The Blind Side: Chapters 1–3

After his first NFL season Taylor became the only rookie ever named the league’s most valuable defensive player, and he published a treatise on his art.

The symptoms induced by his sack-happy linebacker included, but were not restricted to: “intimidation, lack of confidence, quick throws, nervous feet, concentration lapses, wanting to know where Lawrence is all the time.”

In that pool of physical specimens what was precious—far more precious than an inch, or ten pounds, or one tenth of a second—was Taylor’s peculiar energy and mind: relentless, manic, with grandiose ambitions and private standards of performance.

Parcells accumulated lots of anecdotal evidence in support of his view of Taylor’s football character.

Lawrence Taylor was more succinct...

Theismann prides himself on his ability to stand in the pocket and disregard his fear. He thinks this quality is a prerequisite in a successful NFL quarterback.

There’s an instant before it collapses into some generally agreed-upon fact when a football play, like a traffic accident, is all conjecture and fragments and partial views.

He leapt out of the pile like a man on fire. Those who had watched Taylor’s career closely might have expected a bit more sangfroid in the presence of an injured quarterback.

The destruction of Joe Theismann may have been classified an accident, but it wasn’t an aberration. It was an extension of what Lawrence Taylor had been doing to NFL quarterbacks for four and a half years.

In the early 1980s, the notion that a single lineman should be paid much more than any other—and more than star running backs, wide receivers, and, in several cases, quarterbacks—would have been considered heretical had it not been so absurd.

But by the mid-1990s the market disagreed: it had declared this one member of the offensive line a superstar. Not some interchangeable homunculus, not low-skilled labor, but a rare talent.

Less strictly speaking, high school football players were far more highly prized, in part because colleges could usurp a great deal of their (skyrocketing) market value.

High school football players across the country, with the help of their fathers and their coaches, inundated Lemming’s little office in Chicago with tapes of their performances, press clippings, and letters of recommendation.

He watched tapes of those players and winnowed the pool to about 1,500, whom he interviewed in person.

From those he selected 400 for his annual book of the nation’s top prospects, and from the book he culled his list of the Top 100 players in the nation.

The other force that drove the price of quarterback insurance was the supply of human beings who could plausibly provide it. There weren’t many people on the planet, and only a few in the NFL, with Walter Jones’s combination of size, speed, agility, hands, feet, and arms.

Lemming had seen hundreds of NFL- caliber players with social problems come to inglorious ends.

It was true, as Lemming put it, that “there are some colleges that would take Charles Manson if he could run a four-four forty and get his work release.” Their existence didn’t prevent the premature end of a shocking number of potentially lucrative careers.

Never—not once—had a player simply refused to talk to him, or declined to fill in his forms. They begged to answer his questions and fill in his forms. Once, a player had had the audacity to delegate the form-filling to a coach and it had left a bad taste in Lemming’s mouth.

“It’s not only size and strength and speed and athletic ability in football. Football’s an emotional game. It’s about aggression, tenacity, and heart. I didn’t have any idea what was in his heart. I got no sense of anything about him.”

Further east, he passed the relatively prosperous black church, Mississippi Boulevard, housed in a building abandoned by the white Baptists when they fled further east to a new church so huge and sprawling that it had been dubbed Six Flags Over Jesus.

Further east, he passed the relatively prosperous black church, Mississippi Boulevard, housed in a building abandoned by the white Baptists when they fled further east to a new church so huge and sprawling that it had been dubbed Six Flags Over Jesus.

But any doubt that the Briarcrest Christian School served up the sort of education Betty Boo had in mind was allayed by the sight of the passage from the Book of Matthew inscribed on the outside of the main building: With men this is impossible; with God all things are possible.

Freeze was only thirty-three, and with his white-blond hair and unlined face might have passed for even younger than he was—if he weren’t so shrewd.

When football coaches describe their bigger players, they can sound like ranchers discussing a steer. They use words like “girth” and “mass” and “trunk size.”

Hugh was a football coach and so he tended to take an indulgent view of bad grades, but he had no pleasant category in his mind for Big Mike’s.

Every question Simpson asked elicited a barely audible mumble.

“I don’t know if ‘docile’ is the right word,” Simpson said later. “He seemed completely intimidated by authority. Almost nonverbal.”

The disposition of Michael Oher’s application to Briarcrest was Steve Simpson’s decision, and normally he would have had no trouble making it: an emphatic, gusty rejection.

He granted a single concession: if Michael Oher enrolled in a home study program based in Memphis called the Gateway Christian School, and performed at a high level for a semester, Briarcrest would admit him the following semester.

It was as if he had materialized on the planet as an overgrown sixteen-year-old. Jennifer Graves had the same misgivings: the boy reminded her of a story she had read in a psychology journal, about a child who had been locked away inside a closet for years.

“That child didn’t even have tactile sense,” she said, “but it felt like the same sort of thing. Big Mike was a blank slate.”

Still, the players all trudged to the locker room, donned practice uniforms, and set out for the film room.

Prosperous. Forever upgrading the trappings of his existence.

He needed overt drama in his life.

In a couple of cases he had, in effect, paid their tuition, by giving money to a school fund earmarked for scholarships for those who couldn’t afford tuition.

One cold and blustery morning Sean and his wife, Leigh Anne, were driving down one of the main boulevards of East Memphis when, off a bus just ahead of them, steps this huge black kid.

His mother was, Leigh Anne surmised, an alcoholic.

He mentioned a place—it was in a less affluent section of Memphis.

He was different from the other children that she and Sean had helped out. For a start, he was obviously more destitute.