Book Review: 'The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game'

'The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game' by Michael Lewis
Norton Publishing ($24.95)

Saved by football: Street kid's talent for the game brought him more than fame
Sunday, November 26, 2006
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By John Freeman

In spring 2004, someone sent a football game tape to high-school scout Matt Lemmings. The video quality was poor, but he knew immediately he had to check out one lineman.

"When he came off the line, it looked like one whole wall was moving," Lemmings tells Michael Lewis. "When I saw the tape I guess I didn't really believe it. ... No one who is that big should be able to move that fast. It just wasn't possible."

The kid had a name, Michael Oher, and as Michael Lewis reveals in this fascinating and heartwarming book, his size and speed were not the only singular things about him.

For starters, the fact that Oher (pronounced "oar") was in school at all was a miracle. He had an IQ of 80, and a cumulative grade point average of 0.6.

His mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict and his father was murdered.

Lemmings had no idea about Oher's background when he went to Memphis to watch him play.
Oher was a blank canvas -- a rather large, fast-moving one -- upon which Lemmings saw the possibility of a masterwork: a National Football League left offensive tackle.

As in "Moneyball," his previous book on baseball strategy, Lewis shows how a single moment in sports history embodies an enormous shift in how that game is played. The need for a player like Oher began in the late 1970s, when the NFL's passing game began to dominate offenses.

The bubble burst in the early '80s when New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor exploited quarterbacks' left sides -- their blind sides (for right-handed throwers) -- sacking them, maiming them and sometimes ending their careers.

As quarterbacks' salaries skyrocketed, coaches looked for linemen who could protect this investment.

Lewis insists Memphis Grizzlies basketball team announcer Sean Tuohy was unaware of Oher's possibilities when he saw the boy in the gymnasium of Briarcrest Christian School. He just saw a kid who might need help.

Oher had been admitted to the school, mostly white, academically rigorous and for the well-to-do, for his athletic ability. And Tuohy, who had worked his way through the University of Mississippi on a basketball scholarship, knew what it meant to have one skill and one skill only.

What began as an idle act of generosity became for Tuohy and his family a bear hug so tight it drew even the attention of the NCAA recruiting police.

Driving home one day, Tuohy and his wife spotted Oher walking through the cold. "Where are you going?" they asked.

"To basketball practice," Oher replied.

"Michael you don't have basketball practice," Tuohy said. "I know," said Oher, "but they got heat there."

From that moment, the Tuohy family made Oher their responsibility. Lewis describes what happened when a 6-foot-5, 330-pound black teenager moved in with a conservative, white, wealthy Memphis family.

In no time at all, Oher took to calling Leigh Anne Tuohy, who was his fiercest protector, "mamma," and their blond teenage daughter, "my sister."

Race, Lewis believes, was the least of their issues. They had to find clothes big enough (even the Tennessee Titans didn't have anyone as large), find him a tutor so he would be eligible to play football, and then they had to run interference when hordes of coaches descended with offers of full college scholarships.

Lewis is a terrific reporter and a gifted prose stylist. He absorbs the vibrations of the world he immerses himself in without getting carried away. So as the book progresses, he never loses track of Michael Oher.

Although he is a hulking man, Oher is often timid and afraid. He doesn't like to be touched, he says very little and he trusts almost no one.

In fact, there is a lot about Oher's past that the Touhys don't know, can't know, and Lewis beautifully captures how Oher seems to hide those pains in his massive bulk.

One day soon, that protective armor will make Michael Oher, now playing football at Ole Miss, a very rich man.
(John Freeman is the president of the National Book Critics Circle. )