Michael Oher wants to set moviegoers straight about his portrayal in "The Blind Side." He was never slow, mentally or physically. He did know football from an early age. Most important, many people besides a wealthy, loving couple in the swank east side of Memphis, Tenn., helped him rise from homelessness to football stardom at Ole Miss and in Baltimore.
The Ravens offensive tackle tells his story in "I Beat the Odds," written with Don Yaeger. He details his hard-knocks life before he entered Briarcrest Christian School and was mentored and then adopted by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy. It's a surprising book to come from a fellow who dislikes talking about himself. He did it to reach disadvantaged kids and inspire them to persevere as he did. The book highlights his wise side.
It frankly depicts Oher's life in the meanest projects in West Memphis. He logged time in foster care, in a hospital ward, in friends' homes. He stole food when he was hungry. He went on the lam from Tennessee's Department of Children's Services. He ran away from responsible caretakers on the chance he could reunite with his mother, who had 12 children by different men as well as an unshakable drug habit.
In Michael Lewis' "Blind Side" book, Sean Tuohy told Lewis, "Michael's gift is that the Good Lord gave him the ability to forget."
When I recently asked Oher whether it was hard to dig up his roots for "I Beat the Odds," he said, "It wasn't difficult at all. I understood that in order to write this book, I had to look back a lot."
At age 7, watching Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls beat the Phoenix Suns on TV ignited Oher's ambition to use athletic skill to rise from the inner-city ghetto. What saved him, he thinks, was having any dream — and developing the mental toughness and honest values to stay true to it. The chance to reach at-risk kids with that message led Oher to agree to write this book with Yaeger (a former Sports Illustrated editor who has collaborated with the likes of Jordan, Walter Payton and John Wooden).
"My past is what made it all possible," Oher said. "For the people I was trying to target — kids who are in the same situation I was — I had to go back. The people who write me and tell me I am an inspiration — I had to let them know what it was really like, and open the eyes of people who should know about kids who need a hand." Oher wants his book to convey that a youth can rescue himself or herself from hopelessness without benefactors like the Tuohys or prospects of sports stardom.
When his management team approached him about "I Beat the Odds," he didn't envision anyone buying another Michael Oher book "when people already thought they knew me." "The Blind Side," book and movie, were huge hits; the Tuohys had started their own memoir ("In a Heartbeat"). "But then," Yaeger recalled, "he realized that both the book and the movie 'The Blind Side,' though they were good stories, were incomplete."
Oher is proud of the finished book, Yaeger said, because it delivers the theme that made him want to do it in the first place: "If, as a kid, he had made a lot of wrong decisions, he would never have been in a place where he could be 'saved.' Everybody in the world has focused on the couple who saved him, and how awesome that is — and what the Touhys did is awesome. But the truth is, Michael Oher had to be available to them. He was 16 before he met them; he did a lot to save himself. He's grateful to the Tuohys; he's grateful to Ole Miss; he's grateful to the Ravens. But Michael has a backbone that doesn't exist in a lot of people. He'd be successful whatever he did in life, even in an hourly-wage job."
Interviewed the Friday after the Ravens' playoff loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, Oher said, "I didn't want the book to be about me." Still, he uses it to correct some misperceptions. His beef against the movie is that "it portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving when he got it." He thinks that, like the book, the film made it look as if the Tuohys taught him how to play football.
"Sports is all I had to grow up on," Oher told me. "I didn't have too much of anything else. Sports is how I got to that point. Briarcrest would not have taken me if I couldn't do anything." Movie scenes like Sean Jr. teaching Oher strategy with condiment and spice bottles — well, Oher feels you can take them with a whole shakerful of salt.
Yaeger said that Oher is sensitive to any scene that made him appear careless or stupid. Oher disputes the now-iconic image of him walking to a Briarcrest gym during a frigid Thanksgiving break in cut-off blue jeans and a baggy T-shirt. He recalls wearing long pants and a sweat shirt. He thought going to the gym was an intelligent choice. "I felt responsible," he writes, "like I was doing my homework for basketball. And I felt some pride and ownership of that space: It was my school, and since I was part of the team, it was my gym, too. … It never occurred to me that it might not be open."
His story is most potent when he sees his childhood anew. As a kid, his one goal was to be with his mother and siblings. Anyone who stood in that path he considered a villain. For example, the "Blind Side" book portrays a foster provider named Velma as a grotesquely obese disciplinarian who sat on her charges to punish them. In "I Beat the Odds," Oher revises that characterization totally. Velma was a dedicated caregiver who made him attend school and church. "She showed me that there is a structure in life," Oher said. "Before I went to Velma, I never had a set time of having to be in the house, even at that young age. As I got older, I woke up on my own, and went to school on my own — I understood that was the way it was supposed to be."
Oher ended up in "a couple of homes that were less than ideal," he writes with pointed understatement. He has packed away those memories. Yaeger thinks Oher declined to explore them because they'd have turned his book into a horror story.
Yaeger sensed Michael's anxiety when they drove to see Bobbie Spivey, Oher's caseworker from Tennessee's Department of Children's Services. Yaeger said, "I had this crazy idea from interviewing her and talking to Michael that I should put them together, for the first time since he was 14.
"But I could tell the idea of churning all this stuff up — in conversation with this woman who had chased after him for years — was now making him uncomfortable. For her part, she had never had one of her wards come back and thank her, which he did, and sit down with her as a successful adult."
An hour and a half later, Spivey was shedding happy tears, and Oher had found new insight. "I did see her as the enemy," Oher said. "But she was trying to help me. Early on, she was trying to give me a better life."
Oher found value in experiences that might have just humiliated others. When he was 10, DCS authorities moved him to St. Joseph's Hospital for "emotional monitoring." They thought he seethed with pent-up rage. Actually, he was a quiet, oversized boy who would pound his fists to test his man-size hands or bump into furniture because he was still getting used to his big body.
"Being in that hospital, away from anybody I knew, made me a stronger person; it made me grow up fast," Oher said. Another plus: the hospital's video library. "I saw movies; that's all I had to do at that time." His favorite: ""The Godfather.' It's about loyalty, honesty, a lot of different things."
When the book was done, Yaeger asked Oher, "How do you stay humble?" Oher answered, "I have that on-line banking. Every morning I get up, and I go over and I hit my computer for refresh, and I see that my money is still there. It blows me away." To Yaeger, "The young man who can say that he can't believe he still has money in his account — that's Michael Oher. That's who he really is."
If you go
Michael Oher will be signing books at 7 p.m. on Thursday Feb. 10 at Barnes & Noble, 601 E. Pratt St. He will appear again at 2 p.m. on Saturday Feb. 12 at Borders, 170 W. Ridgely Road, Timonium. Call 410-385-1709 or 410-453-0727.