When Roper took Michael back downstairs for the sales pitch, Sean Junior followed. At the end of the pitch, to which Michael listened wordlessly, Sean Junior stood up. He didn’t raise his hand but he might as well have. “Can I ask my question?” he asked. His voice cracked. He now had this squeaky drawl, to go with his big slow smile and straight black hair falling down over his eyes. He was the sort of little kid grown women took one look at and said, “Oh, isn’t he just the sweetest thing you ever saw!”
“Uh, sure.”
With that, Sean Junior took off on a surprisingly insistent rap. He explained how important it was for him to be near Michael, and how concerned he was that once Michael committed himself to some big-time college football program, he’d become totally inaccessible. Then came the question: if Michael Oher agreed to play football for Ole Miss, what level of access would be granted to his little brother?
“How about we get you an all-access pass?” said the Ole Miss recruiter.
“That’d be good.”
LEIGH ANNE’S FIRST impression of the college coaches of America was that none of them had the first idea what he was getting into. Michael Oher was so far from being qualified to go to college that there was hardly any point to the discussion. Added to that was the obvious question: even if he somehow qualified to attend college, without the elaborate support system she had created for him, how would he cope once he got there? She wasn’t worried about the spirit but the letter of higher education. School she viewed mostly as something you did well in so you could (a) play sports and (b) get out of it and make something of yourself in the wider world. In the wider world Michael was lost, and would remain lost no matter how much Shakespeare they made him read.
Michael wasn’t stupid. He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence. He’d been denied the life experience that led to knowingness, which every other kid at Briarcrest took for granted. Leigh Anne was now making it her personal responsibility to introduce him to the most basic facts of life, the sort of things any normal person would have learned by osmosis. “Every day I try to make sure he knows something he doesn’t know,” she said. “If you ask him, ‘Where should I shop for a girl to impress her?’ he’ll tell you, ‘Tiffany’s.’ I’ll go through the whole golf game. He can tell you what six under is, and what’s a birdie and what’s par. I want him to know the difference between Monet and Matisse.”
Restaurant dining was a subject unto itself. “You don’t know how complicated it all is until you go with someone who has no idea,” she said. When she took him to an Italian restaurant, she didn’t order for two. She ordered up the entire menu, “just to show him what they were.” Michael thus learned to distinguish pesto from alfredo, and puttanesca from marinara.
The trouble was that there really was no end to the quotidian details of upper-class American life bafflingly new to Michael Oher. Every time he turned around, he bumped into a thing with which he should have been completely familiar and wasn’t. One day they were leaving the house to go to a track meet. It would be a three-hour flight on Air Taco and Michael needed to bring his North Face backpack so he could study on the road. They were still in the driveway when Leigh Anne noticed he didn’t have it with him.
“Michael,” she said, “go and get your backpack.”
“I don’t know where it is,” he said.
“It’s in the foyer,” she said. “Just go in and get it.”
He left the car reluctantly and returned to the house. She waited several long minutes, then followed him inside to see what on earth had gone wrong. Coming through the front door she found the backpack where it had been, in the foyer. There was no sign of Michael, and she walked through the house until she came upon him near the back door, loitering uneasily. He looked up at her and asked, “What’s a foyer?” It took a minute to explain, as her explanations amounted to little lectures on the general subject. (“It’s an entry hall some places. A foy-er some places. A foy-yay other places, depending on where you are in the South.”) When she was done, Michael just shook his head.
“But let me tell you something,” Leigh Anne said. “He absorbed it. He absorbed everything.” More and more, as Michael put it, “I feel smarter. ’Cause I know what things are.”
