The Blind Side (40 page)

Michael saw none of it: he was long gone. Ignoring the calls from Leigh Anne and the text messages from Sean, he drove around Oxford in a fog of anger and confusion. He was angry because Antonio had said what he’d said and then struck him; he was confused because he was newly vulnerable. He now had these people he loved, who loved him. Through them, other people could get to him. He was no longer just another poor black kid going nowhere. He understood that most people, white and black, treated him a lot differently than they would have if he wasn’t a football star. But he couldn’t bring himself to be cynical about the Tuohy family. He knew other people, white and black, were saying that these rich white Ole Miss boosters had identified him early on as a future NFL lineman and bought him the way you’d buy a cheap stock or a racehorse. That they might not need his money but they liked his status, and had envisioned how he might serve the Briarcrest and Ole Miss football teams. Michael didn’t believe it. “I wasn’t anything when I first got to them, and they loved me anyway,” he said. “Nothing was in it for them.”

A few hours after he’d fled the scene of the crime, he noticed that the tone of Sean’s text messages had changed. They started out urgent. Now they were just funny.

Mike Tyson! U coming back into the ring for another round?

Michael began to compose himself. Three years ago he’d have just kept on running and never looked back. He wouldn’t admit that he was different, but he couldn’t deny that things were different. He was no longer a black object skipping along the surface of a white background; he’d been woven into the white fabric. So…why was he running? Who was he running from? For that matter—where was he running to?

He opened his cell phone.

At that moment Sean was sitting on the floor of a movie theater’s lobby in Seattle, worrying that Michael might be looking for a bridge to throw himself from. He’d been traveling with the Memphis Grizzlies, and the team had an off day. Sean and his friend Brian Cardinal, the Grizzlies’ forward, had gone to see a movie, 16 Blocks with Bruce Willis. The first call about Michael had come as they walked into the theater. With his cell phone nearly out of juice, Sean found the plug in the lobby and set about trying to fix things. First he called Coach O, who, bless his heart, refused to be anything but calm. Then he called Hugh Freeze, and learned that (a) the little boy needed stitches in his head but was otherwise fine, and (b) the police, if and when they found Michael, intended to take him to jail. That wasn’t good. Jail meant, at the very least, news stories. Jail meant the wrong kind of reputation.

Sean now considered how to play it. The poor white kid had been born with a talent for seeing the court, taking in every angle and every other player, and then attacking in the most efficient way possible. The talent translated beautifully from basketball into life. He knew that Leigh Anne had cheered for one of the senior officers of the Ole Miss campus police, Michael Harmon, back when he’d been a flanker on the Ole Miss football team, and considered him a friend. Bobby Nix, the father of the injured boy, had been Sean’s fraternity brother at Ole Miss. Dr. Thomas Wallace, the vice chancellor of the university and an old friend of Sean’s, was now serving as Michael’s “mentor.” Sean sat there on the theater floor, thinking how best to play this possession, while, every ten minutes, Brian Cardinal popped his head out of the theater door and said, “You haven’t missed anything yet.”

And he hadn’t—the real action was right there on the lobby floor. After he’d left yet another text message for Michael—make it funny, he thought, so he doesn’t throw himself off a bridge—Sean decided he needed a lawyer. The Ole Miss football team, and the school itself, he decided, should be allowed to handle matters as they saw fit. (Especially since he knew how they’d see fit.) And so he called his old friend Steve Farese.

Farese was the defense attorney then representing, among other clients, the nice lady in Selma, Tennessee, who had shot her Baptist preacher husband in the back and killed him. For Steve Farese, a single bullet fired into one’s husband’s back counted as a trivial offense: a human being could hardly think up a thing to do that Farese couldn’t construe as innocent. The FedEx pilot accused of stuffing his wife in the trunk of his car and setting it on fire? Innocent! The rapper charged with rape? Innocent! The Ole Miss quarterback, Eli Manning, charged with peeing on the side of a campus building? Off and starting for the New York Giants! When Sean reached Farese, and explained that the police were about to take his son in and book him, Farese became excited. “Oh, no, no, no, no, they are not,” he said. “Sean, this is just an unfortunate accident.”

