“I figure when I get to the second course, I’ll look for the third one,” said Sean. “And when I get to the third one, I’ll look for the fourth one.”
NCAA Lady: Okay.
Sean: What’s wrong with that answer? You rolled your eyes. Let me tell you now: that’s really rude. To look at me and roll your eyes like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or that I’m trying to mislead you.
NCAA Lady: All right. Now may I answer you?
Sean: Absolutely.
NCAA Lady: It’s not that—
Sean: And I won’t roll my eyes and accuse you of anything!
NCAA Lady: First of all, I’m not accusing you of anything.
Sean: It’s the body language I’m getting.
NCAA Lady: Can I finish my statement?
Sean: Sure!
She then explained how surprised she was that Sean didn’t know the details of the BYU study program, given how he seemed to have calculated every other angle on the court. How could he not know, for example, even the subject matter of these courses?
“It could be one of nine different courses,” shouted Sean, brandishing a copy of Michael’s high school transcripts. “He’s still got eight F’s on here.”
Which brought them to the nub of the NCAA lady’s displeasure. She must have been feeling like a Keystone Kop. She didn’t understand these BYU courses. She didn’t know exactly what Michael was doing to get himself academically up to snuff. She remained unclear who had given what to Michael, and when, so she had no real idea exactly how many of their rules against booster graft had been violated. All that was bad enough. But what really bothered her was that Michael wasn’t talking. “This is the interview for Michael,” she said to Sean. “And like last time you’re doing most of the talking. And I need to hear from Michael.”
“Well,” said Sean, as if she’d just made the world’s most preposterous demand. “He doesn’t know.”
NCAA Lady: Well, if that’s the case, say, “I don’t know.”
Sean: He said he didn’t know.
NCAA Lady: But you’re still answering all his questions!
Sean: He said he didn’t know. And so I did my best to answer it for you and you just didn’t like the answer.
NCAA Lady (now staring straight through Michael): Well…I’m just trying to make sure that you don’t know.
Sean: What part of “I don’t know” fooled you?
NCAA Lady: That you’re his legal guardian and you don’t know if he’s supposed to take English or math or science. That’s the part that still baffles me.
Sean: Ma’am, I hate that it baffles you. But all you asked me to be is truthful. You didn’t ask me to be smart.
It was then that Michael’s face broke into a smile. More than a smile. When he registered what Pops had just said, he let loose this wheezing laugh…heh…heh…heh…heh. He sounded just like Muttley, the cartoon character, sidekick to Dick Dastardly. Michael Oher might never be sure of Sean Tuohy’s deeper motives. But he could be sure of this: Pops was funny!
Michael watched with something like amusement as Sean and the NCAA lady sparred for the next few hours. The NCAA lady did what she could to remain calm and polite and retain the high ground while Sean yelled at her and turned red in the face and hurled abuse from the ground below. (He kept calling the NCAA “The Evil Empire.”) The NCAA lady asked some detailed question, and one of two things followed. Either Michael supplied an unsatisfying answer or Sean hollered at her. Finally, the NCAA lady gave up, and let Michael go off to get another A in some course he couldn’t even describe.
Once Michael was gone, the blood drained out of Sean’s face. Out came the carrot. He apologized for being so upset, but said she had to understand that Michael had found the first round of questioning very disturbing. He felt he had failed Michael, he said, by letting her grill him like that. As he spoke, the NCAA lady studied him.
“Nothing was promised to you or your family?” she asked.
“Me?” said Sean. “I don’t need anything.”
His arms were extended in a way that said—Behold! Do you not see the million-dollar house gorgeously appointed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in furnishings? Did you somehow miss the five cars in the driveway? The BMW? Do I need to call my pilots and order Air Taco to buzz NCAA headquarters? Sean made this one point—that both he and Michael were too rich to be bought—several times. Once, after the NCAA lady had asked Michael if any Ole Miss boosters had given him any money to go to Ole Miss, Sean had said, “Ma’am, he’s richer than any Ole Miss boosters.” Sean Tuohy was up from nothing and now he had done so well for himself and his family that no one could give him anything he couldn’t buy. He’d lived his life to be able to say that.
