The Blind Side Read online

  He was right about the NFL games. By November 18, 1985, when the Giants went into Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, DC, to play the Redskins, opposing teams have taken to lining up their players in new and creative ways simply to deal with him. The Redskins are a case in point. Early in the very first game in which his Redskins had faced this new force, back in 1981, Joe Gibbs had watched Taylor sprint past the blocker as if he wasn’t there and clobber Joe Theismann from behind. “I was standing there,” said Gibbs, “and I said, ‘What? Did you see that? Oh Lord.’” Gibbs had flopped about looking for a solution to this new problem, and had come up with the “one back offense”—a formation, widely imitated in the NFL, that uses one running back instead of two. Until that moment, football offenses had typically used running backs to block linebackers who came charging after quarterbacks. But running backs were smaller, weaker, and, surprisingly often, given their job description, slower than Lawrence Taylor. Lynn Cain, a running back for the Atlanta Falcons, was the first to dramatize the problem. The first time Cain went to block Taylor he went in very low, got up underneath him, and sent Taylor flying head over heels. The next play Cain tried it again—and was carried off the field on a stretcher. “People figured out very quickly that they couldn’t block Lawrence with a running back,” Parcells said. “Then the question became: who do you block him with?” Hence Joe Gibbs’s first solution: to remove the running back from the game and insert, across the line from Lawrence Taylor, a bigger, stronger tight end. The one back offense.

  That will be the strategy tonight, but Joe Theismann knows too well its imperfections. Having that extra blocker to help the tackle addressed the problem, Theismann thought, without solving it. Too often Taylor came free. The week of practice leading up to the game had been a seminar on Lawrence Taylor. “If you looked at our overhead projector or our chalkboard,” said Theismann, “all the other Giants players were X’s or O’s. Lawrence was the only one who had a number: fifty-six. He was a little red fifty-six and the number was always highlighted and circled. The goal was: let’s identify where Lawrence is on every play.” Taylor moved around a lot, to confuse the defense, but he and his coach were happiest when he came from his own right side and the quarterback’s left. “The big reason I put him over there,” said Bill Parcells, “is the right side is the quarterback’s blind side, since most quarterbacks are right-handed. And no one wants to get his ass knocked off from the back side.” Lawrence Taylor was more succinct: “Why the hell would I want to come from where he can see me?” But then he added: “It wasn’t really called the blind side when I came into the league. It was called the right side. It became the blind side after I started knocking people’s heads off.”

  Where Taylor is at the start of the play, of course, isn’t the problem. It’s where he ends up. “When I dropped back,” says Theismann, “the first thing I still did was to glance over my shoulder to see if he was coming. If he was dropping back in coverage, a sense of calm came over me. If he was coming, I had a sense of urgency.”

  Four Mississippi: Taylor is coming. From the snap of the ball Theismann has lost sight of him. He doesn’t see Taylor carving a wide circle behind his back; he doesn’t see Taylor outrun his blocker upfield and then turn back down; and he doesn’t see the blocker diving, frantically, at Taylor’s ankles. He doesn’t see Taylor leap, both arms over his head, and fill the sky behind him. Theismann prides himself on his ability to stand in the pocket and disregard his fear. He thinks this quality is a prerequisite in a successful NFL quarterback. “When a quarterback looks at the rush,” he says, “his career is over.” Theismann has played in 163 straight games, a record for the Washington Redskins. He’s led his team to two Super Bowls, and won one. He’s thirty-six years old. He’s certain he still has a few good years left in him. He’s wrong. He has less than half a second.

  The game is on ABC’s Monday Night Football, and 17.6 million people have tuned in. Frank Gifford is in the booth, flanked by O. J. Simpson and Joe Namath. “Theismann’s in a lot of trouble,” the audience hears Gifford say, just before Taylor’s arms jackknife Theismann’s head to his knees and Taylor’s torso pins Theismann’s right leg to the ground. Four other players, including, oddly, the Redskins’ John Riggins, pile on. They’re good for dramatic effect but practically irrelevant. The damage is done by Taylor alone. One hundred and ninety-six pounds of quarterback come to rest beneath a thousand or so pounds of other things. Then Lawrence Taylor pops to his feet and begins to scream and wave and clutch his helmet with both hands, as if in agony.

