“I like that one,” he said.
She was five one, 115 pounds of blond hair, straight white teeth, and the most perfect pink dress. He was black, poor, and three times her size. Everyone—everyone—stared at them. And as they moved from shop to shop, the surroundings, and the attention, became more discomforting. At the final Big and Tall Shop on the border of what had just been pronounced, by the 2000 United States Census, the third poorest zip code in the country, Leigh Anne said, “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never been to this neighborhood.” And Big Mike finally spoke up. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I got your back.”
Along the way she asked him more questions. “But of course they were the wrong questions,” she said later. She noticed little things about him, however, and in these were tiny clues. “I could tell he wasn’t used to being touched,” she said. “The first time I tried to touch him—he just freezes up.”
When they were finished shopping, he was heaped with packages and yet he insisted he wanted to take the bus home. (“I am not letting him ride the bus with all these bags!”) She drove him back—into what she assumed must be the worst neighborhood in Memphis. They stopped in at McDonald’s. He ordered for himself two quarter pounders with cheese. On a hunch she bought six extra burgers for him to take home with him. At length, they reached what he said was his mother’s house. It was an ominous dark redbrick building behind a tall metal gate. Across the street was an abandoned house. The scrub grass, the dead plants in pots, the flaking paint on the houses: everything, including the small children in the streets, looked uncared for. She parked and stepped out of the car, to help him with all the bags. That’s when he sprang into action:
“Don’t get out!” he said.
“I’ll just help you with the bags.”
“You don’t need to get out of the car,” he said.
He was so insistent that she stepped back inside the car and promised to stay put, with the doors locked, while he went in and found someone to help him with his packages. A few minutes later a line of small children streamed out of the front gates of the depressing apartment building and, antlike, lifted the sacks and carried them inside. When the last child had moved the last package, the gate closed behind him.
He hadn’t given her the first clue of what he thought of her, or of their strange afternoon together. “Probably,” she figured, “that I’m some nice lady who wanted something from him.” So when he thanked her, she made a point of saying, “Michael, it was my pleasure. You don’t owe me anything.” And that, she thought, was that.
It wasn’t, of course. He was different from the other children that she and Sean had helped out. For a start, he was obviously more destitute. And she couldn’t explain why just then, but she was drawn to him and felt the urge to do things for him. He was just this big ol’ kid who could have been mean and scary and thuggy, but everything about him was soft and gentle and sweet-natured. With him she felt completely safe; even if he wasn’t saying anything, she sensed he was watching out for her.
She went home and thought about the problem still at hand: how to clothe the biggest sixteen-year-old boy she had ever laid eyes on. She flipped through her Rolodex. Several of her interior decorating clients were professional athletes. All but one were basketball players, and all of them were tall and thin. The other was Patrick Ramsey, the Washington Redskins’ new starting quarterback. “I know how these athletes are about their clothes,” she said. “They’re very particular and they’re tossing them out and getting new ones all the time.” What more fertile source of extra-large hand-me-downs than the NFL? She called Ramsey, who said he was more than happy to dun his teammates for their old clothing. She gave him Michael’s measurements, and Patrick Ramsey took them down.
A few days later, he called back. “You’ve got these measurements wrong,” he said, matter-of-factly. She explained that she had taken the measurements herself, and written them down on a piece of paper. It must be Patrick who had them wrong. He read them back to her—20-inch neck, 40-inch sleeve, 50-inch waist, 58-inch chest, etc.—nope, he had them right.
“There’s no one on our team as big as he is,” Ramsey said.
She thought he was kidding.
“Leigh Anne,” said the Redskins quarterback, “we only have one player on this team who is even close, and he wears Wrangler blue jeans and flannel shirts and no black kid is going to be caught dead wearing that stuff.” That would be Jon Jansen, the Redskins’ starting right tackle.
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line.
