He called Leigh Anne’s cell phone. She was on the bus with the Briarcrest cheerleaders, riding back to the school. After she had sorted Michael out on the bench, Leigh Anne sensed she had glimpsed another little sliver of his childhood. “I just thought: this kid has never been injured before,” she said. “Or if he has been injured, he said, ‘I’m not gonna tell anyone about it.’” She suspected this might be the first time he had no choice but to allow someone else to do something for him. “When he was sitting on the bench refusing to let those men look at him,” she said, “it was as if he thought: ‘If I just keep my hand clenched tightly to my chest, it’ll go away.’”
Now Carly Powers was in her ear, saying, “Leigh Anne, you got to talk to him because he’s being completely irrational.” Carly handed his cell phone to Mike.
“Michael, you have to let them take care of you,” she said.
“But it really hurts,” he said.
“Michael, you’re being a baby! You’re acting like Sean Junior!” Sean Junior was nine.
“They trying to stick me with a needle!”
“It’s better than getting your hand cut off when gangrene sets in.”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“Michael,” she said, “people lose limbs because of things like this. You want to lose your arm?”
No, he didn’t want to lose his arm.
“Okay,” she said. “And please don’t make it hard on Coach Powers because he’s just trying to help. And if I have to drive down there, it’s going to be bad news.”
“All right.”
Powers came on and asked Leigh Anne if she thought Big Mike had medical insurance, and Leigh Anne said there was no chance he had medical insurance or any other kind, and he should just put Sean’s name on all the forms.
To food, clothing, and tuition add medical care. It was an odd situation. A boy without a nickel in his pocket, no private mode of transportation, no change of clothes, no history of medical care, had stumbled into one of the more expensive private schools in Memphis. Lunch materialized, courtesy of Sean Tuohy, though Michael never asked, and so never learned, where it had come from. Clothes materialized, courtesy of Leigh Anne. He still exhibited an odd tendency to show up at school in the same clothes every day, but now they were different clothes: long pants and the brown and yellow Rugby shirt Leigh Anne had bought for him. That shirt became so worn that Leigh Anne, the fiftieth time she saw him in it, threatened to rip it off his back. She noticed all the details. One of these was that the Rugby shirt was fitting him more snugly. “I’m not sure he’s stopped growing,” she told Sean.
Michael’s biggest need—a place to sleep at night—wasn’t, at first, an issue. He spent most nights on Big Tony’s floor. But because Big Tony lived such a long way from school, Michael had bivouacked some nights here and there in East Memphis, several of them on the Tuohys’ sofa. There were also nights when he took the express bus back to the poorest neighborhoods on the west side of town. There he stayed, Leigh Anne assumed, with his mother.
Transportation was the big issue: Michael had no money and no reliable way to get around. He was totally dependent on whoever might give him a lift, and he had no idea, when he arrived at school in the morning, where he might spend the night. He sort of shopped around every day for the best deal he could find. If he had no place else to stay, he went home with Big Tony. But then his safety net vanished, suddenly. It happened the night the team returned from Myrtle Beach.
The Briarcrest basketball team had flown to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in the winter of 2003 to play two games. It had been Michael’s first trip on an airplane, and also his first trip outside of Memphis. The first game had been traumatic, and both he and his coach, John Harrington, came to think of it as the moment Michael began to accept who he was, and fit himself into the team. The back end of his sophomore year and the front end of his junior year he had been an obviously physically gifted but disappointing basketball player. “He had no concept of his role,” said Harrington. “Basketball’s all about players accepting their roles. You want to know why the Lithuanians beat the Americans? It’s because the Lithuanians know and accept their roles.” Michael, now six five and a half and 350 pounds, was built to control the area under a high school basket. (To put his width into perspective, Shaquille O’Neal, the Miami Heat center who is seven one and seemingly wide as a truck, weighs 330 pounds.) But he insisted to everyone that he was a shooting guard, and if they put him at center, he stepped out, dribbled around, shot threes, and generally pissed off his coach, as well as the parents of his teammates. Plus, he didn’t play defense. “He was a liability on the defensive end,” said Harrington. “That’s why he didn’t play but about half of most games.”