  His reaction is a mystery until ABC Sports clarifies the event, by replaying it over and again, in slow motion. “Again, we’ll look at it with the reverse angle one more time,” says Frank Gifford. “And I suggest if your stomach is weak, you just don’t watch.” People watched; the replay was almost surely better attended than the original play. Doug Flutie was probably a representative viewer. Flutie had just finished a glorious college quarterbacking career at Boston College and started a professional one in the USFL. On the evening of November 18, 1985, he was at home with his mother. She had the football game on; he had other things to do. “I heard my mother scream,” he told a reporter. “And then I saw the replay. It puts fear in your heart and makes you wonder what the heck you’re doing playing football.”

  THERE’S AN INSTANT before it collapses into some generally agreed-upon fact when a football play, like a traffic accident, is all conjecture and fragments and partial views. Everyone wants to know the whole truth but no one possesses it. Not the coach on the sidelines, not the coach in the press box, and certainly not the quarterback—no one can see the whole field and take in the movement of twenty-two bodies, each with his own job assignment. In baseball or basketball all the players see, more or less, the same events. Points of view vary, but slightly. In football many of the players on the field have no idea what happened—much less why it happened—until after the play is done. Even then, most of them will need to watch a videotape to be sure. The fans, naturally more interested in effect than cause, follow the ball, and come away thinking they know perfectly well what just happened. But what happened to the ball, and to the person holding the ball, was just the final link in a chain of events that began well before the ball was snapped. At the beginning of the chain that ended Joe Theismann’s career was an obvious question: who was meant to block Lawrence Taylor?

  Two players will be treated above all others as the authorities on the play: Joe Theismann and Lawrence Taylor. The victim didn’t have a view of the action; the perpetrator was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t stop to look. “The play was a blur,” said Taylor. “I had taken the outside. I was thinking: keep him in the pocket and squeeze him. Then I broke free.” Why he broke free he couldn’t say, as he didn’t actually notice who was trying to block him. Theismann, when asked who was blocking Taylor on that play, will reply, “Joe Jacoby, our left tackle.” He won’t blame Jacoby, as the guy was one of the two or three finest left tackles of his era, and was obviously just doing his best. That’s why it made no sense, in Joe Theismann’s opinion, for an NFL team to blow big bucks on an offensive lineman: there was only so much a lineman could do. Even when his name was Joe Jacoby.

  That was one point of view. Another was Jacoby’s who, on that night, was standing on the sidelines, in street clothes. He’d strained ligaments in his knee and was forced to sit out. When Joe Jacoby played, he was indeed a splendid left tackle. Six seven and 315 pounds, he was shaped differently from most left tackles of his time, and more like the left tackle of the future. “A freak of nature ahead of his time,” his position coach, Joe Bugel, called him, two decades later. Jacoby wasn’t some lump of cement; he was an athlete. In high school he’d been a star basketball player. He could run, he could jump, he had big, quick hands. “We put him at left tackle for one reason,” said Bugel, “to match up against Lawrence Taylor.” The first time they’d met, Jacoby had given Lawrence Taylor fits—he was a 300-poun
der before the era of 300-pounders, with hands so big they felt like hooks. Taylor had been forced to create a move just for Jacoby. “Geritol,” Taylor called it, “because after the snap I tried to look like an old man running up to him.” Unable to overwhelm him physically, Taylor sought to lull Jacoby into a tactical mistake. He’d come off the ball at a trot to lure Jacoby into putting his hands up before he reached him. The moment he did—Wham!—he’d try to knock away Jacoby’s hands before he latched on. A burst of violence and he was off to the races.

  Still, Jacoby was one of the linemen that always gave Taylor trouble, because he was so big and so quick and so long. “The hardest thing for me to deal with,” said Taylor, “was that big, agile left tackle.”