“Well, I know that” the NCAA lady said. Then she laughed, and relaxed. “But I just have to ask the question.”
For the first time, she seemed human. Girlish, even. She ceased to be an investigator from the NCAA and became a woman named Joyce Thompson. And Joyce Thompson was genuinely curious about this domestic situation. A poor black giant monosyllab of the Memphis ghetto comes to live with, and apparently be loved by, a rich white right-wing family on the other side of town: how did that happen? She offered to turn off her tape recorder—Sean told her he didn’t care if she left it on—and then set about satisfying her honest curiosity.
Joyce: Is he normally quiet like that?
Sean: When I met him that was talkative.
Joyce: How many times would you say he was here?
Sean: Hundreds. It was an open door to him.
Joyce: Did he just show up?
Sean: A lot of times he’d just show up.
She took that in.
Joyce: How did you two ever meet?
Sean: I told him I was Collins’s daddy. That’s how I introduced myself to him.
Joyce: Did he open up to you?
Sean: No. Gosh no. I barely got his name out of him.
Joyce: And so at some point he came over here and he spent the night. When’s the first time he spent the night?
Sean: I don’t know. Sometime during that basketball season…. This sounds bad but he was probably left at school one day, and I happened to be there.
She asked about Michael’s childhood, and he told her how little they still knew of it. They talked about the problems of parenting. She confessed that she didn’t know them firsthand. But she wondered how any mother could let her child wander the world looking for a bed without caring to know where he wound up. She wondered why on earth a rich white happy family in East Memphis would go to all this trouble for some poor black kid. And, finally, she wondered how Sean now felt about the experience. That final piece of curiosity led Sean to think aloud about the implications for his family of Michael Oher. “It’s ruined us,” he said. “Because so far as I can see, there’s no downside. We can’t look at a kid who’s in trouble now without asking, ‘If we had him, could we turn him around?’ So what do we do when he leaves? Do we do it again?”
It was then that Joyce Thompson vanished and out came the NCAA investigator, with barely disguised shock. “Have you thought about doing this again?” she asked.
THERE WAS ONE final piece of unfinished business in Michael Oher’s Briarcrest career. The senior yearbook picture was due, and Michael didn’t have one. It was a Briarcrest tradition for every senior to have his baby picture in the annual. Her lack of a baby picture for Michael drove Leigh Anne to distraction. “You don’t want to be the only senior who doesn’t have a baby picture in the annual!” she said. She had made Michael give her the name of the foster home he admitted to having lived in when he was eight years old. She called the foster mother, who sounded vague; at any rate, she had nothing on him. She went down to his biological mother’s apartment and harassed her for pictures. Finally, she had come upon a single shot, taken by an employee of Memphis Children’s Services, when Michael was about ten years old. She had come home with it and given it to Michael.
Michael had looked at it and exclaimed, “Mama, that’s me!”
“That sure is you!” she said.
Then he’d taken it into the den and stared at it for fifteen minutes.
But the picture didn’t solve the problem. It wasn’t a baby picture. One night Leigh Anne had an idea. She flipped on her computer and went online and found, as she put it, “the cutest picture of a little black baby I could find.” She downloaded the stranger’s photo, and sent it in to Briarcrest.
Briarcrest held its graduation ceremony in a church. The Tuohys were all in the audience, of course, and they had brought Miss Sue with them. Steve Simpson was there and so was Jennifer Graves, who said she’d never seen anyone work so hard for a piece of paper as Big Mike had worked to get his Briarcrest diploma. Big Tony was on hand—even though his son, Steven, wouldn’t graduate until the following year. In spite of Big Tony’s efforts to coax her out of her apartment, Michael’s mother didn’t make it. Dee Dee had told Big Tony that she wanted to see her son graduate from high school, as no one in her entire family ever had gotten past the tenth grade. Big Tony had arranged to pick her up that morning. But when he got to Dee Dee’s apartment he found the lights out and the door locked. He thought he heard someone inside, but whoever it was refused to answer.
