The Blind Side: Chapters 10–12

But they seldom attracted the best black players; and since the early 1970s the Ole Miss football team has had about it a delicious fatalism.

They wore different clothes: oversized ersatz sports apparel so loose fitting that every stiff breeze threatened to leave them naked in the streets.

They drove different cars—these jalopies outfitted with hubcaps worth twice the market value of the entire vehicle.

In modern times Ole Miss’s football team had enjoyed only the briefest and most fleeting moments of glory but had always been good at sending offensive linemen to the NFL.

Ditching the Ole Miss playbook with its X’s and O’s, he gamely set out to teach Michael Oher what was essentially an NFL offense.

Each step was a discrete event, requiring conscious effort.

After three grueling weeks of spring practice, seventeen of Ole Miss’s eighty-five football players quit. Some decamped for other colleges; some just went home.

Now, as the season entered its final week, his nose for available football carrion would be the envy of any vulture.

He knew where to post ads on the Internet to solicit college football players.

The twist to the Mississippi State rivalry was that the fans knew exactly why they hated each other. The game served as a proxy for the hoary Mississippi class struggle, between the white folks who wore shirts with collars on them and the white folks who did not.

The twist to the Mississippi State rivalry was that the fans knew exactly why they hated each other. The game served as a proxy for the hoary Mississippi class struggle, between the white folks who wore shirts with collars on them and the white folks who did not.

The desperate contempt Ole Miss football fans felt for Mississippi State was echoed in the feelings of fans of the University of Texas for Texas A&M and fans of the University of Oklahoma for Oklahoma State—formerly known as Oklahoma A&M.

These schools were not rivals; they were subordinates. Theirs was not a football team to be beaten but an insurrection to be put down.

If Michael Oher felt any social anxiety leaving Memphis for Oxford he hadn't shown it. Once or twice he’d asked questions of Miss Sue about Ole Miss that suggested a certain vague apprehension.

The small club of teetotalers was accepting all applicants.

The offense had been abysmal, and the Internet pundits and the newspaper columnists were pointing to his offensive line as the problem.

The air was soon thick with jargon and code.

They might not have read the papers but they had at least heard the rumor that Sylvester Croom, Mississippi State's head coach, has been riling up his players by posting the scores from past defeats at the hands of Ole Miss.

But every right-thinking Ole Miss football fan and player must agree that Croom has violated football decorum—which is of course only what you’d expect from a Mississippi State football coach.

Coach O actually didn’t share the social pretensions of his employer.

On the football field the players became honorary white people, but off it they were still black, and unnatural combatants in Mississippi's white internecine war.

Every State fan carried a cowbell, and rang it incessantly, as they hurled insults at the Ole Miss players.

With that, they raced out onto the field, to the clanging of cowbells and hoots of derision.

It was a bleak and deterministic worldview, implying, as it did, that there was little a strategist could do to raise the value of his players.

After another series there ensued a long argument—for them—about the difference between “G” and “Gem.”

That in itself posed a problem, as he was only about five nine, and unable to see over the linemen. To compensate for his stature, Spurlock had the habit of just taking off toward the sideline the minute he received the ball.

“He was a runaway a majority of the time,” she said, laconically.

He has no hate. No animosity.

By the time Michael was five years old, and his memory kicked in to record events for posterity, Dee Dee was caring for seven boys and three girls, all under the age of fifteen.

As Dee Dee had no income except for whatever the government sent her on the first of each month, the children had no money for provisions. They had no food or clothing, except what they could scrounge from churches and the street.

But Michael Oher now had a secret ambition, and it would define much of what he did with himself for the next ten years. The ambition stood in defiance of a world that had assigned him no value.

The house teemed with other foster children, older and bigger than Michael and Carlos, who picked on them.

Incredible as it might seem to anyone who knew only the bare facts of his case rather than his emotional predisposition, he missed his mother.

Hurt Village had long since come to epitomize the despair of inner-city life, but it didn’t occur for a minute to Michael to leave.

He wanted to be lithe and fast; he wanted to be Michael Jordan.

But Michael was different, because the white world had so unusually aided and abetted his rise.

He was more interested in Michael’s capacity to serve as an entertaining big brother and wily co-conspirator.

“I used to joke,” said Randall, “that Arthur was the only football player I ever had who I had to keep a lawyer on retainer for.”

On the other hand, if his wife was now going to attack single-handedly America’s most intractable social problem, he liked his chances a bit less.

How, on the brink of adulthood, with a measured IQ of 80, no formal education and no experience of white people, he had so insinuated himself into rich white Memphis that white people no longer noticed the color of his skin.