The Blind Side Read Free

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-pounder 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