I remember the NYT article from when it was current. I thought there was a movie in there somewhere. Anyway, ... here's a taste:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24football.html?pagewanted=all-snip-
When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym — watching the practice of a basketball team he wasn’t allowed to play on — he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.
Sean was an American success story: he had come from nothing and made himself rich. He was a star point guard at Ole Miss, drafted by the New Jersey Nets. And while he didn’t make it in the National Basketball Association, he took his preternatural court sense into the business world and made his fortune — sort of. He owned a chain of 60 Taco Bells, KFC’s and Long John Silver restaurants, along with a mountain of debt. If everything broke right, he might soon be worth as much as $50 million. If everything did not, he could always call games on the radio for the N.B.A.’s Grizzlies, which he had been doing since they arrived in Memphis in 2001. What Atlanta was to the American South, Sean Tuohy was to the white Southern male. Prosperous. Forever upgrading the trappings of his existence. Happy to exchange his past at a deep discount for a piece of the future.
It wasn’t enough. The restaurants ran themselves; the Grizzlies gig was a night job; church was on Sundays. He needed a bit more action in his life. And he now had all the time in the world for what he still loved more than anything: hanging around school gyms and acting as a kind of consultant to the coaches at the Briarcrest Christian School in their dealings with their players. Like every other parent and student at Briarcrest, Sean had been born again, but his interest in the poor jocks might have run even deeper than his religious belief. Sean was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interested in opera singers or a Jesuit scholar in debaters. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. “What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,” he told me once, “was what not to do: beat up a kid. It’s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.”
Sean was 42 years old. His hairline had receded, but not quite to the point where you could call him bald, and his stomach had expanded, but not quite to the point where you could call him fat. He was keenly interested in social status — his own and other people’s — but not in the way of the Old South. Not long after he became a figure in Memphis — a putatively rich businessman who had his own jet and was the radio voice of the Memphis Grizzlies — he had feelers from the Memphis Country Club. He didn’t encourage them because, as he puts it: “I don’t hang with the blues. I’d rather go to a high-school football game on Friday night than go to a country club and drink four Scotches and complain about my wife.” He delighted in the sight of people moving up in the world. Country clubs were all about staying in one place.
When he introduced himself to Big Mike, Sean was already knee-deep in the various problems and crises of the few black students at the Briarcrest Christian School. Sean’s daughter Collins, a sophomore at Briarcrest and on her way to becoming the Tennessee state champion in the pole vault, occasioned almost constant exposure to them: she was on the track team; they were on the track team. Collins had mentioned Big Mike to him. When she tried to pass him on the stairwell, she said, she had to back up to the top because she couldn’t fit past him. Without uttering a peep, he had become the talk of the school.
She said everyone was frightened of him at first, until they realized that he was far more terrified of them. Sean had seen Big Mike around the school three or four times. He had noticed that he wore the same clothes every day: cutoff blue jeans and an oversize T-shirt. Now he saw him in the stands and thought, I’ll bet he’s hungry. Sean walked over and said, “You don’t know me, but we have more in common than you might think.”
Michael Oher stared intently at his feet.
“What did you have to eat for lunch today?” Sean asked.
“In the cafeteria,” the kid said.
“I didn’t ask where you ate,” Sean said. “I asked what you ate.”
“Had a few things,” the kid said.
Sure you did, thought Sean. He asked if he needed money for lunch, and Mike said, “I don’t need any money.”
The next day, Sean went to the Briarcrest accounting department and arranged for Michael Oher to have a standing account at the lunch checkout counter. He had done the same for several of the poorer black kids who had come to Briarcrest. In a couple of cases, he had, in effect, paid their tuition by giving money to a school fund earmarked for scholarships for those who couldn’t afford tuition. “That was my only connection with Michael,” he said later. “Lunch.”
Sean left it at lunch, and at lunch it might have ended. But a few weeks afterward, the Briarcrest Christian School took its Thanksgiving break. On a cold and blustery morning, Sean and his wife, Leigh Anne, were driving down one of the main boulevards of East Memphis when just ahead of them a huge black male stepped off the bus. He was dressed in the same pair of cutoffs and T-shirt he always wore. Sean pointed him out to his wife and said: “That kid I was telling you about — that’s him. Big Mike.”
“But he’s wearing shorts,” she said.
“Uh-huh. He always wears those.”
“Sean, it’s snowing!”
And so it was. At Leigh Anne’s insistence, they pulled over. Sean reintroduced himself to Michael and then introduced Michael to Leigh Anne.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To basketball practice,” Michael said.
“Michael, you don’t have basketball practice,” Sean said.
“I know,” the boy said. “But they got heat there.”
Sean didn’t understand that one.
“It’s nice and warm in that gym,” the boy said.
-snip-
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