The Blind Side

The year is 2004, the Briarcrest Saints football team is beginning its season, and Michael Oher has spent four months adjusting to the idea that he’s a football star. He’s received more than a thousand letters from college programs, almost all offering him a scholarship. Tim Long has taught Michael some of the fine points of the game.

While college football coaches fall over themselves to court Michael, Leigh Anne and Sean have doubts about Michael’s football future. Michael is dependent on Leigh Anne and Sean for food, shelter, and emotional support, and he seems quiet and passive. He also doesn’t play football aggressively because he’s not an aggressive person. This changes after Michael plays in a game against Munford, another Tennessee school, and Michael faces off against a Munford player who mocks Michael for his size. Over the course of the game, Michael becomes increasingly angry with his opponent, who continues mocking him relentlessly. During one play, Michael lifts the 220-pound Munford player off the ground—a legal block—and carries him sixty yards backwards in mere seconds. Michael is calm even after the coach penalizes him, absurdly, for “excessive blocking.” Tim Long is so impressed with Michael that he has to fight the temptation to giggle. It occurs to Sean that “there might be a fire in this belly after all.”

At school, Collins Tuohy, Leigh Anne and Sean’s daughter, notices that Michael is becoming more outgoing—he no longer looks at the floor all the time, and seems to enjoy joking with the other students. Michael asks Leigh Anne to get him a driver’s license, and Leigh Anne realizes that Michael doesn’t have “any evidence he ever existed.” Leigh Anne tries to get Michael a Social Security card, but a man at the Social Security office tells Leigh Anne that there’s “no such person as Michael Jerome Oher.” The man tries “Michael Jerome Williams” and learns that someone with this name—which Michael claims is his own—has been issued six Social Security cards in the last two years. Reluctantly, the man prints Michael a card. Michael visits his mother and gets his birth certificate, which lists his name as Michael Jerome Williams. Leigh Anne still needs to get proof of address, which means that she’s going to need to visit Michael’s mother herself.

To obtain proof of address, Michael calls his mother in advance, and Leigh Anne drives him to the house where she leaves. Michael’s mother, whose name is Denise, is very drunk, and doesn’t invite them inside. Michael says nothing to his mother. With Denise’s permission, Leigh Anne takes a single electricity bill, then leaves with Michael. On the ride back, neither she nor Michael says anything. Leigh Anne drives Michael to the DMV, where Michael takes his written driver’s test.

While Leigh Anne waits for Michael to take his test, she thinks about the flak she’s gotten from her friends about essentially adopting a “huge young black man.” Some of her more intolerant friends are skeptical that Michael can behave himself around Leigh Anne’s beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter, Collins. Leigh Anne always insists that Michael’s relationship with Collins is brotherly, and snaps, “You just need to mind your own business.”

Leigh Anne also thinks about Michael’s bad grades: he has a GPA of 1.56, but needs a GPA of 2.65 to play college football. This is a huge problem—even if Michael gets straight A’s for the rest of high school, he won’t qualify. She spends hours going over Michael’s homework assignments with him, but to no avail—he still makes D’s. One problem with Michael’s schoolwork is that he doesn’t tell Leigh Anne he’s having trouble learning—he’s quiet about his personal life. It’s occurred to Leigh Anne that Michael might be gay, and perhaps this is why he’s so private. Then Michael appears—he’s passed his driving test, meaning that he’s become the first person in his family to get a license.

In September 2004, Briarcrest plays against Melrose, another local high school, and loses. After the game, Leigh Anne encourages Hugh Freeze to play Michael more often, and run the ball left instead of right, since Michael is the number one left tackle in the country. Freeze is reluctant to rely so heavily on one player, but Tim Long encourages him to “run Gap”—in other words, favor a play that requires Michael to run down the field and “destroy everything in front of him.” In a way, the controversy over how to use Michael during a game reflects a controversy in football in general. At the time, purists argue that football was a game of brute force, in which the strongest players win. Football “liberals” argue that guile and strategy are more important than force. Freeze is a liberal; Tim Long is more of a fundamentalist.

On Friday, Briarcrest prepares for a game with Treadwell, with the head coach from LSU, Stacey Searles, in attendance. Freeze decides to take Long’s advice and run Gap, again and again, making use of Michael. During the game, Briarcrest players score touchdown after touchdown, largely thanks to Michael’s talent. Searles is amazed—he’s never seen anyone like Michael. In the end, Briarcrest wins, 59-20. In the next game, Briarcrest faces Carver High, to which it lost last year; Briarcrest wins, again thanks mostly to Michael. By running Gap in game after game, Briarcrest keeps winning.

Even though Michael is critical to his team’s success, he’s oddly underappreciated. Even Hugh Freeze doesn’t realize that Michael is almost single-handedly winning games until a few games have passed. Michael doesn’t run with the ball, but he clears a path for the running back. He’s so quick that some referees assume he must be cheating—but in fact, he’s just bigger and faster than everyone else.

Toward the end of the season, other teams come up with a strategy for beating Briarcrest. In the annual game between Briarcrest and its rival, Evangelical Christian School (ECS), ECS’s goal is to tackle Michael. The strategy works, and ECS wins. Later in the season, Freeze compensates by stacking the line with extra blockers, protecting the running back while the opposing players concentrate on tackling Michael.

Briarcrest makes it to the playoffs in December—three games away from the state championships. In the first game, against Harding Academy, the Harding defensive end tries to tackle Michael, but Michael figures out how to keep the defensive end from tackling his knees, and leads his team to a narrow victory. In the next game, against Notre Dame, Briarcrest wins easily. In the state championship, Briarcrest faces ECS for the second time that year. Freeze’s counter-strategy for dealing with ECS proves successful, and for most of the game, ECS is forced to play Michael “straight.” Briarcrest quickly gains a big lead.

As the championship game goes on, Hugh Freeze decides that he wants to try more trick plays, instead of running Gap. Freeze organizes a “fumblerooski,” a play in which the center gives the ball to the quarterback, who then quickly passes the ball to a fullback, and then pretends to be running with the ball. Strangely, during the play, Michael doesn’t move. Later in the game, Michael faces off against a fullback, 165 pounds, named Clarke Norton. By coincidence, Clarke’s parents are friends with the Tuohys. When Michael realizes that it’s Clarke, he greets Clarke kindly, and then lifts Clarke out of harm’s way rather than tackling him. By the end of the game, which Briarcrest wins easily, it’s clear that “Michael Oher was the best football player in the state of Tennessee.”