The Blind Side: Evolution Of A Game – Michael Lewis, 2009 ★★★

A Left Tackle Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

There seems nothing Michael Lewis does not know about his subjects. His way of writing about them is simultaneously zippy and deep, not an easy trick as any writer can tell you.

Of course, he goes on a bit sometimes, and every now and then he pulls a quip out of left field, but overall, he’s very engaging even when discussing data-driven topics like the bond market in Liar’s Poker and the tech boom in The New New Thing. Even when he writes about more accessible subjects, he seems to prefer a complicated approach. Moneyball is a sabermetrics treatise about a small-market baseball team struggling to maintain its relevance in the free-agency era.

In the book being discussed today, Lewis looks at pro football from the perspective of perhaps the most overlooked player on the field, the left tackle.

“It’s like playing the cantaloupe in the school play,” Lewis observes.

But over the course of the last few decades, that cantaloupe has become a base requirement for National Football League success. As football has evolved from a game focused on rushing to one focused on passing, successful teams rely on a good quarterback. And because most quarterbacks are right-handed, the job of keeping that quarterback healthy has fallen on the previously ignored left tackle, protecting the QB’s blind side from his end of the offensive line.

The emergence of dangerous pass rushers in the early 1980s, specifically Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants, gave left tackles new worth.

“The left tackle has become the second highest paying position on the field, after the quarterback,” Lewis writes. “In Super Bowl XL, played on February 5, 2006, the highest paid player on the field was Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck – who had just signed a new six-year deal worth $8.2 million a year. The second highest paid player on the field was the man who protected Hasselbeck’s blind side, left tackle Walter Jones, who made $7.5 million a year.”

Perhaps recognizing that this same sort of dollar focus might have hindered Moneyball from reaching even more readers than it did, Lewis works the human angle closer to the core of The Blind Side. He focuses on the story of one young man who seems uniquely placed to reap the benefit of the left tackle’s newfound importance.

Michael Oher’s biological mother is an addict who can’t take care of herself, let alone her 13 offspring. Oher has love to give, and also muscle. Lots of it. Already bigger and faster than any left tackle in the pros, he’s still just in his mid-teens. Because of a promise made to a dying woman, he is brought to Briarcrest, a private Evangelical high school, to get a Christian education. There he is spotted by Sean Tuohy, a former University of Mississippi basketball star turned millionaire entrepreneur, and his wife Leigh Anne, “an extreme, and seemingly combustible, mixture of tenderness and willfulness.”

Leigh Anne wastes little time taking Michael to a “Big and Tall” clothing store. By the next chapter, the Tuohys have adopted Oher and are helping him succeed academically at his new school. Michael is a sweet kid, but it takes time for his potential to emerge. All that’s known in the beginning is that he likes sneakers with blue stripes and a futon he can sleep on at night and strip down every morning. 

“It was like God made a child just for us,” Sean tells Lewis. “Sports for me, neat for Leigh Anne.”

As it turns out, God may have made a child for the NFL, too.

Michael Oher doesn’t just have the size to play left tackle, he has incredible speed, enough to play a strong game of basketball and imagine himself the next Michael Jordan. He’s also smart, something that takes time to be revealed at Briarcrest but once it is, helps him become the dominant player on a state championship team.

The book occasionally returns to the story of the left tackle in the NFL, but is more about Michael, the Tuohys, and to a lesser extent the Briarcrest community’s reaction to this giant in their midst. The book’s title, as it turns out, is about more than football. Both Michael and the white community which has taken him in have to work through some misconceptions and hang-ups in order to find a place where he can thrive, not as a “freak of nurture” or a racial/socioeconomic token, but as a healthy, happy human being.

Michael Oher enjoys a career highlight as a professional football player, as a starting player on the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens in 2013. The following year, the Ravens cut him. As of 2016, he remains on the roster of the Carolina Panthers, albeit on injured reserve. Image from http://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/nfl-star-says-hollywood-movie-ruined-career/news-story/0687f8f76b81b1a21d842869be8a49e1

That all sounds very well and good. Yet the more I read The Blind Side, the less concerned I was with Michael Oher and the Tuohys and the more I pined for Lewis to go back to analyzing football.

His description at the beginning of how Lawrence Taylor changed the game in 1981 is a well-crafted highlight (“It wasn’t really called the blind side when I came into the league,” Taylor tells Lewis. “It became the blind side after I started knocking people’s heads off.”) So too is an analysis later in the book about how coach Bill Walsh elevated the role of quarterback by building an array of quick, easy-to-understand passing options into his playbook.

When Lewis gets back to Michael Oher and the Tuohys, the book becomes a pleasant, somewhat inspiring, but also confounding melodrama where the question of what draws the Tuohys to Michael is never deeply discussed. This may be a reason the book drew some criticism for taking a patronizing approach to the whole question of mixed-race adoption, as if the Tuohys wanted not a son but a lineman to send to their alma mater, Old Miss, which is where Oher indeed wound up.

“When the coaches [trying to recruit Oher] walked into the living room of the Tuohys’ lovely Memphis home, the first thing they saw was the Rebel Christmas tree: red and blue branches festooned with nothing but Ole Miss ornaments,” Lewis writes. “On their way out they passed, in the front yard, a little stone statue of what at first appeared a gnome but, upon closer inspection, proved to be the Ole Miss mascot, ‘Colonel Rebel.’”

On the other hand, it’s hard to fault the Tuohys as parents who want the same good things for their adopted child that they themselves enjoyed. And there’s nothing to suggest a mercenary motive on their part. In fact, it’s clear from his account that Lewis, a friend of Sean’s in childhood, likes the Tuohys and expects you to like them, too. They share a lot of themselves which Lewis recounts in entertaining fashion, and you come to root for them and for Michael, the shy, gentle kid who trusts few but who doesn’t quit on anyone who shows they care.

Part of the problem may be the way Lewis constructs the book. We hardly get to know Michael before he is swept up at Briarcrest like Harry Potter at Hogwarts. The struggle consists of adjusting to a millionaire lifestyle and finding acceptance from people who, with few exceptions, seem happy to provide same.

Later on, very near the end of the narrative, there is a crisis involving the police, whereupon Lewis jumps backwards for the first time to recount in detail how rough Michael’s childhood really was, and how challenging it was for him to learn to trust people. It’s the obvious place to begin the story; Lewis leaves it off until it reads almost like an afterthought, given we have by now reached the other side of his journey.

Another drawback is the book’s focus on Oher’s emergence as a singular left tackle is never quite borne out. We do read of his freshman year playing for Ole Miss, where he became an All-American player for a losing team. But then the book stops, with his college career not really underway.

Oher has since gone on to play in the NFL, establishing himself as a solid if not earthshaking player who has won a Super Bowl, struggled with injury, and lines up at right tackle more often than left tackle. For all the build-up Lewis gives him as the offensive line’s answer to Lawrence Taylor, Oher’s probably better known for this book, and its resulting movie adaptation for which Sandra Bullock won an Oscar playing his mother.

Lewis’s ability to tell a good tale may wind up running a few yards farther downfield than the story itself merits. The Blind Side is nevertheless an enjoyable sports-centered human-interest story that shows Lewis can write about human relationships nearly as well as he can about high finance.