The Blind Side Read online

  More praise for

  THE BLIND SIDE

  “Yet another triumph…[The Blind Side] is about much more than college football recruitment…it is actually about the American dream itself.”

  —A. G. Gancarski, Washington Times

  “Lewis has such a gift for storytelling…he writes as lucidly for sports fans as for those who read him for other reasons.”

  —Janet Maslin, New York Times

  “Grabs hold of you.”

  —Allen Barra, Washington Post

  “[Lewis] is advancing a new genre of journalism.”

  —George F. Will, New York Times Book Review

  “Lewis has perfected the art of analyzing interesting changes inside American institutions—the bond market, Major League Baseball—and then decorating the scene with personalities behind the statistics.”

  —Jay Hancock, Baltimore Sun

  “No reader with even a passing interest in the current state of our games should fail to read it.”

  —Bill Littlefield, Boston Globe

  “In The Blind Side, Michael Lewis provides a compelling book…explaining how this subtle and brutal game has changed as the balance of power has shifted between talented athletes and clever, devoted coaches.”

  —The Economist

  “Lewis knows how to put the reader on the field…. The Blind Side displays all of Lewis’ particular writing strengths: the ability to drive a story forward, the eye for both the big picture and telling detail, shrewd wit, and an unerring instinct for discerning social complexity…. You’ll be tempted to stand up and cheer as you read.”

  —Susan Larson, Times-Picayune, New Orleans

  “Lewis is a terrific reporter and a gifted prose stylist. He absorbs the vibrations of the world he immerses himself in without getting carried away. So as the book progresses, he never loses track of Michael Oher.”

  —John Freeman, Houston Chronicle

  “Entertaining and illuminating…about racial division, sporting tactics and financial arbitrage.”

  —John Gapper, Financial Times

  “Combining a tour de force of sports analysis with a piquant ethnography of the South’s pigskin mania, Lewis probes the fascinating question of whether football is a matter of brute force or subtle intellect.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Lewis delivers a thunderous hit.”

  —Bryan French, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “As he has done before, Lewis brilliantly deconstructs a culture.”

  —Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

  “A penetrating tale…an engrossing, if anguished, story of serendipity and salvation.”

  —Mark Hyman, BusinessWeek

  “Grippingly told.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

  “[Lewis has] a gift for narrative pace, for sly wit, for the telling detail, for the clarity and verve of his sentences.”

  —George W. Hunt, America magazine

  “[The Blind Side] works on three levels. First as a shrewd analysis of the NFL; second, as an exposé of the insanity of big-time college football recruiting; and, third, as a moving portrait of the positive effect that love, family, and education can have in reversing the path of a life that was destined to be lived unhappily and, most likely, end badly.”

  —Wes Lukowsky, Booklist, starred review

  “A book about idiosyncratic idealism—but with a hopeful ending.”

  —Jacob Weisberg, Slate

  “It’s the sort of book that one might understandably categorize as just another (true) story about football…but Lewis goes much deeper.”

  —Brian Cook, Sky magazine

  “In my recent reading of Michael Lewis’s outstanding The Blind Side, I cried any number of times, such was the powerful effect of that story.”

  —Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News

  “[A] superbly written and exhaustively interviewed tale.”

  —Steven Goode, Vindicator

  “As good a portrait of contemporary American society […] as anything that Tom Wolfe produced in his prime.”

  —Brian Zabcik, Corporate Counsel

  “A gripping tour through the world of college recruiting, professional football strategy, and the volatile mix of faith and sports.”

  —Christianity Today

  “An extraordinary and moving story of a young man who will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the NFL.”

  —The Octavian

  “A look at the strategy, the underpinnings, the personalities of modern football, told personally and clearly in the form of one young player.”

  —Blue Ridge Business Journal

  “Lewis effortlessly moves back and forth between subtle football tactics and major social issues.”

  —John Lawson III, Tampa Tribune

  “A brilliant investigation of what determines success in American football and, separately, in American society.”

  —Mike Steib, Void magazine

  THE BLIND SIDE

  ALSO BY

  MICHAEL LEWIS

  Home Game

  Panic

  Coach

  Moneyball

  The Money Culture

  Pacific Rift

  Losers

  The New New Thing

  Next

  Liar’s Poker

  THE BLIND SIDE

  Evolution of a Game

  MICHAEL LEWIS

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York London

  Copyright © 2009, 2006 by Michael Lewis

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Lewis, Michael (Michael M.)

