PDF Summary:The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis
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The Blind Side is about a black 15-year-old named Michael Oher from the Memphis inner-city projects who beat the odds to become a football star. This story follows Michael’s journey from his impoverished life with his drug-addicted mother to his adoption by a rich white couple in East Memphis. Through the kindness of strangers and some significant events in the NFL, Michael was able to find his path to success and became one of the greatest left tackles to play high school and college football in the country.
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Before then, Michael used to hang around the basketball courts watching practice. One day, a man named Sean Tuohy saw Michael in the stands and immediately felt a connection with him. Sean could tell Michael was poor and knew he wore the same clothes every day. Sean had grown up poor in Louisiana but now owned 85 chain restaurants and a private jet. He and his wife, Leigh Anne, were pillars in society, and he often donated money to Briarcrest to help students who couldn’t afford the tuition. He figured Michael probably hadn’t eaten, so he went over and offered him help. When Michael refused the offer, Sean put money in his school account to cover lunches for the rest of the year.
Leigh Anne took a different tack with Michael. After meeting him and seeing that he had no possessions or real home, she took him shopping. That day, Michael and Leigh Anne made a personal connection, and she sort of fell in love with this sweet giant boy. Over the next several months, Michael stayed on the Tuohys’ couch whenever he wasn’t able to make the long trip back to West Memphis. He became one of the family, and Leigh Anne finally decided he would live with them for good.
Becoming a Star
Michael was a talented basketball player, and before he started to grow into his current size, he practiced day and night in Hurt Village to become the next Michael Jordan. This training made him fast and nimble, and he kept those skills as he grew. But he didn’t have any fire in his belly. When he first joined the football team at Briarcrest, he was afraid to block the other players and was basically ineffective. He spent more of his junior year on the bench.
But a man named Tom Lemming changed everything when he learned about Michael. Lemming was the premier high school football scout in the nation, and his scouting reports were read by nearly every Division I and II college program. When the Briarcrest coach sent him a tape of Michael chasing down a tiny running back during one game like he was a sprinter, Lemming saw right away that this kid was a freak of nature. He was perfect for the prized position of left tackle, and he told the world about Michael Oher.
Suddenly, coaches from the top football programs in the country were showing up to watch Michael play. Leigh Anne and Sean were skeptical because of his docile character, but Michael proved that he had aggression in him if he was pushed enough. In the first game of his senior season, he became so fed up with the heckling of a lineman on the other team, he picked the 220-pound player up like he was a doll and carried him off the field.
Extra training by his coaches helped Michael learn how to play left tackle, and he became one of the best players in the state of Tennessee. Offers were pouring in from different schools, but in the end, he chose to accept a full-ride scholarship to Ole Miss, the alma mater of both Leigh Anne and Sean. The only problem was that his grades had not improved alongside his football skills. He’d been working with a tutor named Sue Mitchell for almost a year and was making more As and Bs than Cs and Ds, but his transcript was so poor, the increase wasn’t enough.
Sean took Michael to see a psychological examiner to determine whether he had a learning disability. If he did, he could get more time to improve his grades. The examiner determined that Michael had never been taught to read properly but had an amazing gift for memorization. She also learned that his IQ was actually 100-110, which made him average. Because of his average IQ, he was now technically learning below where he should be, and he was certified as having a legitimate learning disability. This diagnosis allowed Michael to take extra classes through an online system to boost his GPA. Finally, the summer after his senior year, he became eligible to play NCAA ball.
A Difficult Road Ahead
Michael’s path to college and the NFL seemed a done deal, but his future was put in jeopardy when someone suggested to the NCAA that Sean and Leigh Anne had bribed Michael to play for Ole Miss. A lengthy investigation proceeded, and Michael was forced to answer questions about his past and relationships in East Memphis. Michael hated this. He didn’t like to talk about himself and was secretive to a ridiculous degree. Even Sean and Leigh Anne had a hard time getting any information about his past out of him. But they had officially adopted Michael by this point and had never tried to push Michael’s decision on where to play. Eventually, the investigation was dropped, and he was free to play football at Ole Miss.
Michael struggled his first year at Ole Miss. He had a hard time learning plays like other players and was playing right guard instead of left tackle, a position he’d never played before. The season was a disaster, and he decided to train hard in the offseason to improve his body and performance. He went from benching 225 to 400 pounds and dropped 24 pounds of weight. He was now faster and stronger and ready for next season.