  Offensive linemen were the stay-at-home mothers of the NFL: everyone paid lip service to the importance of their contribution yet hardly anyone could tell you exactly what that was. In 1985 the left tackle had no real distinction. He was still expected to believe himself more or less interchangeable with the other linemen. The Washington Redskins’ offensive line was perhaps the most famous in NFL history. It had its own nickname: the Hogs. Fans dressed as pigs in their honor. And yet they weren’t understood, even by their own teammates, in the way running backs or quarterbacks were understood, as individual players with particular skills. “Even people who said they were fans of the Hogs had no idea who we were,” said Jacoby. “They couldn’t even tell the black ones from the white ones. I had people see me and scream, ‘Hey May!’” (Right tackle Mark May was black; Jacoby was not.)

  That night, with Jacoby out, the Redskins moved Russ Grimm from his position at left guard to left tackle. Grimm was four inches shorter, 30 pounds lighter, and far less agile than Jacoby. “Little Porky Grimm,” line coach Joe Bugel called him. As a result, he needed help, and got it, in the form of the extra tight end, a fellow named Don Warren. If Taylor made his move to the inside, Grimm was expected to deal with him; if Taylor went on a wide loop outside, Grimm was meant, at most, to punch him, to slow him down, and give Warren the time to stay with him. From his spot on the sidelines, Jacoby watched as Taylor went outside. Grimm couldn’t lay a hand on him and so Warren was left alone with Taylor. “They weren’t used to his speed,” said Jacoby. He watched Taylor race upfield and leave Warren in the dust, then double back on the quarterback.

  Jacoby then heard what sounded like a gunshot—the tibia and fibula in Joe Theismann’s right leg snapping beneath Taylor. He watched as Grimm and Warren removed their helmets and walked quickly toward the sidelines, like men fleeing the scene of a crime. He listened as Grimm told him that Theismann’s bone lay exposed, and his blood was spurting straight up in the air. “Russ was a hunter,” said Jacoby. “He’d gutted deer. And he said, ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.’” And Jacoby thought: It happened because I’m standing over here. Years later he wouldn’t be surprised that Theismann did not realize his great left tackle was standing on the sidelines. “But that’s why his leg got broken,” he said.

  A few minutes later, six men bore Theismann on a stretcher to an ambulance. In ABC’s booth, Joe Namath said, “I just hope it’s not his last play in football.” But it was. Nearly a year later Joe Theismann would be wandering around the Redskins locker room unable to feel his big toe, or to push off his right leg. He’d become a statistic: the American Journal of Sports Medicine article on the injuries to NFL quarterbacks between 1980 and 2001 would count Theismann’s two broken bones as just one of a sample of 1,534—77.4 percent of which occur, just as this one had, during games, on passing plays. The game continued and the Redskins, surprisingly, won, 28–23. And most people who did not earn their living in the NFL trying to figure out how to protect their increasingly expensive quarterbacks shoved the incident to the back of their minds. Not ten minutes after Theismann was hauled off the field, Lawrence Taylor himself pounced on a fumble and ran to the bench, jubilant. Frank Gifford sought to persuade his audience that Taylor was still obviously feeling upset about what he had done to Joe Theismann. But the truth is that he didn’t look at all upset. He looked as if he’d already gotten over it.

  What didn’t make sense on that night was Taylor’s initial reaction. He leapt out of the pile like a man on fire. Those who had watched Taylor’s career closely might have expected a bit more sangfroid in the presence of an injured quarterback. The destruction of Joe Theismann may have been classified an accident, but it wasn’t an aberration. It was an extension of what Lawrence Taylor had been doing to NFL quarterbacks for four and a half years. It wasn’t even the first time Taylor had broken a quarterback’s leg, or ended a quarterback’s career. In college, in the Gator Bowl, he had taken out the University of Michigan’s quarterback, John Wangler. Before Taylor hit him, Wangler had been a legitimate NFL prospect. (“I was invited to try out for the Lions and the Cowboys,” Wangler said later. “But everyone was kind of afraid of the severity of my injury.”)

