social services workers would hunt him down and take him back, and the same thing would happen. After three years, they finally stopped searching for Michael and lost track of him when he was 10. The woman had always wondered what had become of him. And now, Leigh Anne and Sean wondered the same thing.
The bits and pieces of his history that Michael had shared with Leigh Anne and Sean, and the parts the Tuohys were able to piece together on their own, amounted to very little. It would be years before they learned the true history of this boy they’d taken in and given a home and why he was the way he was. But Michael’s history helped highlight why he reacted the way he did after the incident with Antonio and the little boy.
Michael’s mother Denise, or Dee Dee, didn’t start out as a person who was likely to grow up and lose her children. She had an uneventful childhood, but darkness was quick to come into her life, and it never left. When she was a child, her father was murdered in his bed. After that, her mother became an alcoholic and could no longer care for Dee Dee and her brother, Robert. The two children were removed from the home and placed in an orphanage, where they stayed until Dee Dee was 15.
When Dee Dee left the orphanage, she fell in with a group of wayward kids. She started doing drugs and drinking, and five years later, she had her first child with a man named Odell Watkins. Over the next six years, she and Odell had four more children, although he was not a father figure or partner to her. At the age of 27, Dee Dee decided to leave Odell. It wasn’t long before another man walked into her life by way of her brother Robert.
Robert was serving his first prison sentence for murder and made a friend in jail named Michael Jerome Williams. Michael Sr. was getting out of jail, and Robert asked him to visit Dee Dee and give her an update on how he was doing. Dee Dee and Michael came together quickly, and she was pregnant again shortly after. Dee Dee was deep into drugs and had no job or money, but she welcomed her new son, Michael Jerome Williams Jr., into the world happily.
Michael’s father didn’t stick around long after he was born and ended up back in prison. Dee Dee no longer wanted her child named after that man, so she started referring to him as Michael Oher, her last name. Four years and four more children later, Dee Dee was firmly addicted to crack and using her government checks to support her habit, leaving her 7 boys and 3 girls to fend for themselves. Michael’s earliest memories are of going for days without food, drinking water to get full, and sleeping outdoors.
Despite these hardships, Dee Dee’s children loved her. She wasn’t mean and told them she loved them often, and Michael and his siblings started to worry that they’d get taken away from her and separated from each other. In April 1994, when Michael was almost 8, their worst nightmare came true. Police officers showed up to take Dee Dee’s children. The boys were able to escape, but the girls were taken away. Michael never saw his sisters again.
Several weeks after the girls were taken, the police found Michael and his brother Carlos at school. They were taken to live with Velma Jones, an obese woman who used to sit on them when they were bad. Velma was guardian of several foster children, and they used to pick on Michael and Carlos.
Michael ran away two days after arriving and went back to his mother’s place. Despite his pleas, Dee Dee knew things would get worse if Michael didn’t go back, and she escorted him there. He tried the same move a few weeks later, and Dee Dee took him back again.
Two years later, both Michael and Carlos escaped from Velma’s for good. The social workers took Michael to a hospital to have him tested for mental illness, and he was checked into a juvenile ward. Once again, Michael ran away from the hospital. He wandered the dark streets until he found Dixie Homes, the project where Dee Dee lived. But she didn’t live there anymore. In the years that he’d been gone, she’d moved to Hurt Village.
Michael found Dee Dee at Hurt Village, but he went to hide at her abandoned apartment at Dixie Homes to avoid getting taken back to foster care. Carlos showed up soon after, and the two went on the run. When they realized the police were no longer looking for them, they moved in with Dee Dee and a few siblings, some old and some new. The eight of them shared a two-room apartment and stayed there for the next five years.
Hurt Village was a harsh environment with close to 1,000 residents. There were no nuclear families, many adults didn’t have jobs, and 75% suffered from mental illness, including drug addiction. Most of the village was under the control of Delvin Lane and his gang, the Gangster Disciples (GD).