The Briarcrest president gave a long speech filled with many words of warning to the graduating class. He explained that when they left Briarcrest and went out into the world, they would encounter “all kinds of groups that claim some kind of privilege based on their lifestyles or perversions.” (There was no need to say “gay” they knew all about sodomy.) He spoke sternly about the danger of “seeking false happiness in a variety of narcissistic pleasures.” After that final jolt of fear from God, the graduates were called down from their tiered seats at the back of the stage to collect their reward. Steve Simpson called their names, one by one; one by one they filed down. Michael wasn’t called down until nearly the end. He sat waiting on the top tier, upper lip tucked beneath lower, either choking back his emotion or settling his nerves.
“Michael Jerome Oher,” said Steve Simpson, and smiled.
The crowd had been told not to cheer for individuals, but a few people just had to break the rules. Miss Sue cried. Leigh Anne hooted and laughed and clapped. Collins was graduating too, but there was never any doubt Collins would graduate. It was Michael that was the news on this day. “He’s so fired up,” she said, as she watched him amble down, trying to keep his little scholar’s cap from falling off. Sean smiled too, but Sean was paying closer attention to the small group of underclassmen in formal wear gathering on the side of the stage. The Briarcrest Choir. One of the kids, a whey-faced doughboy, was twice as large as the others.
“You see that big guy in the middle,” said Sean. “That might be Michael’s replacement at left tackle. That’s not comforting, that he sings in the choir.”
The NCAA needed its proof of Michael’s new and improved grade point average by August 1. On July 29 Michael took his final BYU test—another Character Course. Sean sent the test to Utah by Federal Express, and the BYU people promised to have the grade ready by two o’clock the following afternoon. “The Mormons may be going to hell,” said Sean. “But they really are nice people.” With Michael’s final A in hand, Sean rushed the full package to the NCAA’s offices in Indianapolis. The NCAA promptly lost it. Sean threatened to fly up on his plane with another copy and sit in the lobby until they processed it—which led the NCAA to find Michael’s file. On August 1, 2005, the NCAA informed Michael Oher that he was going to be allowed to go to college, and play football.
Now came the time to figure out what that meant for his football career. In big-time college football it was highly unusual for a freshman to walk onto campus and start playing. And, when the freshman was an offensive lineman, it was almost unheard of. The offensive line had the most intellectually demanding jobs on the field, apart from the quarterback. Even the best ones expected to spend a season practicing with the team, learning the plays, but not actually playing in the games. In return, they were granted by the NCAA an extra year of eligibility.
But Coach O wasn’t having any of this. He called Sean and told him (a) that Michael was already his best lineman, and (b) that Michael was such a high-profile recruit he needed to become a kind of shop window for future high-profile recruits. Michael would have to start for the Ole Miss Rebels his freshman year.
Sean drove down to Ole Miss to have a word with Coach O. He didn’t think he could talk him out of sticking Michael in the starting lineup, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to anyway. He thought it would be good for Michael to see right away what he was up against—to learn that natural ability might not be enough to “get to the league.” But he worried that Coach O might not fully understand what a challenge big-time football would be for Michael. Michael had just turned nineteen. He’d never lifted weights or trained for football in the way that serious football players usually do. He hadn’t had the time. He had played fifteen games in high school on the offensive line. In less than a month, he’d be starting in the SEC, across the line of scrimmage from grown men of twenty-two who had spent the past four years majoring in football, and were just six months away from being drafted to play in the NFL. As these beasts came after him, he’d need to think on his feet.
Coach O wasn’t one for sitting behind a desk. When he had people into his office at Ole Miss, he’d install them on his long black leather sofa while he marched back and forth, giving pep talks. The subject of Michael Oher brought out the student in him; when Sean came, he sat behind a desk. Coach O actually had a yellow pad to write on. He didn’t get up. He didn’t answer the phone. He took three pages of notes.