“Who is this kid?”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BLANK SLATE
EVERY ONE OF THE COACHES at Briarcrest can recall the moment they realized that Big Mike was not any ordinary giant. For Hugh Freeze the moment was a football practice at which this new boy, who had just been admitted on academic probation, had no business. He just wandered onto the field, picked up a huge tackling dummy—the thing weighed maybe fifty pounds—and took off with it, at high speed. “Did you see that!!!? Did you see the way that kid moved?” Hugh asked another coach. “He ran with that dummy like it weighed nothing.” Hugh’s next thought was that he had misjudged the boy’s mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. “That’s when I had them weigh him,” said Hugh. “One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.” The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later informed was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow, delightfully beefy for a high school sophomore football player. Especially one who could run. “I didn’t know whether he could play,” said Freeze. “But I knew this: we didn’t have anyone like him on campus.”
The basketball coach, John Harrington, had a similarly incidental encounter with Big Mike in action, inside the Briarcrest gym. Whenever a new kid he thought might play on his team showed up, Harrington tossed him a ball, unexpectedly, just to test his reactions and instincts. The first time Big Mike walked onto the Briarcrest court he was wearing his cutoff blue jeans and grubby sneakers. Harrington tossed him a ball anyway, just to see. Instead of taking it to the rim, or kicking it into the stands, as you might expect a boy his size to do, he caught it and swirled. He dribbled three times between his legs, spun, and, from the dead corner of the floor, nailed a three-point shot. “Walking into the gym he sort of became a different person,” said Harrington. “He was doing things a guard would do. Here’s this kid—what, six five and three hundred-something pounds, and he’s moving like he’s a hundred sixty-five pounds. My head’s spinning.”
Coach Boggess, the track coach, who doubled as the weightlifting instructor and tripled as an assistant football coach, had his own shocking encounter with the boy’s freakish physical gifts. It came on the Briarcrest football field. Big Mike wasn’t allowed to play, but every now and then he came out onto the field and played, in effect, by himself. One afternoon he took a sack of footballs out to midfield. Standing on the fifty-yard line he threw them, one by one, through the goalposts at the back of the end zone. As a rule, a good college quarterback’s range was 60 yards—from midfield to the line along the back of the end zone. Here was this kid, a sophomore in high school, shaped nothing like a quarterback, chucking the ball 70–75 yards. And making it look easy.
From the moment he’d laid eyes on Michael Oher, Coach Boggess thought he might invite him onto the track team as a shot putter. He was shaped like a shot putter, and also like the shot itself, round and heavy. It hadn’t occurred to Boggess to ask Big Mike to throw anything else until he saw him chucking these footballs and realized he was not merely huge and strong, but flexible and long-armed. There was elegance about him. High school track didn’t have the javelin. That was a pity, Boggess thought, as he watched the footballs rocket through the goalposts. Still, there was the discus. “I hadn’t thought of him throwing the discus,” said Boggess, “because with the discus it�
�s not how big you are, it’s the technique you use. The discus is not physiologically suited to the football lineman-type body, in the way the shot put is. Those bodies don’t have the grace to do it.”
Throwing a discus is more complicated than it appears. The discus thrower needs to separate his lower half from his upper half so that the lower half rotates faster than the upper and creates a torque effect. To achieve the proper spin on the discus requires the body control of an ice skater. None of the Briarcrest coaches was able to teach “spinning” by example, as none of them could do it themselves. When they had a kid who was ambitious enough to try it, they showed him instructional videos.
In Michael Oher’s case, the coaches’ ignorance hardly mattered. When the first track meet rolled around that first spring, he hadn’t spent a minute with the coaches. He was earning straight D’s in the classroom and spending five hours a day with tutors, in exchange for being allowed to finish up the basketball season on the Briarcrest team. When Coach Boggess led him out Briarcrest’s back door and onto the old grass field for that first meet, he sensed, rightly, that Michael Oher was witnessing track and field for the first time in his life. “He didn’t know what a discus was,” said Boggess. “He’d never seen one.” The track coach inserted Michael at the back of the queue of discus throwers from the other schools, and left him to give it a whirl. Michael, for his part, never said a word, or asked a question. “I just watched them a couple of times,” he said, much later, “and then I threw it.”