Michael stopped attending school for 18 months after arriving at Hurt Village, fearing the police would find him there and take him away again. He didn’t realize the Department of Children’s Services had already given up on placing him in a foster home. He lived a free life with no supervision or obligations, and he remembers it as being fun. Michael had few to no friends and spent a lot of time alone. His favorite pastime was shooting hoops from morning to night, what he considered to be training for his future. Michael had a dream—he wanted to be the next Michael Jordan.
Michael’s dream started in 1993 after he watched the Bulls guard make the Phoenix Suns look like a high school team. He was fast and agile, and he believed he had what it took to make it to the NBA. He made a vow to be as great as Jordan one day. No one in the world thought this little boy had anything to offer the world, but he knew differently. He knew he was destined to be a rich and famous athlete.
Michael grew quickly and got stronger, but inside, he was still a quiet and shy boy. There were only two people that Michael hung out with: a boy his age named Craig, who also loved to play basketball, and a man 10 years older named Big Zach. Zach had been a hot high school football prospect and had what would become the quintessential left tackle body. Many people mistook Michael and Big Zach for brothers because they were so similar in shape and features.
Like Michael, Tom Lemming had touted Zach as one of the brightest offensive tackles in the country, and scholarship offers rolled in. But unlike Michael, Zach had a large group of friends and a girlfriend. After he returned from a visit to Florida State, where the coach had his name already stenciled on a locker, they convinced him he wasn’t good enough for the NFL and that college was a waste of time. He listened and dropped out of school. Several years later, Zach regretted his decision. He didn’t realize how close he’d been to making it.
Perhaps it was this future regret looming in his subconscious that caused Big Zach to take Michael under his wing. He took him to the basketball court and saw that Michael was good and handled the ball well for his size. People started calling Michael “Big Mike,” but he hated it because it didn’t match the image he had in his mind. Without pictures or mirrors around, he didn’t have a true understanding of how big he was getting. He wanted to be light as air and fast with cat-like reflexes, like Jordan, so that’s who he believed he was.
To keep the illusion alive, Michael wore oversized clothes and shoes a size too small. He worked out, believing he was slimming down, and only played guard on the court to maximize his quickness. This delusion also kept him from realizing how strong he was becoming. He was truly shocked one day when he picked up a kid while horsing around like it was nothing. Still, he refused to be big. He was small and lithe in his mind, and his body followed his mind’s commands.
During this time, Michael still wasn’t attending school most days, but his teachers kept moving him up a grade without concern. He was unencumbered and content, but everything changed before his 15th birthday when Big Tony found him on the basketball court at Hurt Village.
Tony took Michael in and enrolled him into Westwood High School, where Tony’s son, Steven, played basketball. Michael played both basketball and football at the school, but he didn’t care much for football. Still, Big Tony saw how big Michael was getting and knew he could attract attention from colleges with his size alone.
Around this time, Tony’s mother died, and he fulfilled his promise to her to take Steven across the city to get a Christian education. And if he was already driving Steven to Briarcrest, he may as well take Big Mike, too.
Michael remembers those first months at Briarcrest as days of confusion. He’d never been around white people before and couldn’t understand their way of life. They were all overly friendly, seemingly fragile, and careless with their possessions.
Steven had noticed this, too, and one day, the two boys came home with Big Tony and revealed a stash of stolen items from the boys’ locker room. Tony sat Steven and Michael down and explained the ways of their new world to them. It wasn’t like the hood. They had to stay out of trouble and follow the rules because once a black boy caused trouble in a white world, he’d never be accepted again.
Everything that had happened to Michael Oher, from his entry into Briarcrest up to his near-certain path to the NFL, was in jeopardy because of his behavior that day in the tutoring center. The center became a crime scene, with both Ole Miss and Oxford police investigating the incident. The little boy was taken to the hospital, and the father, Bobby Nix, was pressing charges. He and his wife had already lost one child.
