The Blind Side by Michael Lewis Page B

size 14, and so it was size 14 shoes Sean bought for him, even though it meant a bit of pain when he walked.
Around the house he was a neat freak. Leigh Anne ran a tight ship and within weeks it was clear that Michael was the only member of the crew who passed muster. “You might drop your underwear on the floor,” said Sean, “but one minute later they’d be gone. They might have wound up in the silverware drawer but they were not on the floor.” Michael’s were the only underwear never dropped. Collins, who was the same age as Michael, had never made her bed in her life and, no matter how often her mother hollered at her, never would. Michael not only made his bed, he removed the sheets from the futon, folded them, and returned the thing to its couchlike state. Every day, without exception. “It was like God made a child just for us,” said Sean. “Sports for me, neat for Leigh Anne.”
From the moment Michael moved in with them, Sean began to stew on his future. (“Because I figured I was going to have to pay for it.”) Michael was approaching the end of his junior year in high school, and while they hadn’t seen his transcripts, they knew his grades were poor. Since Myrtle Beach he’d been good enough on the basketball team that Sean thought he might be able to play at a small college. “And I figured if he wasn’t, I could make him good enough,” said Sean. At six five he wasn’t tall enough to be a post player in major college basketball but he might make it in Division II. Sean had contacts in college basketball all over the South. He began to write letters on Michael’s behalf to coaches at small schools—Murray State, Austin Peay. He had Leigh Anne go out and sign up Michael for every summer basketball camp she could find.
Then Hugh Freeze called Michael and said that this guy who wrote scouting reports on high school football players was coming through town and had agreed, on Hugh’s recommendation, to see him. Accustomed to just doing what he was told around Briarcrest, Michael jumped in the passenger seat of a teammate’s car and allowed himself to be driven to the University of Memphis. He sat through fifteen long minutes of this strange little guy’s questions without the faintest interest in the encounter. “I just wanted him to stop talking so I could leave,” he said later. Under Michael’s mute gaze, Tom Lemming finally stopped talking. Michael left the forms Lemming gave him, unfilled. And that, Michael thought, was that.
Only it wasn’t. Lemming’s private scouting report was sent to the head coach at more than one hundred Division I college football programs and so more than one hundred head college football coaches learned that this kid in Memphis, whom no one had ever heard of, was the most striking left tackle talent he’d seen since he first met Orlando Pace. And Orlando Pace was now being paid $10 million a year to play left tackle for the St. Louis Rams. It was only a week or so after Lemming’s report went out that the Briarcrest Saints football team met for two weeks of spring practice. Hugh Freeze was there, of course, as he was the head coach and ran the practices. Tim Long was there, too, because he coached the offensive line. Like several of the coaches, Long was a Briarcrest parent, but was also a six five, 300-pound former left tackle at the University of Memphis, and a fifth-round draft pick of the Minnesota Vikings. At first sight, Long had been awed by Michael Oher’s raw ability. “When I first saw him,” he said, “I thought: this guy is going to make us all famous.” But then he’d coached him in the final games of his junior year, after Michael was moved to right tackle on the offensive line, and Long wondered why he wasn’t a better player. One game he had pulled Michael out and sat him on the bench because he thought the team was better off playing another guy.
The only other coach at Briarcrest Spring Practice with any experience of college or pro