That’s when Michael called.

“Pops,” he said, “you’re my first call. Just like I promised.”

“Michael,” said Sean, “this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

Sean sorted it out; of course he sorted it out. He told Michael to turn himself in to campus police who, he felt sure, would keep him from the clutches of the Oxford police. He called Bobby Nix and anyone else whose opinion might matter. He explained the situation in a way that they’d completely understand and offered to pay for whatever needed paying for. And, after a long round of fulsome apologies and ten hours of community service, Michael was restored to his former status of model citizen—and the incident never even hit the campus newspaper. It just went away, the way it would have gone away for some well-to-do white kid. Of course, lessons were learned and points of view exchanged. Coach O, for instance, pulled Michael into his office to discuss The Responsibilities of Being Michael Oher. Rather dramatically, Coach O extracted from his desk a thick folder stuffed with newspaper clippings, and dropped it with a thud. “Dajus da crap dey wrote bout me last sittee days!” he boomed. (That’s just the crap they wrote about me in the last sixty days!) He went on to lecture Michael on the burdens of conspicuous success. “Let me tell you something, son,” he concluded (in translation). “It is lonely at the top. I hate you had to learn about this at such a young age, but there are going to be many Antonio Turners. This is the first of many incidents.”

MICHAEL OHER’S CAREER as a football player wasn’t a sure thing—there was no such thing in football as a sure thing. But his odds in life had changed, dramatically. In just the past three years he had encountered countless threats to his future that might have put an end to it had he remained socially unconnected to white people: illiteracy, bad grades, car crashes, a night with the Memphis police, an NCAA investigation, men in the street who offered to become his agent. Any one of these might have sent him right back to the prison of his past. It was part of being hopelessly poor that events conspired to keep you poor; if it wasn’t one thing, it was another. That cycle, in Michael’s case, had been broken. He was like a quarterback who had gone from playing in an unimaginative offense, incapable of making him look good, to playing in an offense designed by Bill Walsh.

There’s an instant before it collapses into some generally agreed-upon fact when a life, like a football play, is all conjecture and fragments and partial views. Everyone wants to know the whole truth but no one possesses it. But Michael Oher already had collapsed into a generally agreed-upon fact: he was a success. The world that had once taken no notice of Michael Oher was now so invested in him that it couldn’t afford to see him fail. Of course, he wasn’t the first black kid to rise from poverty and make it in the white world. But Michael was different, because the white world had so unusually aided and abetted his rise. The white world had watched Michael Oher happen, or thought they had, and so could imagine how he might be replicated. He haunted that world.

The Briarcrest Christian School, for starters, wrestled internally with the implications of Michael Oher. Applications to the school from black inner-city kids shot through the roof—“They all saw what happened to Michael and they now want to go to Briarcrest, too,” said Sean. The school’s new president, Bill McGee, did not like the idea of throwing open the doors to poor black athletes who couldn’t read or write, but the school’s staff could see the benefits. “Yeah, we helped Michael Oher,” said Carly Powers, the Briarcrest athletic director. “But I tell you something else. Michael Oher helped our school. He gave a lot of people here some hope that if you help some of these kids, it is possible that they’ll come around and make something of their lives.” Jennifer Graves, who oversaw students with special needs, and so supervised Michael’s academic life, saw an even higher purpose in Michael. “Michael got saved when he was at Briarcrest,” said Graves. “What better way to spread the word of Jesus than for Michael Oher to stand up and say it? What kid in the Memphis City Schools wouldn’t listen?” She knew that Michael was still intensely private—and that his gift for avoiding social entanglements had probably made a lot of what had happened to him possible. But when it was pointed out to her that Michael didn’t seem like the most obvious spokesman for any cause, she just smiled and said, “And Moses stuttered.”*

The coaches who had come to Briarcrest to woo Michael Oher also had trouble banishing him from their thoughts. Nick Saban was now coaching the Miami Dolphins, but he sent the Tuohys a Christmas card. (“If I was still at LSU Michael would be playing for me!”) And, every now and again, Saban mentioned to scouts and sports agents that he was waiting for this phenomenal left tackle at Ole Miss to age, so that he could draft him.