  As it turned out, there was a simple explanation: Taylor was claustrophobic. His claustrophobia revealed itself in the way he played the game: standing up looking for the best view, refusing to bend over and get down in the dirt with the other players, preferring the long and open outside route to the quarterback over the short, tight inside one. It revealed itself, also, in the specific fear of being trapped at the bottom of a pile and not being able to escape. “That’s what made me so frantic,” he said. “I’ve already dreamed it—if I get on the bottom of a pile and I’m really hurt. And I can’t get out.” Now he lay at, or near, the bottom of a pile, on top of a man whose leg he’d broken so violently that the sound was heard by Joe Jacoby on the sidelines. And he just had to get out. He leapt to his feet screaming, hands clutching the sides of his helmet, and—the TV cameras didn’t pick this up—lifting one foot unconsciously and rubbing his leg with it. It was the only known instance of Lawrence Taylor imagining himself into the skin of a quarterback he had knocked from a game. “We all have fears,” he said. “We all have fears.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MARKET FOR FOOTBALL PLAYERS

  SOMEONE HAD SENT Tom Lemming a tape, but then Tom Lemming received thousands of tapes from thousands of football coaches and parents who wanted their kids to make the various high school All-American teams he selected. He at least glanced at all of them—usually quickly. This tape was different; this tape he watched in wonder. He knew right away that this boy was a special case. He lived and played in Memphis, Tennessee, and Memphis was always rich in raw high school football talent—so that wasn’t it. “The tape was grainy and you couldn’t see very well,” said Lemming. “But when he came off the line, it looked like one whole wall was moving. And it was just one player! You had to look at it twice to believe it: he was that big. And yet he would get out and go chase down, and catch, these fast little linebackers. When I saw the tape I guess I didn’t really believe it. I saw how he moved and I wondered how big he really was—because no one who is that big should be able to move that fast. It just wasn’t possible.”

  As he drove into Memphis in March of 2004, Lemming thought: everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent. The Briarcrest Christian School team didn’t typically have black players, either, and Michael Oher was black. But what made Michael Oher especially peculiar was that no one in Memphis had anything to say about him. Lemming had plenty of experience “discovering” great players. Each year he drove 50,000 to 60,000 miles and met, and grilled, between 1,500 and 2,000 high school juniors. He got inside their heads months before the college recruiters were allowed to shake their hands. It didn’t happen as much as it used to, but he still found future NFL stars to whom the recruiters were oblivious. For instance, no one outside of Newport News, Virginia, had ever heard of Michael Vick—future number one pick in the entire NFL draft and quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons—before Lemming stumbled upon him and w
rote him up in his newsletter. But even in the case of Michael Vick, the people closest to him knew he had talent. Michael Vick was no secret in Newport News, Virginia. Michael Oher was as good as invisible, even in Memphis, Tennessee. Lemming asked around, and the local high school coaches either didn’t know who he was or didn’t think he was any good. He hadn’t made so much as the third string all-city team. He hadn’t had his name or picture in any newspaper. An Internet search for “Oher” yielded nothing on him. The only proof of his existence was this grainy videotape.

  From the tape alone, Lemming couldn’t say how much Michael Oher had helped his team, just that he was big, fast, and fantastically explosive. “To make my lists they almost always have to have production,” said Lemming. By “production” he meant honors and achievements—not mere potential. “He was different from just about every other kid I picked to be a high school All-American in that he didn’t have any.” But if Michael Oher in the flesh was anything like Michael Oher on the videotape, Lemming was afraid not to make an exception of him. He had his reputation to protect. Nothing was as embarrassing to him as leaving a kid off his lists who, four years later, was a first-round NFL draft pick. And the last time he had seen a player with this awesome array of physical gifts was back in 1993, when he went to the Sizzler Steakhouse in Sandusky, Ohio, and interviewed a high school junior working behind the counter named Orlando Pace.