Leigh Anne Tuohy was trying to do for one boy what economists had been trying to do, with little success, for less developed countries for the last fifty years. Kick him out of one growth path and onto another. Jump-start him. She had already satisfied his most basic needs: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and health care. He had pouted for three days after she had taken him to get the vaccines he should have had as a child. It was amazing he hadn’t already died some nineteenth-century death from, say, the mumps. (When she tried to get him a flu shot the second year in a row, he said, “You white people are obsessed with that flu shot. You don’t need one every year.”) Now she was moving on to what she interpreted as his cultural deficiencies. She had watched her own penniless husband turn his athletic triumphs into business success and, indeed, a happy life. But there was nothing inevitable about the process; you needed to know how to translate one narrow kind of success into another, much broader kind. To Sean, the skill came naturally. It would never come naturally to Michael, but it might come unnaturally, if she worked on him. She would make him completely at home in white Christian entrepreneurial Memphis, but in the way that a blind man became comfortable in a well-furnished room. He’d memorize the contents of the room so perfectly that his blindness became irrelevant.
To others it might seem silly, or beside the point, for Michael to know how to read a wine list, or score a golf game, or distinguish between Gucci and Chanel, but to Leigh Anne it didn’t seem silly at all. He had to know all sorts of ridiculous little things if he was ever going to feel at ease in their world. The rich world. It was one thing when she first met Michael and took him out to buy clothes—she could see why she shouldn’t impose her tastes on a stranger. It was another matter entirely now that Michael was, in effect, her child. “I’m trying to make him more preppy,” she said. “He just looks so nice in a Ralph Lauren sports jacket.”
He went through phases where he wore headbands and throwback jerseys and pants that drooped down the back of his ass, and Sean had tried to explain to her that “yes, it’s a thug look, but it’s an organized thug look, a high-priced thug look.” She didn’t buy it; she fought back; and she took it as one of many small victories in the great war when Michael’s friend Terio Franklin from Briarcrest called her one day and said, “Mizz Tuohy, I need some of those shirts with alligators on them—can you get me some?”
In every city in America, rich white kids worked overtime to look and sound like black kids from the ghetto. In Leigh Anne’s new world, black kids were crossing the line from the other direction.
She wasn’t shy, either, about impressing upon Michael the important distinctions within the white world, and a sense of his new social class. One morning she and Collins and Michael set out on a little trip to Alabama. On their way they stopped at a McDonald’s. As they waited for their food, a scruffy-looking man came through in a pickup truck with a gun rack and some dead animal in the bed of his truck. “Lord, he’s such a redneck,” said Collins. Ten minutes down the road, Michael asked, “What’s a redneck?” Collins tried to explain but couldn’t quite get it across until she said, “Thomas Trubride is a redneck.”*
Trubride was a Briarcrest classmate of theirs. “Thomas Trubride is a good guy,” Michael said.
“A redneck is just someone who drives a pickup truck with guns in it,” said Leigh Anne.
“That doesn’t sound too bad to me,” said Michael.
“It’s not bad,” said Leigh Anne. “It’s just not who we are.”
Increasingly, it wasn’t. In many ways Michael was coming to resemble a naturalized citizen of East Memphis. Every Sunday he attended Grace Evangelical Church, and he was always the first one dressed to go in the morn
ing. His grades had improved, dramatically, thanks to Miss Sue. At the end of the first semester he’d come home from the Briarcrest Christian School with four A’s, two B’s, and a C. The school’s report cards included the students’ cumulative class ranking. Up until then Michael had always finished dead last. On the strength of the first semester of his senior year, in a class of 163 students, he placed 162nd. “He’s started making his move!” shouted Sean, gleefully. “He’s picking them off one at a time, like Sergeant York.”
But it wasn’t just his grades. He had a family that loved him, and would take care of him, and he was coming to take their love for granted. Leigh Anne got these little hints of Michael’s security in the relationship. For instance, one afternoon she received a phone call from the store manager of one of Sean’s Taco Bells on the other side of Memphis. “Mizz Tuohy,” the man drawled, “there is a big ol’ black kid here who says we need to serve him for free ’cause he’s your son.” She had treated Michael as she treated their other two children, which is to say she lavished upon him most of the material comforts and spiritual guidance known to mankind. “A year ago he didn’t have a bed to sleep in and wouldn’t look you in the eye,” said Sean. “Now he’s got a car, money in his pocket, and everyone knows who he is.” No wonder he got better at football his senior year, thought Leigh Anne. He was charging off the ball with confidence because he was arriving at the football field with confidence.