In Memphis, Leigh Anne was frantically trying to get hold of Michael. She bounced between calls to Michael’s cellphone and Sean’s. Michael didn’t answer, and Sean was in Seattle with the Memphis Grizzlies and at a movie theater. He’d received the first call about Michael just as he and a friend were entering, and now he was on the lobby floor against a wall with his phone plugged into an outlet.
As usual, Sean was trying to figure out the best strategy for how to manage this situation. He was worried that Michael might do something drastic to himself out of fear or guilt. Sean called Hugh Freeze, who informed him that the boy had received stitches but was unharmed beyond that. Hugh also said the police were planning on arresting Michael. Sean reeled. An arrest would generate bad press and a bad reputation for Michael. He called a family friend who was also a big-time defense attorney.
During this time, Michael was driving around Oxford angry and confused. He’d never had attachments like he had with the Tuohys before, and his love for them made him vulnerable. Even he was surprised by how quickly he’d become angry after Antonio said what he did about Collins and Leigh Anne. If Michael was still the kid he was 3 years before, he’d have kept going and never looked back. But he had a family he loved now, so he called Sean.
Sean told Michael to turn himself in to the Ole Miss police. Afterward, Sean called the boy’s father and any other person with sway in the case and explained who Micahel was and what had happened. He promised to cover the medical bills and damage incurred and got the campus police to handle the situation without the city police.
At the end of it all, Michael completed 10 hours of community service, made a series of apologies, and returned to his life without a single word being written about the incident. He received the rich-white-kid treatment, and no one was the wiser.
Michael’s story is scripted as though it was meant to be, and for Michael, it was. He has a hard time admitting that anything that happened to him contributed to his success. He knew from early on that he was going to be a big athletic star, and he saw his rise as merely the fulfillment of his destiny. But the truth isn’t quite so fantastic or simple.
Michael may have been born with an athletic gift that made him ripe to be a star, but his path to the NFL was by no means a sure thing. He had to overcome his learning issues and poor school performance, run-ins with the law, an NCAA inquiry, and his lack of training to be a starting left tackle for Ole Miss and a future first-round prospect for the NFL draft. And if he’d simply stayed a black kid from the inner city, he’d likely not have made it. There were numerous people, from Big Tony to the Briarcrest administrators and teachers, who made his current life possible. And then there were the Tuohys, without whom Michael would not have been treated with the privilege he enjoyed.
All of these aspects of Michael’s life turned him from a poor black kid that no one knew about into a household name within the football sphere and beyond. And although Michael’s talents and body type are unique, his potential is not. There are hundreds of talented black athletes in West Memphis and other inner city communities who have what it takes to be star athletes someday. But more than likely, no one will ever know who these kids are. Their lives are not organized in a way that grants them access to the brass ring. But after Michael, many tried.
Briarcrest became inundated with applications from poor black students with bad academic histories but athletic talent. These boys wanted a chance to prove themselves and receive the help they needed to be successful in life. And although many at Briarcrest and in East Memphis saw that there was a benefit in helping these kids make something of themselves, the new president wasn’t comfortable with Briarcrest becoming a training ground for black youth.
Sean and Leigh Anne also recognized the lasting legacy of what they’d done for Michael. They saw that there were many young black kids who could have bright athletic futures under the right circumstances. It wasn’t talent that held them back but a skewed system of opportunities. If Briarcrest had opted to allow more black students in, they would have been willing to help give them the resources needed to succeed. They also knew that it’s 100% fact that if Michael had never crossed their path, his talents would have remained unknown in Hurt Village.
This point was driven home for Leigh Anne one day in 2006 when she read a story about a young black boy from West Memphis named Arthur Sallis. Sallis was a football star on the rise at one of the Memphis public high schools. He was being recruited by every coach in the SEC and offered scholarships from Kentucky and Ole Miss. But he didn’t qualify for college sports because he didn’t meet the NCAA’s minimum GPA requirement. His scholarships went unused, and Sallis returned to West Memphis.
