The Blind Side, Book Review # 6

Book review # 6: THE BLIND SIDE by Michael Lewis

The writer of this review usually doesn't pay much attention to pro football. Years in medical practice have led me to see the National Football League (NFL) as a brain-concussion farm. My first impression of this book was 'Way too much back-story. Who really cares about 300-pound football players, let alone their statistics? I was wrong.

This is a true story of one young man's determination to rise out of poverty and prejudice and achieve national recognition as a football star. He did so by becoming uniquely able to give his team's quarterback an extra second or two to pass the football forward and advance his team to the opposing team's goal line, scoring touchdowns and winning the game.

Michael Oher (pronounced Orr) began life as one of thirteen children of a mother addicted to cocaine, in a slum section of Memphis, Tennessee. He could hardly have been much lower in prospects--quiet, illiterate, measured IQ of 80. Teachers gave him D grades just to move him out of their classes. But he was huge; six feet five inches tall, a muscular 350 pounds, and fast on his feet. For a while he had been a bodyguard to the leader of the toughest street gang in the Memphis slum.

Things start to change when he stayed for several months with a friend, Steven. Steven's grandmother has just died, and her dying wish was that her grandson get a Christian education. Memphis had the largest private school system in the nation. So Steven's father puts him in his ancient car, figures that “Big Mike” may as well go too, and they head for Briarcrest, a large evangelical Christian school on Memphis's east side, where the Dad knows the basketball coach. But it is the football coach who is truly awed at the sight of Big Mike. His shoulders fill the doorway, and he's only sixteen! His grade-point average is only 0.6 in the Memphis public schools—yet the boy clearly wants to be here. And the football coach very definitely wants him.

After several weeks when his classroom test scores are all zeros, one of the more experienced teachers sits him down, one on one, to go over a test. An hour later, she comes out and tells the science teacher, “Michael knows the material, he just doesn't know science vocabulary!”

Once the school realizes his mind really can absorb knowledge, they see Michael as a kid who has nowhere to go but up. Sean Tuohy, an unofficial assistant coach, had started out himself as a poor kid in a private school, without even lunch money. He and his wife, Leigh Anne, now well-to-do owners of a fast food chain, take special interest in Michael. Their daughter, a classmate of Michael's and who is herself an athlete, knows many of the black student athletes. Their son, Sean Junior, age 9, sees Michael as the older brother he never had, and when the Tuohys discover that Michael has no place to stay, nowhere to even be warm at night, they take him into their home.

Michael became a powerful football player, once he learned the rules. One high school rival team had a boy who repeatedly trash-taunted Michael, who finally lost his temper, something he rarely did. This time he surged across the line of scrimmage, lifted his opponent and ran at speed down the field for fifteen yards, took a hard left into the opposing team's players on the sidelines, scattering them as he ran on to pin the boy against the football field's fence.

The referee ran to the Briarcrest bench yelling, “Coach Tuohy! He can't do  that!”

“Did the whistle blow?” asked Tuohy.

“No, but he's got to let go of him when he reaches the sidelines!” The ref walked off a 15-yard penalty for 'excessive blocking'. Michael had moved the 220-pound defensive end at least 60 yards. In seconds.

“Michael,” Tuohy asked later , “Where were you taking him, anyway?”

“I was going to put him on the bus. I got tired of him talking. It was time for him to go home.”

“What did he say while you were taking him to the bus?”

“Nothin! He was just hangin' on for dear life.”

Everyone at school knew who he was after that, not only on Briarcrest campus, but on every football team in the state. But he still had many obstacles to overcome before being eligible to enter the University of Mississippi , and, later, first pick in the NFL draft, for his uncanny ability to protect the quarterback's blind side.

Author Michael Lewis has assembled the results of his massive research to give an understanding of the evolution of football in the 21^st century. For those of us more interested in Michael Oher's human story, I recommend the movie version of The Blind Side, starring Quinton Aaron as Oher and Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy, his adoptive mother. But for the serious fan, the book has a lot of good background about college and pro football.