A year and a half into the reeducation of Michael Oher she felt, for the first time, almost relaxed. One night she realized that for the first time since she began to feel responsible for Michael, she was worried about nothing. “It was nine at night and Sean was traveling with the Grizzlies,” she said. “I was sitting alone in bed with the remote in my lap. I could hear Miss Sue working away with Michael at the kitchen table. And I thought: I am so happy. I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to do anything.”
Not long after that, she went out for her afternoon walk. The sky couldn’t decide whether to rain or snow; it was a winter day not so very different from the one on which she had first met Michael. She was motoring along at a fantastic clip when her cell phone rang: “Mom, you have to come home,” Collins shouted into the phone. “There’s been an accident.”
All Collins knew was that Michael had been driving Sean Junior out to Briarcrest to play basketball when Michael’s truck collided with another car. Collins and Leigh Anne drove out together, but the accident had created a traffic jam, and they couldn’t get within a half-mile of it. When Leigh Anne saw they couldn’t drive any closer, she left Collins with the car and took off at a sprint. The first thing she saw was Michael’s truck, totaled. Then Michael, sitting on the side of the road, crying.
When she got to him, he was sobbing so violently that she could barely understand what he was saying. She grabbed his cheeks in her hands and said, “Michael, listen to me, this could happen to anybody.” Then she understood what he was saying: “SJ needs you. Go over to SJ.” Then she saw Sean Junior stretched out on the ground on the other side of the mangled truck. She ran to him in a panic. His face was an unrecognizable mass of swollen, oozing flesh. She wasn’t entirely sure it was him until he spoke. “Mom,” he said, “will the blood come out of my shirt?”
She laughed; how badly hurt could he be if he was worried about his shirt? She sent Michael home and climbed in the ambulance with SJ. And Michael kept right on sobbing. “I just wished it was me going to the hospital instead of SJ,” he said later.
At the hospital, the doctors said they were amazed that Sean Junior hadn’t been more seriously injured. His face was bruised, and incredibly swollen—“I never knew a human face could do that,” said Leigh Anne. “I never knew lips could swell like that.” But his bones were perfectly intact. Michael’s truck had skidded on the ice across the divide at 25 miles per hour and crashed head-on into the big van, also traveling at 25 miles per hour. The driver of the van was fine, and so was Michael, but no four and a half foot tall boy should have been sitting in the front seat: the airbag had exploded directly into Sean Junior’s face. The doctors saw this kind of thing fairly often, and in every other case the airbag busted the little kid’s nose or cheekbones, and usually took out a bunch of teeth in the bargain.
Leigh Anne listened to the doctors discuss how bizarrely lucky Sean Junior had been in his collision with the airbag. Then she went back home and relayed the conversation to Michael, who held out his arm. An ugly burn mark ran right down the fearsome length of it. “I stopped it,” he said.
In Michael Oher’s file at the Briarcrest Christian School were the results of a test he had been given, by the Memphis City School system, at some point during the eighth grade. The test was designed to measure his aptitude for a variety of careers. It showed that he had an aptitude for almost nothing. He scored in the 3rd percentile in spatial relations. In a category called “the ability to learn,” he had scored in the 5th percentile. But there was one quality he possessed in an extreme form, and in whatever test the public school system had used to measure it, Michael Oher had scored in the 90th percentile. The quality was labeled “Protective Instincts.”
AROUND THE TIME of the accident, the head coaches of the schools on Michael’s short list came for their formal visits, or tried to. Urban Meyer was named the new head coach at the University of Florida and called Hugh Freeze every single day for the next two weeks, hoping to be invited into the Tuohy home. Leigh Anne picked up the home phone once a week to find Mark Richt, the head football coach from the University of Georgia. One week Richt finally said to her, “Look, if I have any shot at all, I’ll be there in an hour and a half.” “I have to be honest with you,” said Leigh Anne. “I have no desire to go to Athens, Georgia, every Saturday to watch my son play football.” Richt graciously thanked her for not wasting his time, and promised not to pester her further. Some of the coaches gave up; more of them slinked into Briarcrest and found Michael there. But they all knew they remained outside the circle of trust. Michael formally decided who to have into the house, but Leigh Anne was never far away from the decision. In the end, they chose three: Nick Saban of LSU; Phil Fulmer of Tennessee; and David Cutcliffe of Ole Miss.