Shortly after he’d started his training, one of Michael’s teammates ridiculed him for his posh life with the Tuohys. Many of Michael’s teammates were black and from impoverished communities, and this player resented the privilege Michael now enjoyed. He made some disparaging comments about Leigh Anne and her daughter, Collins, and Michael attacked him. In the scuffle, a 3-year-old boy was badly hurt and had to be taken to the hospital. Michael was confused and scared, so he ran, like he used to as a boy.
Sean called everyone he knew at Ole Miss, including a former fraternity brother who was the father of the injured boy, and worked everything out. He told Michael to turn himself in to the campus police and promised everything would be OK, and it was. Michael received the kind of treatment saved for the rich white athletes and barely got a slap on the wrist. His reputation was intact, and he went on to start at left tackle his sophomore year.
Michael’s Legacy
Once he was famous, Michael stopped going back to West Memphis. He became distrustful of people and leaned in to his new life with his new family. All the sporting publications and analysts were betting the farm on his success as an NFL player, and he wanted to protect himself and his finances from people looking for handouts.
But his absence from Hurt Village didn’t stop other kids from wanting to find a similar path to success. One study of a public high school in West Memphis showed that there were many young black athletes with enough talent to make it professionally, but only 1 of 6 ever would. The others lacked the education required to attend college and didn’t have the resources to change their circumstances. Many of these athletes tried to enroll in Briarcrest, but the school was resistant to increasing their black student population.
Sean and Leigh Anne were conflicted about what to do to help other kids like Michael. They knew their resources had helped Michael succeed, and they knew that if he hadn’t met them, no one would likely know who he was. After reading an article about a dynamic high school football star like Michael who couldn’t accept a full-ride scholarship to play Division I ball because of his grades, they decided to do something about it. Leigh Anne wanted to open a center for young black athletes to help them get the education they deserved and needed to make their dreams come true.
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PDF Summary Chapter 1: A New Era for the NFL
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A Changing of the Guards
Lawrence Taylor changed the game of professional football upon his arrival in 1981. He introduced the element of fear in both the players and coaches that created a shift in priorities.
Fear is not a word often used when describing professional football players. By the time a player has reached the NFL, he’s played in enough games and taken enough hits that fear seems like it should be a distant memory. But when the Giants drafted Taylor and subsequently hired defensive coach Bill Parcells the same year, the combination created fear in the hearts of all coaches, offensive linemen, and quarterbacks across the league.
Parcells understood that fear was a beneficial aspect of the game. His goal was not only to stop the offensive line of scrimmage but also mess with the heads of the opposing quarterbacks. He wanted to instill a sense of panic, a lack of confidence, and an equilibrium disruption that would cause the quarterback to make rushed and misguided plays. And he had the perfect player in Taylor to carry out this plan.
Taylor was not your typical left tackle. He was large, tall, and fast, a combination not often seen. He was driven...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Discovering Michael Oher
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These parameters had served Lemming well. In 1995, 14 of his top-25 picks became number one picks during the NFL draft. Sports broadcasting stations and polling organizations started using Lemming’s lists to guide their own top picks. And in 2000, Lemming was asked to select the inaugural team for the U.S. Army High School All-American game, a task he was given each year following.
The New Recruit
The demand for a certain type of left tackle in the wake of Taylor added a new dimension to Lemming’s standards. Before, a high school lineman who came in at 250 pounds was considered good-sized. But with the rise of massive and fast pass rushers, linemen were now required to be monstrous, and the type of person who could play left tackle was even more defined.
Recruits for left tackle now had to be at least 300 pounds, have long arms and large hands, and be fast like a sprinter and light on their feet like a ballerina. But finding this type of player in the high school ranks was like finding a silver dollar in a heap of quarters.
It was for this reason, and this reason alone, that Lemming took notice when he received a grainy, barely viewable video in Spring 2004. He...
PDF Summary Chapter 3: The All-American
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Michael excelled at track and field but struggled on both the basketball and football teams at first. Part of the issue was his lack of aggression, which made him weak defensively in both sports. Neither coach could figure out why this huge kid was so docile. Most kids who come from traumatic backgrounds have an inherent aggression that gets channeled through sports. Football, especially, provides these kids opportunities to express their rage in a productive way, but Michael never did. He lacked that aggressive fire, and his teams suffered for it.
