The Blind Side: Chapters 4–6

He just wandered out to the meets and threw whatever needed to be thrown. By the time he finished his quixotic track career, Michael Oher would break the West Tennessee sectional record in the discus, and threaten it in the shot put.

In the stands Leigh Anne Tuohy watched as two, then three, then four grown men tried to subdue Michael Oher, and then coax him into allowing them to examine his hand.

Whether it was attrition of other people, or whatever. But I became the person Michael came to.

“It’s better than getting your hand cut off when gangrene sets in.”

He spent most nights on Big Tony’s floor. But because Big Tony lived such a long way from school, Michael had bivouacked some nights here and there in East Memphis, several of them on the Tuohys’ sofa.

They stood to one side, but you could tell them by their identical dark slacks and coaching shirts with their school's emblem emblazoned on the chest: University of Michigan, Clemson University, University of Southern Mississippi, University of Tennessee, Florida State University.

When Michael walked in the door that evening, Leigh Anne took him aside and told him how sorry she was to hear about his dad. “And I hope this doesn't sound callous and cold to you,” she said. “But you didn’t know the man.”

When Michael dribbled the ball between his legs, drove to the basket and rose up and dunked, Saban balked. There was no way, he said, that Michael Oher weighed more than 285 pounds.

But the Oakland Coliseum, on December 28, 1975, was, in retrospect, a seminal moment.

The press box offers what he calls “the clinical atmosphere” in which he thrives. Looking down from the press box one can more easily see what goes right, and what goes wrong.

After they’d led their team to victory, people pointed to their air of confidence, their cool under pressure, and the other intangible virtues of the presumably born leader.

If they led their teams to Super Bowls, these prima donnas became all but irreplaceable, in the public mind.

Walsh’s job, as he saw it, was to create a system that suited Virgil Carter’s talents: guile, nimbleness, and an ability to throw accurately, as long as he didn’t have to throw far.

The virtues it exalted above all others were precision, consistency, and predictability.

Walsh had created the contraption to compensate for the deficiencies of his quarterback, but an offense based on a lot of short, well-timed passes turned out to offer surprising inherent advantages.

The pass had always been viewed as a complement to the run, but it could apparently function as a substitute as well.

Finally, the Walsh plan addressed the football coach’s visceral fear of an offense based on the passing game.

The next year, in Bill Walsh’s system of well-timed passes, the seemingly inept Deberg threw more passes (578) than any quarterback in the history of the NFL.

The performance of Walsh’s quarterbacks suggested a radical thought: that in the most effective passing attack in the NFL, and on one of the most successful teams in the history of pro football, the quarterbacks were fungible. The system was the star.

No doubt there are plenty of reasons for the relative paucity of football research, but a big one is that inquiring minds have been discouraged by the messiness of the game.

In 2004, for example, the New York Giants lost to the Arizona Cardinals, and Giants quarterback Kurt Warner was sacked six times. The New York sports press, with just a couple of interesting exceptions, vilified the Giants’ offensive line.

There’s an arcane dispute waiting for anyone who wants to have one about the meaning of the phrase “West Coast offense.”

“There’s only one Moses, but I’m not sure there’s a Moses here.” But Howard Mudd, who coached the Chargers’ offensive line at the time, and watched Fouts’s transformation, has no such ambivalence.

Walsh still had no sense that his ideas were likely to be pilfered, or that they were even recognized as ideas.

The drift of the game was in his favor—“The rule changes played right into our hands,” he said—but hardly inexorable.

Parting so unsentimentally with his left tackle showed everyone that he was not to be trifled with.

“You couldn’t get his feet up off the ground. He had great balance. He had ballast."

The rain began to fall and the field became such a mess that, after the kickoff, teams of men in dark blue windbreakers ran around replacing the divots.

He didn’t yet have an impressive highlight reel of game film to precede him, and the folks up in Munford apparently didn’t read either the Memphis newspapers or Tom Lemming’s newsletter.

They read the Memphis sports pages, and so they also knew of Michael Oher, newly heralded as the hottest football recruit to come out of Memphis in some time who, for some strange reason, was now living with Sean Tuohy.

“Did the whistle blow?” asked Sean, who could have made a good living as a tort lawyer.

Technically, it was Hugh’s job to talk to Michael, as, since Michael’s apotheosis, Hugh had taken a special interest in the offensive line.

Now she’d catch him smiling and laughing and bantering with other kids in the halls and, in general, playing Big Man on Campus.

And so they left Collins to become a fully authorized grown-up driver, and raced the fifteen miles out to the Briarcrest Christian School, where Mr. Simpson met them in the parking lot, with the original of his letter embossed with the Briarcrest seal.

She wore a muu-muu and a garish wig that Leigh Anne assumed she had thrown on when they’d called to tell her they were on their way.

Her mother, Virginia, was already playing the role of doting grandmother to Michael, and she and Michael clearly adored each other.

What the woman—it was nearly always a woman—who asked Leigh Anne the question meant was, How have you handled having your gorgeous, nubile, seventeen-year-old daughter living under the same roof with a huge young black man the same age?

White Memphis life was organized around the churches, and the churches, at any rate most of them, viewed homosexuality as either a sin to be expiated or a disease to be treated.

Ten yards downfield he was delivered, violently, back to the earth, where he vanished for several seconds beneath Michael, until Michael, with the indolence of an heir to a great fortune getting out of bed in the morning, lifted himself off the flattened body.

A few minutes later, the Briarcrest Christian School Saints were state champions. Michael Oher was, by general consensus, the best football player in the state of Tennessee.