That changed at Myrtle Beach. At Myrtle Beach, something happened. “At Myrtle Beach,” said Harrington, “Big Mike got angry.” The minute he walked onto the court for their first game, the crowd was on him. They called him names. Black Bear. Nigger. They called him names that neither he nor his coach cared to repeat. Harrington wasn’t shocked by more subtle forms of racism away from the basketball court, but it had been a long time since he’d seen the overt version on it. “I don’t think there’s a white coach with a black kid on his team, or a black coach with a white kid, who could have any racism in him,” he said. Big Mike responded badly; Harrington hadn’t seen this side of him. He began to throw elbows. Then he stopped on the court, turned on the fans, and gave them the finger.
One of the handicaps of coaching at an evangelical Christian school is that a technical foul isn’t regarded by your own fans as a rallying cry but a spiritual transgression: you really didn’t want Briarcrest people to think that you didn’t have your passions well under control. “At Myrtle Beach,” said Harrington, “that was the closest I’ve ever come in my career to a technical foul.” He yelled at the refs for a bit and then called them, and the opposing coach, over. Pointing to the fans causing the trouble, he said, “You can take care of this problem or Big Mike can take care of this problem. And I think it’ll be a lot better for them and for you if you take care of it. Because he’s gonna clean house.” Big Mike overheard this exchange and apparently liked the sound of it. He stayed in the paint for the rest of the game, grabbed 15 rebounds and scored 27 points, and helped his team thrash a team to whom they’d been expected to lose. “I think he realized then that this kind of thing didn’t just happen in Memphis,” said Harrington. “It happened everywhere. And we were on his side.”
Then they flew home. It was when they landed at the Memphis airport that Big Mike’s chronic housing problem became a crisis. The other players all had parents to meet them. Big Tony’s girlfriend had come to pick up Steven—who was also on the team—but Mike refused to get in her car. “I’m not spending another night in that lady’s house,” he told his basketball coach. Pressed, he explained that he had overheard her talking about him on the telephone and that she had said many rude things: that he was a freeloader, that she didn’t like him in their house, that he was stupid, that he was never going to amount to anything. When the players had all gone home, Michael Oher and his basketball coach were left together in the Memphis airport. Harrington asked Big Mike where he wanted to go, and Big Mike gave him an address, and Harrington drove his emerging star into the worst neighborhood in Memphis. “Every hundred yards he said, ‘You can just let me off here, Coach. You can just let me off here.’ It was the middle of the night and I said, ‘Mike, I’m driving you to your front door.’”
After he had let Big Mike off in front of a dark and seemingly empty building, Harrington telephoned his volunteer assistant coach, Sean Tuohy. He told him the problem. “And Sean said, ‘Maybe it’s time I looked into this.’”
The next few months there was a lot to look into. Michael stayed nights in East Memphis with at least five different Briarcrest families: the Franklins, the Freezes, the Saunders, the Sparkses, the Tuohys. He somehow persuaded another black kid on the Briarcrest bask
etball team, Quinterio Franklin, to let him use his house as a kind of base camp. One night after a track meet, Michael was left without a ride home and Leigh Anne offered to take him wherever he wanted to go. “Terio’s,” he said, and off they went…thirty miles into Mississippi. “It was a trailer,” she said. From the outside she couldn’t believe there was room enough inside the place for him. She insisted on following him in, to see where he slept. There she found an old air mattress on the floor, flat as a leaf. “I blow it up every night,” he said. “But it runs out of air around midnight.”
“That’s it,” she said. “Get all your crap. You’re moving in with me.”
