The Blind Side: sometimes sports is more than just a game
Another September, football is back, and all’s right with the world. The first National Football League games were played Thursday night (Sept. 4) and the colleges kicked off their season last weekend. As the glaring sun of summer fades into fall, for some of us, the true new year begins — full of hope, optimism and an expectation of miracles. For a while, at least, each year, the football fan is a true
believer.
"The Blind Side: Anatomy of a Game," (Michael Lewis, 2006, W.W. Norton and Co.) is a book to confirm the faith of football’s true believers, to inspire those who want to believe, and to instruct people who would like to learn something about football. "The Blind Side" is a Cinderella story, if Cinderella can be a 6-foot-5-inch, 300-plus-pound, functionally illiterate teenager, who, incidentally, runs like a greased bullet.
Michael Oher is the teenager. He grew up in west Memphis, Tenn., in, as the book describes it, the third-poorest ZIP code in the United States. He managed to get through the ninth grade of Memphis public schools without learning to read. How is it allowed, you might ask yourself, that a child in this country can get that far in school without someone teaching him to read? But that’s a situation too common to marvel at; the miracle is when, as in Michael’s case, one of these kids gets rescued.
Through the intervention of a kindly adult, Michael finds himself in a private Christian school, on the opposite — read white, read wealthy — side of Memphis. He can’t pass the simplest of math or English tests. Never mind the answers; he doesn’t even understand the questions.
But there is something about this hulking, silent boy, larger than a lot of NFL offensive linemen, that appeals to the heart. He is essentially a stray, trying to raise himself. In one of a series of miracles, this Cinderella boy finds a family, or you could say a family finds him, and his life changes.
But "The Blind Side" also is a story about football. It’s about tactics, and skill sets and the arrival in the game of powerful linebackers such as the New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor, who wasn’t satisfied just to sack quarterbacks. Taylor wanted to hurt them, to frighten them, to come up on their blind side and knock them senseless. And as in any war, in this contest of helmets and pads and battering ram shoulders, a type of player evolved who could protect the quarterback on his vulnerable side. That’s where Michael Oher comes in.
This book has been out a couple of years. I have thought about it often since I read it, as I hear about the young man who had tried out for a pro team and was cut, and went on to teach school or tend bar or work in his brother-in-law’s business. Then one day he gets a call from a director of player personnel. ‘‘We have a slot open, and we’d like to see how you do,’’ he hears. And another miracle happens.
"The Blind Side" is a story that is still playing out. These days, Michael Oher plays for Ole Miss. He’s a senior and an offensive lineman. By all accounts, he has a bright future in the NFL. We football fans have good reason to be optimistic.