The two of them talked about many aspects of Michael Oher, but eventually Sean got around to his mental development. Michael’s mind, Sean said, “is like a house built on sand. He doesn’t know what ‘agenda’ means, but he knows eight thousand more complicated words.” Sean didn’t worry all that much about Michael’s schoolwork, as he planned to ship Miss Sue down to Oxford with him; Miss Sue could take care of Michael’s grades. What he was worried about was Michael’s ability to understand football plays. “Michael can read,” he said, “but it just doesn’t register very well. If you give him a play book filled with X’s and O’s, he’ll say, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ Then he’ll run on the field and won’t have any idea what he’s supposed to do. If you think you can just put it on a chalkboard and he’s going to know the play, it’s not going to happen. But if you take him aside and explain it to him using mustard bottles and ketchup bottles—some visual aide that enables him to see it—not only will he remember it, he’ll remember it for the rest of his life.”
“This is very important,” said Coach O, scribbling notes.
“Coach,” said Sean. “My faith believes that the Lord sends down gifts for everyone and our job is to find those gifts. Michael’s gift is the gift of memory. When he knows it, he knows it.”
Coach O stopped scribbling and looked up. “I’m going to tell you one thing, Sean,” he bellowed. “He’s got some pretty good fucking feet, too. You seen them feet? Now them feet: that’s a fucking gift!”
CHAPTER NINE
BIRTH OF A STAR
THE REDBRICK MONSTROSITY rises from a hollow beside a quiet road in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. To call it a home would be to give the wrong impression. It’s less a shelter than a statement: the long sweeping driveway, the lawn that could double as a putting green, the giant white columns, the smooth stone porch inscribed with greetings in Latin. Through the leaded glass windows can be glimpsed sleek marble floors leading to a grand staircase lit by chandeliers with enough wattage to illuminate an opera house. It’s the sort of place where the door really should be answered by an English butler, but Steve Wallace answers his own door. He wears shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, and has the pleasantly surprised air of a man who has just woken up from a dream that he is rich only to discover that he’s actually rich
. The only thing that the home and its owner have in common is that they are both huge. He walks across his great stone porch and onto his lawn to adjust the sprinkler. He limps; but they all limp. One nasty scar runs down his right knee and another lines his left ankle. Former NFL linemen age painfully and die young. No life insurance salesman in his right mind sells them coverage at the usual rates.
Hard as it is to believe now—as he returns to his mansion and passes through its stone halls toward the magnificent den with its elaborate audiovisual system—there was a time when Steve Wallace worried about such financial trivia as life insurance. He worried about making a living. He wasn’t born with money; all he knew how to do was block, and in 1986, when he started his NFL career, blockers didn’t get paid much. His first contract guaranteed him $90,000 a year, which was pretty good, but he wasn’t sure how long it would last. He sat on the bench, and waited, without knowing exactly what he was waiting for. It turned out he was waiting for Bubba Paris to eat himself out of a job.
After the 49ers won their first Super Bowl, in 1982, Bill Walsh had used his first draft choice to select Paris. Bubba was meant to be the final solution to Walsh’s biggest problem, the need to protect Joe Montana’s blind side. “At three hundred pounds or less,” said Walsh, “Bubba would have been a Hall of Fame left tackle. He was quick, active, bright, and he had a mean streak.” Bubba also had a history of putting on weight, but, as Walsh said, “we felt we could deal with that. And we did. Briefly.” Walsh fined Bubba for being overweight. He inserted clauses in Bubba’s contracts that paid him bonuses for showing up for work under 300 pounds. He sent Bubba to Santa Monica to live at the Pritikin Diet Center. He even hired a fitness instructor to drive over to Bubba’s house every morning and feed him less than Bubba fed himself. Walsh did everything he could think of to keep Bubba from expanding. And then one day the fitness instructor showed up at Bubba’s house and, as Walsh put it, “The car was in the driveway, the drapes were closed, and nobody answered the door.”
The Blind Side Page 22