Crossing a new line, Michael picked up a single Glad trash bag and followed her back into the car. Right up until that moment Leigh Anne had hoped that what they and other Briarcrest families had done for Michael added up to something like a decent life. Now that she knew it didn’t, she took over the management of that life. Completely. “The first thing we did,” she said, “was have a cleansing of the clothes.”
Together they drove to every house in Memphis where Michael had stashed his clothing. Seven houses and four giant trash bags later she was staring at “this pile of crap. It was stuff people had given him. Most of it still had the tags on it. Stuff he would never wear. I mean there were polo shirts with little penguins on them.” For the next couple of weeks Michael slept on the Tuohys’ sofa, and no one in the family stated the obvious: this was Michael Oher’s new home, and probably would be for a long time. He was, in effect, a third child. “When I first saw him, I was like, ‘Who the heck is this big black guy?’” said Sean Junior, aged nine at the time. “But Dad just said this was a kid we were trying to help out and so I just said all right.” Sean Junior had his own uses for Michael: the two would vanish for hours on end into his bedroom and play video games. Just a few months after his arrival, Leigh Anne would point to Michael and say, “That is Sean Junior’s best friend.” “He got comfortable quickly,” said Collins Tuohy, then sixteen. “When he kept staying and staying, Mom asked him if he wanted to move in. He said, ‘I don’t think I want to leave.’ That’s when Mom went out and bought the dresser and the bed.”
After she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do—“it was ruining my ten-thousand-dollar couch”—but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or, if it did, it might collapse in the middle of the night and he and it would come hurtling through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. The day the futon arrived, she showed it to Michael and said, “That’s your bed.” And he said, “That’s my bed?” And she said, “That’s your bed.” And he just stared at it a bit and said, “This is the first time I ever had my own bed.”
That was late February 2004. Leigh Anne sat Michael down and established some rules. She didn’t care if she ever saw his mother, and didn’t need to know her problems, but he would be required to visit her. “I’m not going to have you say that I took you away from your mother. I don’t care if you don’t want to go, you’re going.” She didn’t know who his friends were from back on the west side of Memphis but they were welcome in the house and he should bring them home. Didn’t he have anyone he grew up with who he might like to bring over? He didn’t offer up any names. “Anything you wanted to know you had to pry out of him,” she said. And so she pried. “He finally mentioned someone named Craig but this Craig never materialized.”
Sean, for his part, had long since given up interest in probing into Michael’s past, or anything else. The boy had a gift for telling people as little as possible, and also for telling them what they wanted to hear. “The right answer for Michael is the answer that puts an end to the questions,” said Sean. He finally decided that Michael had not “the slightest interest in the future or the past. He’s just trying to forget about yesterday and get to tomorrow. He’s in survival mode: completely focused on the next two minutes.” He persuaded his wife to take a more detached view of the question, who is Michael Oher? and Leigh Anne agreed, at least in principle. “What does it matter if he doesn’t know the names of his brothers and sisters,” she said, unconvincingly. “Or where he went to school. Or if he went to school.”
They decided to move forward with Michael on a need-to-know basis: if they needed to know some detail about his past, she harassed Michael until he gave her an answer. If they didn’t—and mostly they didn’t—she’d leave him alone. “It is what it is,” she said. “The past is the past.” In her big talk with Michael she told him, “We’re just going to go forward. There is nothing I can do about whatever might have happened to you before now. If it’s going to cause you problems, and you’re not going to be able to go forward without dealing with it, maybe we need to get help from someone smarter than I am.”
He just looked at her and asked, “What does that mean?”
She tried to explain about psychiatrists, but it was obvious he didn’t know what therapy meant. So she said to herself: Oh, what the hell. There’s no way he’s ever going to lie on some couch and talk about himself.
And, she half thought, his past actually didn’t matter all that much to him. “Like the way a woman blocks out childbirth,” she said, “I think he just blocked out a lot of his childhood.”
