The Blind Side Read Free Page B

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.”
The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER TWO
The Blind Side
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