Sallis didn’t simply go back to West Memphis and do nothing. He started a carpet-cleaning business with his high school coach’s help and raised his baby daughter on his own. Then, a few years later, Sallis was at home with his four-year-old daughter when three men broke in. They shot him in the head, and at 22, Arthur Sallis died.
Leigh Anne realized that Michael could very easily have been Sallis, and she wasn’t alone. A study conducted at Sallis's high school showed that 5 of 6 students with collegiate athletic potential never make it because of their educational performance. One of the only career paths afforded to poor black kids was obstructed. But Leigh Anne was going to do something about it. She decided she wanted to start a foundation that would help promising black athletes raise their grades so they could follow their dreams.
Michael’s inability to see the blessings that afforded him his life made him resentful of people from his past who now wanted help. He didn’t feel like he owed anyone anything, and anyway, he didn’t have anything to give. He was still an amateur athlete in college and hadn’t earned a single cent, but that didn’t keep his family and friends from West Memphis from calling.
Once, Michael had stated he would buy a house big enough for his mom and all his siblings when he reached the NFL. But now he stopped returning his mother’s calls and rarely returned his siblings’. He thought that because they started in the same place, they should be able to turn their own lives around, like he had.
Part of Michael’s attitude was his feeling that he hadn’t changed as a person. He was still the same kid from Hurt Village, just in a new environment. But there was still one person Michael felt connected to and wanted to help. His old friend Craig from childhood was still a close friend. As soon as Michael got his driver’s license, he started bringing Craig to the Tuohy house. And he knew he would take Craig with him when he went pro.
What made Craig so special was that Michael trusted him because he felt he was one of the only people who didn’t want something from him. Craig never asked for help, and when Michael offered it, he turned it down. Michael took that as a sign of Craig’s integrity, which made him want to help him more. Michael also felt comfortable with Craig because he was the only person who understood that Michael was still the same person he’d always been.
But it would be another two years before Michael could reach his dream of playing in the NFL and helping his friend. He was a sophomore at Ole Miss and couldn’t be drafted until after his junior year. But there was no doubt that he would make it, not for Michael or anyone else.
Michael started every game for Ole Miss his sophomore year and made the Dean’s List with a 3.75 GPA. He was focused in college and told those around him that he would stay and graduate, but inside he knew it wasn’t true. If the NFL came knocking when he became eligible, he was going to answer.
Michael no longer looks backwards toward his past. He rarely goes to West Memphis and spends the majority of his time away from the team with his family, the Tuohys. He has successfully shed one life and replaced it with a newer, shinier life. He beat the odds stacked up against him with the wind of the white world, once a presence to hold him down, now pushing him forward. But there is nothing remarkable about this to Michael. It is what it is.
After Michael’s junior year season at Ole Miss in 2008, he declared for the NFL draft. But days later, he rescinded and returned to play his senior year. He eventually graduated as a highly decorated college athlete with a degree in criminal justice.
In 2009, Michael was drafted in the first round by the Baltimore Ravens and signed a 5-year contract worth $13.8 million. He started every game for the Ravens his first season in the NFL and came in second for Rookie of the Year. In 2013, Michael won a Super Bowl with the Ravens over the San Francisco 49ers.
Michael left the Ravens in 2013 to play for the Tennessee Titans, but his career there only lasted one year. Michael then went to play for the Carolina Panthers, protecting star quarterback Cam Newton’s blind side. He signed an extensive $21.6 million three-year contract, but after a failed physical examination due to continuing issues from a concussion, the Panthers released Michael in 2017.
Today, Michael lives in Baltimore. He has not played football since his release.
Part of what makes Michael Oher’s story so remarkable is the way the NFL changed to create an environment perfect for someone like him. How can his story help your life?
What aspects of Michael’s life resonate with your own? Did you overcome the odds to achieve success? Did you struggle to do well in school?
What inspiration can you take from Michael’s story and apply to your life?
Do you have a natural gift that fits perfectly into a niche in the world? What is it, and where does it fit?
Michael is an example that anything is possible when people believe in you. Who is your support system, and how do those people continue to support your dreams and success in life?