  The blind side: evolution of a game / Michael Lewis.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07902-9

  1. Oher, Michael. 2. Football players—United States—Biography.

  3. University of Mississippi—Football. 4. College sports—United States.

  I. Title.

  GV939.O44L49 2006

  796.332092—dc22

  [B]

  2006023509

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For Starling Lawrence

  Underpaid guardian of the author’s blind side.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  BACK STORY

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MARKET FOR FOOTBALL PLAYERS

  CHAPTER THREE

  CROSSING THE LINE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BLANK SLATE

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DEATH OF A LINEMAN

  CHAPTER SIX

  INVENTING MICHAEL

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE PASTA COACH

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHARACTER COURSES

  CHAPTER NINE

  BIRTH OF A STAR

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE EGG BOWL

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FREAK OF NURTURE

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AND MOSES STUTTERED

  Afterword to the Paperback Edition

  Author’s Note

  THE BLIND SIDE

  CHAPTER ONE

  BACK STORY

  FROM THE SNAP of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. One Mississippi: The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back Joh
n Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It’s what most people know as a “flea-flicker,” but the Redskins call it a “throw back special.” Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming straight at him. It’s a runing down—the start of the second quarter, first and 10 at midfield, with the score tied 7–7—and the New York Giants’ linebacker has been so completely suckered by the fake that he’s deep in the Redskins’ backfield. Carson thinks he’s come to tackle Riggins but Riggins is long gone, so Carson just keeps running, toward Theismann. Three Mississippi: Carson now sees that Theismann has the ball. Theismann notices Carson coming straight at him, and so he has time to avoid him. He steps up and to the side and Carson flies right on by and out of the play. The play is now 3.5 seconds old. Until this moment it has been defined by what the quarterback can see. Now it—and he—is at the mercy of what he can’t see.

  You don’t think of fear as a factor in professional football. You assume that the sort of people who make it to the NFL are immune to the emotion. Perhaps they don’t mind being hit, or maybe they just don’t get scared; but the idea of pro football players sweating and shaking and staring at the ceiling at night worrying about the next day’s violence seems preposterous. The head coach of the Giants, Bill Parcells, didn’t think it preposterous, however. Parcells, whose passion is the football defense, believed that fear played a big role in the game. So did his players. They’d witnessed up close the response of opposing players to their own Lawrence Taylor.

  The tackle who had just quit the Philadelphia Eagles, for instance. Jerry Sisemore had played tackle in the NFL for eight years when, in 1981, Taylor arrived. Sisemore played on the right side of the offensive line and Taylor usually came off the other end, but Sisemore still had to worry about the few times Taylor lined up across from him. Their teams were in the same NFL division and met twice each regular season. The week leading up to those games, Sisemore confessed, unnerved him. “Towards the middle of the week something would come over you and you’d just start sweating,” he told the New York Times. “My last year in the league, opening day, he immediately got past me…. He just looked at me and laughed. Right there I thought I had to get out of this game.” And after that season, 1984, he did.

  The feelings of those assigned to prevent Taylor from hurting quarterbacks were trivial compared to those of the quarterbacks he wanted to hurt. In Taylor’s first season in the NFL, no official records were kept of quarterback sacks. In 1982, after Taylor had transformed the quarterback sack into the turning point of a football game, a new official NFL statistic was born. The record books defined the sack as tackling the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage as he attempts to pass. Taylor offered his own definition: “A sack is when you run up behind somebody who’s not watching, he doesn’t see you, and you really put your helmet into him. The ball goes fluttering everywhere and the coach comes out and asks the quarterback, ‘Are you all right?’ That’s a sack.” After his first NFL season Taylor became the only rookie ever named the league’s most valuable defensive player, and he published a treatise on his art. “I don’t like to just wrap the quarterback,” he explained. “I really try to make him see seven fingers when they hold up three. I’ll drive my helmet into him, or, if I can, I’ll bring my arm up over my head and try to axe the sonuvabitch in two. So long as the guy is holding the ball, I intend to hurt him…. If I hit the guy right, I’ll hit a nerve and he’ll feel electrocuted, he’ll forget for a few seconds that he’s on a football field.”