The assistant coaches of all three universities had spent the previous six months loitering in the vicinity of the Tuohy home and Briarcrest. Trooper Taylor, the recruiter from the University of Tennessee, might as well have had season tickets to Michael Oher’s Briarcrest basketball games. “I just love watching high school basketball,” he leaned over and told Sean Junior during one of the games. And who could argue the point, when he traveled six hours from Knoxville to do it? Now the head coaches arrived to close the deal with Michael, with the ceremonial air of great chefs condescending to grill the beef, after their sous-chefs had done the marinating.
Sean made a show of not being present when the coaches turned up in his living room (See? I don’t care!). It was left to Leigh Anne to receive the famous football coaches with a big smile that disguised her gritted teeth. Leigh Anne didn’t have Sean’s ability to fake it. Sean could pretend all he wanted, but Michael simply could not function without the elaborate support system she had built for him: private tutors, constant monitoring, and a steady drip-drip-drip Chinese cultural reeducation program, administered by her, to assimilate him into their world. (“The Chinese government would have shot her at some point,” said Sean, “’cause after she finished telling everyone else what to do, she would have tried to tell them what to do, too.”)
Leigh Anne reasoned that, if Michael was going to be part of the family, he had to know what the family knew and behave as the family behaved. Ole Miss was an hour away, and she had, on her fingertips, every pullable string inside the place. The chancellor was a friend, the athletic director called Sean for advice, the locals, who still remembered Sean as the Great White Point Guard, asked him for his autograph. Leigh Anne could be as sweet as the day is long, and seldom did she need to be anything but sweet. But if her friends at Ole
Miss didn’t take care of her little 350-pound baby she could, and would, have their asses in a sling. She liked knowing that.
The first to enter was Nick Saban, of LSU, fresh off winning the national championship. He was at a serious disadvantage with Michael, however, because Michael had already visited LSU and been entertained for a lurid evening by a few of LSU’s star football players. Michael refused to go into the details of the night, but when he came home his eyes were big and round. To Leigh Anne he said simply, “Mom, that’s a bad place down there.” Leigh Anne didn’t want to know what had happened—she could guess—but she did ask Michael what they fed him: raw seafood. “I don’t think he ate anything the whole weekend,” she said.
With Michael’s official visit to Ole Miss coming up, she picked up the phone, called Ole Miss recruiter Kurt Roper, and said, “I am faxing you a list of what Michael likes and what he doesn’t like and you use it like a frickin’ road map.” Leigh Anne’s list was straightforward and exact: “Don’t take him to some titty bar and give him shots of tequila. Don’t put him with guys who want to show him how to have sex in eighty-five different positions. Don’t feed him a steak: he hates steak. Take him to Ole Venice [a restaurant in Oxford] and feed him Fettuccine Alfredo with chicken. Take him to a movie—and not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because he’ll just hide his face in his hands the whole time. And then let him go to bed.” And the people at Ole Miss had done exactly that. And Michael had come home and said what a fine time he had had—and how Ole Miss wasn’t at all like LSU.
Then Nick Saban arrived. Waiting for him were the Tuohys minus Sean, plus Miss Sue, Coach Hugh Freeze, and Briarcrest principal Steve Simpson—who Sean thought would get a kick out of being included. Whatever damage LSU had done to its reputation with Michael on his visit to the place was immediately forgotten—at least by Leigh Anne. Saban came into the house in his Armani suit and Gucci dress shoes and made a point of being polite to every single person in the room. Then he looked around, as if soaking in every last detail of the Olde English and Country French furnishings, and said, “What a lovely home. I just love those window treatments.” I just love those window treatments. He didn’t say, “I just love the way you put together the Windsor valances with the draw drapes,” but he might as well have. Right then Leigh Anne decided that if Nick Saban wasn’t the most polished and charming football coach in America, she was ready to marry whoever was.
The Blind Side Page 17