If Nick Saban was still interested, Phil Fulmer was obsessed. Fulmer’s University of Tennessee, widely considered before the 2005 season to have a shot at the national championship, had finished a disastrous 5–6. But at the start of the season they scored a huge victory at home against the highly ranked LSU Tigers. After the game the euphoric Fulmer spoke to the television cameras on the field, then rumbled into the Tennessee locker room. He found his agent, Jimmy Sexton, waiting for him. “He’d just beaten LSU,” recalled Sexton, “and the first thing he says to me is ‘See if you can get Michael Oher to transfer.’”

Fulmer returned to the Briarcrest Christian School. With the departure of Hugh Freeze—and Michael Oher—the Briarcrest football program fell on hard times. But the team still had one big-time prospect, a pass rushing defensive end named Greg Hardy. “The Freak,” as he was known, because he was six six and 245 pounds with lightning reflexes and sprinter speed. The Freak was a quarterback’s worst nightmare. The Freak was also black and, right up to the moment Briarcrest let him in, the recipient of a Memphis public school education. He wasn’t a great student, but his grades were good enough to qualify him to play college football. And Phil Fulmer was seriously interested in him.

But, as Fulmer stood on the sidelines of the Briarcrest practice field and watched, he couldn’t help but notice, just down the sideline, a familiar figure: Sean Tuohy. The Tennessee football coach edged a little closer until at length he caught Sean’s eye.

“You gonna adopt this one, too?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Sean. “I’m waiting to see how good he is.”*

He was only half-joking. His experience with Michael Oher had left Sean alive to the possibilities. If these poor black kids were good enough at sports that the wider world had a natural interest in them, all they’d need was a little push, in the form of love and attention from someone like Leigh Anne, and they’d be on their way. “The problem isn’t intelligence,” he said. “It’s access to the system.” But Briarcrest had a new policy of shunning the inner-city black athlete, and it infuriated him. “They really aren’t as obsessed as they should be with giving opportunities to academically challenged kids,” he said. Sean was willing to provide the funds to pay for kids to go to Briarcrest, and yet Briarcrest was newly unwilling to take them.

SEAN JUNIOR MUST HAVE noticed his father’s new interest in helping out, financially, every poor black boy who could hit a jump shot and every black girl who could pitch a softball. SJ was the only white player on his twelve-and-under AAU basketball team, and most of the black players were conspicuously poor. Just about every one of them had applied to Briarcrest, and if Briarcrest hadn’t rejected them, his father was ready to bankroll them all. It got SJ to thinking about his own situation.

He now had a question he wanted to ask.

Three years earlier, Sean Junior, like his big sister Collins, had been more than happy to take Michael in. He didn’t really view Michael as black or poor or a potential drain on the family’s resources. He was more interested in Michael’s capacity to serve as an entertaining big brother and wily co-conspirator. Still, now that Collins and Michael were off at Ole Miss, SJ couldn’t help but feel left out. Collins was Miss Everything and dating Cannon Smith, the son of the billionaire founder of Federal Express. Michael was already being spoken of as a first-round NFL draft pick. Just the other day, a scout for the Chicago Bears had taken Michael aside and told him that he could be the best lineman ever to come out of Ole Miss. Even if he didn’t actually have any money yet, SJ thought, Michael was sure to become really rich. And all he had gotten out of the deal was a single trip with Coach O through the Grove.

And so he had a question. He was in the back of a car one day, being chauffeured by his mother to one of his AAU basketball games, when he thought to ask it.

“Mom,” he said, “can I ask you something about you and Dad’s will?”

“Uh huh,” she said, warily.

“Collins is going to marry Cannon and so she’ll be a billionaire,” he said.