  The game of football evolved and here was one cause of its evolution, a new kind of athlete doing a new kind of thing. All by himself, Lawrence Taylor altered the environment and forced opposing coaches and players to adapt. After Taylor joined the team, the Giants went from the second worst defense in the NFL to the third best. The year before his debut they gave up 425 points; his first year they gave up 257 points. They had been one of the weakest teams in the NFL and were now, overnight, a contender. Of course, Taylor wasn’t the only change in the New York Giants between 1980 and 1981. There was one other important newcomer, Bill Parcells, hired first to coach the Giants’ defense and then the entire team. Parcells became a connoisseur of the central nervous system of opposing quarterbacks. The symptoms induced by his sack-happy linebacker included, but were not restricted to: “intimidation, lack of confidence, quick throws, nervous feet, concentration lapses, wanting to know where Lawrence is all the time.” The players on the Giants’ defense picked up the same signals. As defensive back Beasley Reece told the New York Times, “I’ve seen quarterbacks look at Lawrence and forget the snap count.” One opposing quarterback, finding himself under the center before the snap and unable to locate Taylor, called a time-out rather than run the play—only to find Taylor standing on the sidelines. “I think I saw it more with the quarterbacks in our division,” says Giants linebacker Harry Carson. “They knew enough to be afraid. But every quarterback had a certain amount of fear when he played us.”

  By his fourth pro season Taylor was not just feeding these fears but feeding off them. “They come to the line of scrimmage and the first thing they do is start looking for me,” he said. “I know, and they know. When they’d find me they’d start screaming: 56 left! 56 left! [Taylor wore No. 56.] So there’s this thing I did. After the play was over I’d come up behind them and whisper: don’t worry where I am. I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins’ linemen put it, “No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty.” Bill Parcells thought Taylor’s size and speed were closer to the beginning than to the end of the explanation. New York Giants’ scouts were scouring the country for young men six three or taller, 240 pounds or heavier, with speed. They could be found. In that pool of physical specimens what was precious—far more precious than an inch, or ten pounds, or one tenth of a second—was Taylor’s peculiar energy and mind: relentless, manic, with grandiose ambitions and private standards of performance. Parcells believed that even in the NFL a lot of players were more concerned with seeming to want to win than with actually winning, and that many of them did not know the difference. What they wanted, deep down, was to keep their jobs, make their money, and go home. Lawrence Taylor wanted to win. He expected more of himself on the field than a coach would dare to ask of any player.

  Parcells accumulated lots of anecdotal evidence in support of his view of Taylor’s football character. One of his favorites involved these very same Washington Redskins. “Joe Gibbs in a game in Giants Stadium basically decided that Taylor wasn’t going to make any plays,” said Parcells. “He put two tight ends on Taylor’s side—along with the left tackle—and two wide receivers in the slot away from Taylor.” This was extreme. An NFL football field is a tightly strung economy. Everything on it comes at a price. Take away from one place and you give to another. Three men blocking Taylor meant two Giants with no one to block them. Taylor’s effect on the game, which the Giants won, was not obvious but it was nonetheless great. “But after the game,” Parcells continued:

  The press sees that Lawrence doesn’t have a sack and hasn’t made a tackle and they’re all asking me “what’s the matter with Taylor?” The next week we go out to San Diego to play the Chargers. Dan Henning is the coach. He sees the strategy. They do the same thing. Two tight ends on Lawrence, two wide receivers in the slot. Lawrence doesn’t get a sack. We win again. But after the game everyone is asking me all over again: “what’s the matter with Taylor?” I grab Lawrence in the locker room and say to him, “I’m going to change your first name from Lawrence to What’s The Matter With?” At practice that next week he was What’s The Matter With? “What you doin’ over there What’s The Matter With?” “Hey, What’s The Matter With?, how come you aren’t making plays?” By Thursday it�
��s not funny to him. And I mean it is really not funny.

  The next game we have is against the Vikings on Monday Night Football. Tommy Kramer is the quarterback. They don’t employ the strategy. He knocks Kramer out of the game, causes two fumbles and recovers one of them. I’m leaving the field, walking down the tunnel towards the locker room for the press conference. And out of nowhere this…thing comes and jumps on my back. I didn’t know he was coming. He basically knocks me over. He’s still got his helmet on. Sweat’s still pouring down his face. He comes right up into my face and hollers, “I tell you what Coachy, they aren’t going to ask you What’s The Matter With?!!”

  Parcells believed Taylor’s greatness was an act of will, a refusal to allow the world to understand him as anything less than great. “That’s why I loved him so much,” he said. “He responded to anything that threatened his status.” When in the middle of his career Taylor became addicted to cocaine, Parcells interpreted the problem as a simple extension of the man’s character. Lawrence Taylor trusted in one thing, the power of his own will. He assumed that his will could control NFL football games, and that it could also control his own chemical desires.