Sean had a different take: Michael’s mind was finely calibrated to get from one day to the next. Whatever had happened to him in the past he couldn’t afford to dwell on it. He couldn’t afford to be angry, or bitter. “Michael’s gift,” Sean said, “is that the Good Lord gave him the ability to forget. He’s mad at no one and doesn’t really care what happened. His story might be sad, but he’s not sad.”
But even if they had decided not to interrogate him, there was nothing that said she couldn’t notice the little tics and quirks about him. Information took many forms and both Leigh Anne and Sean had a talent for acquiring it. When they stopped in at the Taco Bell just around the corner, for instance, Michael would order more food than he wanted. The next morning Sean would open the refrigerator and find the coagulated, extra Mexican pizza. “He was in the habit of guaranteeing himself an extra meal,” said Sean. “I had to explain that he didn’t need to do that. That he could get it whenever he wanted it. He said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Michael, I own the restaurant. You can go over there any time you want and eat for free.’” But the habit was hard to break. Sean would see him come into the house, extra free Mexican pizza in hand, and “it was like he would catch himself. He’d come in with the extra pizza and see me and go, ‘Oh, man, I forgot.’” Collins noticed, “He hoarded everything: food, clothes, money. He’d get stuff and he’d hide it away.” It was as if he didn’t actually believe that this free stuff would remain free.
There were tiny revelations that had Leigh Anne upset for days, for what they implied about his childhood. She took Michael with her and Sean Junior to a Barnes & Noble. As they walked through the store, Sean Junior spotted Where the Wild Things Are and said, “Look, Mom, you used to read that to me when I was little.” To which Michael replied, in the most detached tone, “I’ve never had anyone read me a book.”
There were also things about him that caused Leigh Anne and Sean to think of him as an even deeper mystery. He refused to wear clothes that, in his opinion, didn’t match. He refused to wear clothes that had even a spot on them. He ironed his T-shirt; and if he wore the same T-shirt every day, he ironed it every morning. “That ain’t a socioeconomic issue,” said Sean. “That’s a where-the-hell-did-that-come-from? issue.” Sean had him out one day, buying basketball sneakers for himself. He asked Michael if he’d like a pair and Michael said, sniffily, he didn’t like the colors on display. “I said, ‘Michael you have none. How can you turn down shoes when you don’t have shoes?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t want those unless they have it with the blue stripe.’ ‘For someone who has no
shoes you’re pretty damn picky about what shoes you get.’” When they finally found the sneaker shoe color that Michael liked, they had another argument about his shoe size. Michael refused to wear the size 15 shoes that the salesman proved he needed. He insisted that he wore a size 14, and so it was size 14 shoes Sean bought for him, even though it meant a bit of pain when he walked.
Around the house he was a neat freak. Leigh Anne ran a tight ship and within weeks it was clear that Michael was the only member of the crew who passed muster. “You might drop your underwear on the floor,” said Sean, “but one minute later they’d be gone. They might have wound up in the silverware drawer but they were not on the floor.” Michael’s were the only underwear never dropped. Collins, who was the same age as Michael, had never made her bed in her life and, no matter how often her mother hollered at her, never would. Michael not only made his bed, he removed the sheets from the futon, folded them, and returned the thing to its couchlike state. Every day, without exception. “It was like God made a child just for us,” said Sean. “Sports for me, neat for Leigh Anne.”
From the moment Michael moved in with them, Sean began to stew on his future. (“Because I figured I was going to have to pay for it.”) Michael was approaching the end of his junior year in high school, and while they hadn’t seen his transcripts, they knew his grades were poor. Since Myrtle Beach he’d been good enough on the basketball team that Sean thought he might be able to play at a small college. “And I figured if he wasn’t, I could make him good enough,” said Sean. At six five he wasn’t tall enough to be a post player in major college basketball but he might make it in Division II. Sean had contacts in college basketball all over the South. He began to write letters on Michael’s behalf to coaches at small schools—Murray State, Austin Peay. He had Leigh Anne go out and sign up Michael for every summer basketball camp she could find.
The Blind Side Page 8
