The Blind Side: Chapters 7–9

At the end of December 2004, she and Sean would become Michael’s legal guardians, but even without the imprimatur of law Michael felt so much a part of the family that she couldn’t imagine him out of the Christmas picture.

When the coaches walked into the living room of the Tuohys’ lovely Memphis home, the first thing they saw was the Rebel Christmas tree: red and blue branches festooned with nothing but Ole Miss ornaments.

He of course told Leigh Anne and Sean that he really liked Ole Miss—but only after Leigh Anne and Sean explained to him that, if he had any intention of going to Ole Miss, they really ought to go through the process of formally adopting him, so that the many gifts they had already bestowed on him might be construed not as boosters’ graft but parental love.

He of course told Leigh Anne and Sean that he really liked Ole Miss—but only after Leigh Anne and Sean explained to him that, if he had any intention of going to Ole Miss, they really ought to go through the process of formally adopting him, so that the many gifts they had already bestowed on him might be construed not as boosters’ graft but parental love.

The trouble was that there really was no end to the quotidian details of upper-class American life bafflingly new to Michael Oher. Every time he turned around, he bumped into a thing with which he should have been completely familiar and wasn’t.

Leigh Anne didn’t have Sean’s ability to fake it. Sean could pretend all he wanted, but Michael simply could not function without the elaborate support system she had built for him: private tutors, constant monitoring, and a steady drip-drip-drip Chinese cultural reeducation program, administered by her, to assimilate him into their world.

He was at a serious disadvantage with Michael, however, because Michael had already visited LSU and been entertained for a lurid evening by a few of LSU’s star football players. Michael refused to go into the details of the night, but when he came home his eyes were big and round.

His plan had been to roll up to Briarcrest in the Volunteers’ swanky team buses, and, offensive lineman leading the charge, have the entire team surround Michael Oher and give him a cheer. Even more shrewdly, Fulmer staged his tableau on the very Friday that Michael was meant to make his official visit to Ole Miss.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Roper succumbed to the rock: Fulmer’s buses rolled into Briarcrest at 3:31, just in time to pass Roper driving in the other direction, with Michael in the car.

Phil Fulmer may not have thought Miss Sue worthy of his attention but he quickly set about ingratiating himself with Leigh Anne.

It was ten o'clock at night and neither Fulmer nor his retinue showed any signs of tiring.

Maybe it was Coach Fulmer’s demotic southern manner, or maybe it was just that SJ was growing bolder with age and experience.

From the depths of the barrel emerged sounds so clotted and guttural that, when you first heard them, you did not recognize them as English, or, for that matter, human speech.

At the end of the practice USC’s two biggest stars, quarterback Matt Leinert and running back Reggie Bush, along with the entire USC offensive line, came over to Michael, surrounded him, and offered fulsome praise of Coach O.

Blood dripped from his chin as he cut down the net, sullying and sanctifying his prize.

Special access to the hallowed ground of SEC football, inside the T and the Grove, was nice, but it didn’t beat having his own locker in the locker room of the national champions.

For his senior yearbook, he’d selected his quote, from a rap song, which he’d expurgated for Briarcrest Christian School consumption: “People ask me if I ever reach the top will I forget about them? So I ask people if I don’t reach the top will y’all forget about me?”

“This is a huge undertaking,” said Sean. “This is like an eighty-five-page document. This is a monstrous undertaking. It was a nomad existence.”

To his one-word answers he would add nothing—not a scintilla of color commentary or new information.

As a tool for overhauling the grade point average of Michael Oher, as well as for broadening his experience of white people, Sue Mitchell had a number of things to recommend her.

Still, in spite of these presumed defects, Miss Sue was relentless and effusive—the sort of woman who wants everything to be just great between her and the rest of the world but, if it isn’t, can adjust and go to war.

Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer.

But like every great prestidigitator Sean knew that a hitch was also an opportunity.

Now the two psychological examiners established that his IQ was currently somewhere between 100 and 110—which is to say that he was no more or less innately intelligent than most of the kids in his class at Briarcrest.

Prostrate in the adjoining room, Miss Sue saw Michael’s body language change.

The reason the NCAA needed investigators roaming the country to ensure that college football teams, and their boosters, weren’t giving money or food or clothing or shelter or succor of any sort to the nation’s best high school football players is that the nation’s best high school football players were worth a lot more to the colleges than the tuition, room, and board they were allowed to pay them.

The first time the NCAA lady had walked into his living room, Sean Tuohy had been all false bonhomie. He’d held out his pleasantness the way a trainer, faced with an ill-tempered horse, might hold out a carrot, with the clear implication that it could always be withdrawn.

I mean I think I was clear: I’m not being flippant.

Now that Michael had been certified as learning-disabled, he was allowed to retake the ACT tests as many times as he wanted, with Miss Sue on hand to help him parse the questions.

“It could be one of nine different courses,” shouted Sean, brandishing a copy of Michael’s high school transcripts.

She remained unclear who had given what to Michael, and when, so she had no real idea exactly how many of their rules against booster graft had been violated.

Always a bit leery of the way Walsh viewed them—as cogs in his intricate machine—the players would later point to that playoff loss as the beginning of the end of their feeling for their ingenious coach.

It was all good fun, all positive. But at the very end of the highlight reel, Walsh, perversely, had inserted a single negative play: the Doleman sack.

The NFL hadn’t yet begun to levy big fines for fights, and Wallace had taken full advantage of the freebies. He now had a reputation as one of the league’s dirtiest linemen—because he started so many fights.

He didn’t understand why Walsh needed to humiliate him. He said nothing, of course, but was at once livid and ashamed.

Doleman has moved to the other side of the field, in search of a better venue to practice his black art.

Even he was constrained in his financial demands by the conceit that one good lineman was no different from any other.

The people who evaluated football players and football strategies understood that the parts were inextricable from the whole, of course.

“Before free agency, they just paid you whatever they felt like paying you, and your only recourse was to withhold services,” said Tom Condon, an offensive lineman for the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1980s who went on to become a leading players’ agent.

When Wolford jumped to the Colts, Polian was working in the league office and found himself embroiled in the discussions over the disturbing new contract.