Across the field Collins Tuohy, daughter of Sean and Leigh Anne, future Tennessee State champion in the pole vault, watched the discus competition as she waited herself to compete. When Big Mike’s first throw landed, she picked up her cell phone and called her father. “Daddy,” she said, “I think you better come over here and see Michael throw the discus. It looks like a Frisbee.”
Boggess watched, too. “I think I just laughed,” he said. “It wasn’t spinning or doing anything fancy. But, man, it flew.”
Michael’s first throw won him first place in that meet. But it was a crude victory, the track and field equivalent of bludgeoning when a sword was at hand. Big Mike wasn’t spinning, and neither was the discus. “That first time he did it he didn’t really have anyone to watch, because the other kids at that meet weren’t really able to spin either,” said Boggess. Still, he was amazed, even then, how much the kid looked like he knew what he was doing. Even on the first throw, after watching the kids in front of him, he acquired the basic snap release. Boggess had had kids on his team who never even got that far. At the bigger meets, Boggess knew, some of the discus throwers had serious technique, and would offer Michael a more sophisticated model to imitate. To Boggess, the striking thing was how quickly Michael Oher learned. He wasn’t just big and strong and agile; he had a kind of physical intelligence. “He basically taught himself,” said Boggess. “Because we couldn’t teach him. I remember going out on the field one day and saying: Oh my God, he’s spinning. He’s figured it out. Evidently he just figured it out by watching.”
That was the point: Big Mike was able to learn with his body, when he could see other people in action. It wasn’t long before Boggess was watching, with glee, as his professional-looking high school discus thrower hit 166 feet—the longest throw in Tennessee in six years. He never had time to practice, as he had to be tutored after school. He just wandered out to the meets and threw whatever needed to be thrown. By the time he finished his quixotic track career, Michael Oher would break the West Tennessee sectional record in the discus, and threaten it in the shot put. In his spare time! It came so easily to him, said Boggess, that if his talent for throwing the discus did not wind up seeming so trivial when set beside his other talents, “they’d have taken him away and trained him up and he’d have been big time.”
For his first year and a quarter, until the spring of his junior year, there was some question as to the highest use of Michael Oher. Once the teachers figured out he needed to be tested orally, he proved to them that he deserved high D’s instead of low F’s. It wasn’t clear he was going to acquire enough credits to graduate with his class, but Mr. Simpson and Ms. Graves stopped thinking they were going to send him back out on the streets, and they let him play sports. He joined the basketball team at the end of his sophomore year, and soon afterwards the track and field team. In his junior year he finally got onto the football field.
The problem there, at first, resembled his problems in the classroom. He was a blank slate. He had no foundation, no idea what he was meant to do as a member of a team. He said he had played football his freshman year, at Westwood, but there was no sign of it in his performance. When Coach Hugh Freeze saw how fast he could move, he pegged him as a defensive tackle. And so, for the first five games of the 2003 season, he played defense. He wasn’t any worse than his replacement, but he wasn’t much better either. One of his more talented teammates, Joseph Crone, thought Big Mike’s main contribution came before the game, when the opposing team stumbled out of their locker room or their bus, and took the measure of the Briarcrest Christian School. “They’d see all of us,” said Crone, “and then they’d see Mike and say, oh crap.”
That, at first, was his highest use: to intimidate the opposition before the game. During the games he seemed confused. When he wasn’t confused, he was reluctant. Passive, almost. This was the last thing Coach Hugh Freeze expected. Freeze didn’t know much about Michael Oher’s past but he knew enough to assume that he’d had some kind of miserable childhood in the worst part of Memphis. A miserable childhood in the worst part of Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense: it made you angry, it made you aggressive, it made you want to tear someone’s head off. The NFL was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood for sensational acts of violence.