In track and field, Michael participated in field events, like discus and shot put. Michael had no training in either event when he competed in the first meet, but his strength and ability to mimic others’ physical movement helped him come in first. That was the moment Coach Boggess realized Michael learned by watching movement. He started showing him performance videos of high-quality field athletes, and by the end of Michael’s track career at the school, he broke the West Tennessee sectional record in the discus and almost broke it for the shot put.
His success as a basketball player would come a different way. Skills and...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 4: A New Future for Michael Oher
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Becoming Human
With his growing popularity, Michael started changing. Where once Michael was reserved and afraid of his own shadow, now he was gregarious at school and becoming popular. The more people told him he was special, the more he started to believe it. At home, he was becoming more outspoken, confident, and comfortable asking for things. The first thing he wanted was a driver’s license.
Leigh Anne was willing to get Michael a license, but she didn’t have any documentation for him. He had no birth certificate, social security card, or school ID. On paper, Michael Oher didn’t exist. To start the process of making him official, Leigh Anne collected an ID card and documentation from the school to vouch for his existence. But the man at the social security office said he still couldn’t find anyone named Michael Oher in his system. His hands were tied.
But Leigh Anne wasn’t one to take no for an answer, so she explained the situation to the man. She told him about Michael’s life and them taking him in, and it worked. The man continued looking and discovered something strange. **Michael Jerome Oher didn’t exist, but Michael Jerome Williams did. Leigh Anne was...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: College Bound
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But Hugh Freeze quickly became a liability in Michael’s decision process, as well, when he started interviewing for a job on staff at the University of Tennessee. He wasted no time in trying to impart to Michael all the reasons UT was the right school for him. Leigh Anne also wasn’t shy about her feelings about Michael attending Ole Miss, but she didn’t pressure him. But his tutor, a woman named Sue Mitchell, who’d been working with Michael on his grades five hours a day, six days a week for several months and also an Ole Miss alumna, did. On the day before Michael was leaving to visit the Tennessee campus, Sue told him that she’d heard it on good authority that the FBI conducted decomposition tests on corpses and buried the bodies under the football stadium.
Many people had a vested interest in where Michael decided to attend college, but he took it all in stride. He never committed to one school or another in a serious way and entertained any and all offers to visit campuses in an official or unofficial capacity. The only caveat was that **if he was intending to go to Ole Miss, the Tuohys thought it best to officially adopt him to avoid looking like boosters offering...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Big Man on Campus
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The rivalry game was called the Egg Bowl because of the egg-shaped trophy passed back and forth depending on who won the game. Ole Miss hadn’t lost the game in more than four years, and they didn’t want to start now. It would not only be an embarrassment in front of the rival crowd. It would be national humiliation. And it would also mean death for the offensive coaches, especially DeLeone.
For Michael’s part, he did his best to follow the plays and support his team. He mostly caught on and performed exceedingly well in his new position. But he also struggled and was lost and confused on the field during play. Usually, his good games came after hours of extra practice with Sean, who ran through all the plays with Michael beforehand. Playing in the SEC was a far cry from the three-play offense at Briarcrest, and an error meant more than simply an open player. It was the difference between the quarterback walking off the field or being carried off the field. The pressure was high, and it was intensified for this final game.
The embarrassment started immediately and swiftly. The inability of the Ole Miss offensive coaching squad to come up with a strategy that could harness...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Discovering Michael Oher
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Michael’s father didn’t stick around long after he was born and ended up back in prison. Dee Dee no longer wanted her child named after that man, so she started referring to him as Michael Oher, her last name. Four years and four more children later, Dee Dee was firmly addicted to crack and using her government checks to support her habit, leaving her 7 boys and 3 girls to fend for themselves. Michael’s earliest memories are of going for days without food, drinking water to get full, and sleeping outdoors.
Despite these hardships, Dee Dee’s children loved her. She wasn’t mean and told them she loved them often, and Michael and his siblings started to worry that they’d get taken away from her and separated from each other. In April 1994, when Michael was almost 8, their worst nightmare came true. Police officers showed up to take Dee Dee’s children. The boys were able to escape, but the girls were taken away. Michael never saw his sisters again.
Foster Care
Several weeks after the girls were taken, the police found Michael and his brother Carlos at school. They were taken to live with Velma Jones, an obese woman who used to sit on them when they were bad. Velma...
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