Read The Blind Side for Free Online

him the usual questions.
“What colleges are you interested in?”
“What do you want to major in?”
“Where do you think you’ll be in ten years?”
They were met with total silence. Not knowing what else to do, Lemming handed the kid his questionnaire. Michael Oher looked at it and put it to one side. Lemming then handed him the ultimate prize: the form to play in the U.S. Army high school all-star football game. Michael Oher looked at it and put it, too, to one side. (“I noticed his arms were really long.”)
“You want to fill it out or not?” asked Lemming, finally.
Michael Oher just shrugged.
In hopes of generating some kind of response, Lemming asked what he assumed was a simple question: “So, you want to play in the Army game or not?” It was the equivalent of asking a four-year-old if he’d like a lifetime supply of ice cream. But Michael Oher didn’t say yes or no. “He made some sound of total indifference,” said Lemming. “First guy ever to say that. First and last.”
Lemming decided further interaction was pointless. Michael Oher left, and left behind blank forms and unanswered questions. In the past twenty-six years Lemming had interviewed between forty and fifty thousand high school football players. Never—not once—had a player simply refused to talk to him, or declined to fill in his forms. They begged to answer his questions and fill in his forms. Once, a player had had the audacity to delegate the form-filling to a coach and it had left a bad taste in Lemming’s mouth. That incident had occurred in this very room, in Memphis, Tennessee. The player was named Albert Means. Albert Means’s sure-thing career had gone up in smoke after the NCAA discovered a University of Alabama booster had paid his high school coaches one hundred fifty grand to guide him to Alabama. (And the Crimson Tide spent the next two seasons on probation.)
Lemming didn’t exactly write off Michael Oher, but he put him to one side with a mental asterisk beside his name. “I thought he was trouble,” he said. “It’s not only size and strength and speed and athletic ability in football. Football’s an emotional game. It’s about aggression, tenacity, and heart. I didn’t have any idea what was in his heart. I got no sense of anything about him.” If Lemming picked twenty high school All-Americans, he expected ten of them to fulfill their potential. The other ten would be lost to injury or crime or bad grades or drugs. The sponsors of the U.S. Army All-American game worried a great deal about their good name. Every year there was a player or two they declined to invite because they didn’t want dope in their rooms, or criminal records on their rosters, or even boorish behavior. Michael Oher fell into that category, Lemming decided, a character risk. Still, he couldn’t deny his talent. “I didn’t hold a grudge,” said Lemming. “He wasn’t rude to me. And I try to go with the best players. I thought he could be the best offensive lineman to come out of the South in the last five years. He was an instant All-American. I saw him as a number one NFL draft choice. Playing left tackle.” But there was no way he’d invite Michael Oher to play in the U.S. Army All-American game.
What never crossed Tom Lemming’s mind was that the player he would rank the number one offensive lineman in the nation, and perhaps the finest left tackle prospect since Orlando Pace, hadn’t the faintest idea who Lemming was or why he was asking him all these questions. For that matter, he didn’t even think of himself as a football player. And he’d never played left tackle in his life.
The Blind Side

The Blind Side

CHAPTER THREE
The Blind Side
CROSSING THE LINE
WHEN BIG TONY put the two boys in his car on the west side of Memphis and drove them out, he was taking the longest journey he could imagine, and yet he only had to travel about fifteen miles. Driving east, he left the third poorest zip code in the United States and