The trouble with Michael Oher as a football player was the trouble with Ferdinand as a bull: he didn’t exhibit the anger of his breed. He was just a sweet kid who didn’t particularly care to hit anybody, or, as Hugh put it, “He just wasn’t aggressive. His mentality was not a defensive player’s mentality.” The depth of the problem became clear during Briarcrest’s fourth game, when the team took buses up into Kentucky to play a pretty tough Calloway County team. Early in the game Michael caught his hand on an opponent’s face mask and gashed the webbing between his fingers. “You’d a thought he was going to die,” said Hugh. “Screaming and moaning and carrying on. I thought we were going to have to go and get a stretcher.” His defensive tackle ran to the bench, clenched his hand, and refused to allow anyone to look at it.
In the stands Leigh Anne Tuohy watched as two, then three, then four grown men tried to subdue Michael Oher, and then coax him into allowing them to examine his hand. “He was in a fetal position,” she said. Men were next to useless in getting Michael to do things, because he didn’t trust men: she knew this about him, and more. After their shopping trip, when she turned up at Briarcrest, Michael had sought her out. He had mentioned that he hated to be called “Big Mike” and so from then on he was, to her and her family, Michael. “I don’t know what happened,” Leigh Anne said. “Whether it was attrition of other people, or whatever. But I became the person Michael came to. At his basketball games he’d just walk over and start talking to me. When I was at school, he’d find me and talk to me. I think everyone kind of noticed that he’d gotten close to me. Maybe before I noticed.”
She walked down from the stands, crossed the track, walked onto the football field, and went straight to the bench.
“Michael, you need to open your hand,” she said, crossly.
“It hurts,” he said.
“I realize it hurts. But your head is going to hurt a lot worse when I hit you upside it.”
He unclenched his hand, one giant finger at a time. The gash went to the bottom of the webbing and down the finger, where the bone was visible. “I wanted to throw up,” said Leigh Anne. “It was gross.” She pr
etended it wasn’t and told him he needed to be taken to the hospital.
“The hospital!!” he wailed. She thought he was going to faint.
They were a good two and a half hours from home, so Carly Powers, the Briarcrest athletic director, took him to a Kentucky emergency room. “The first question he asked when we got in the car,” said Powers, “and he kept asking it, ‘Is it going to hurt? Is it going to hurt?’ He was a nervous wreck. You could see it in his eyes. When we walked into that hospital, he was scared to death.” Powers sensed that Big Mike had perhaps never seen the inside of a hospital.
A nurse checked them in, told Powers to wait in the lobby, and escorted Big Mike to the back. A few minutes later, Powers heard “this blood-curdling scream. And you can tell it’s Big Mike.” The nurse comes running out and says, “Mr. Powers, I think we’re going to need you back here. We need your help to hold him down.” Powers followed her back to see what the problem was. A needle, as it turned out. The doctors were trying to give Big Mike a simple shot to numb his hand, and Big Mike had taken one look at the needle and leapt off the table. A staff of three had tried to put him back on it, without success. “He’d never seen a needle,” said Powers.
Even a rich private school was ill-equipped to deal with a parentless child. Like all schools, it was hard-wired to call, at the first sign of conflict, a grown-up. In the eight months since she had taken him shopping for clothes, Leigh Anne Tuohy had become that grown-up. Briarcrest teachers knew that, increasingly, Big Mike was spending time with Sean and Leigh Anne. Sean was becoming something like a private basketball coach to him, and Leigh Anne was grappling with the rest of his life. The Tuohys were now covering not only his school lunches but also, indirectly, his tuition. For this reason and one other, when Carly Powers, as athletic director, asked himself which adult he might call to talk reason to Big Mike, he settled on Leigh Anne. The other reason was that he’d never seen Leigh Anne fail to get her way. “She is going to get it done,” said Powers, “or she is going to drive you nuts.”
The Blind Side Page 7
