No Mas Book Review: The Blind Side

By Steven L. Isenberg


Some No Masians may well have already found their way to Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side whether from having read his Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, his New York Times Magazine pieces on his old baseball coach in Louisiana, or the one that is a slice of this book itself. It was my good luck that your man, Christopher, my son, gave it to me.

The ingredients of The Blind Side are common enough: the drive to win and tactical necessities; coaches of idiosyncracy, imagination, myopia, opinion and ego; professional salaries and star status; high school and college proving grounds; academics and athletes; recruiting and rules; race and poverty as destiny and determiners, and those who would undo that knot; big ambitions and good hearts; and the frame of the South for the picture.

And yet Blind Side’s theme of transformation and its unlikely connections of character and circumstance give renewed vivacity to commonalities.

The pivotal element is the bone-chilling and bone-breaking success of Lawrence Taylor, the specter of his attacks on quarterbacks from their blind side. If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does an NFL coach. Hence, the recasting of the offensive left tackle to become a lynch pin of a winning team.

The physical and skill requirements for this new role changed a position of forgotten names and numbers into one of top draft choices and salaries. Inevitably and urgently, that merger of necessity and opportunity would make its way into college and high school football.

And so the connection to a lonely, abandoned, unschooled African American boy from the Memphis projects, who becomes embraced by a white, evangelical family, and a school whose motto is “Decidedly Academic, Distinctly Christian,” and eventually the Ole Miss football team.

This tale of nature and nurture, the escape from loneliness, neglect, squalor and silence, is of the creation of a new life for Michael Other, who at sixteen looked to be six feet five inches and 330 pounds, with feet of astonishing agility, and tested at an IQ of 80.

The moving forces are accident, good will, good fortune and purposeful kindness. It is the sports fervor and savvy, generous and directing instincts and unshakable and shrewd resolve of Sean and Leigh Anne Touhy that shape Oher’s awakening and future.

Sean, a high school pal of Lewis, is a fast food entrepreneur with the heartbeat, humor and court sense of an old jock, a scrappy basketballer of drive, who stands with wonder at how his wife takes matters in hand. Leigh Anne, once a cheerleader at Ole Miss, where Sean set an NCAA record for assists (the right metaphor for his role in TBS) becomes for Oher a maternal player-coach who gives new meaning to alma mater.

It is the Touhy family, with their daughter, Collins and son Sean Jr., who provide provisions and visions, willpower and wherewithal, welcome and warmth, to a boy who has only known drift and dislocation. For them, and thus for Oher, where there is a will, there is a way and, interestingly, it is not seemingly ground in the Will and the Way, but worldly paths.

Lewis’s story of Oher is a born again one. Oher had been so cut off from schooling he is without primers of how to think and fundamentals of knowledge. His IQ test is irrelevant. The only test score that appears germane to a boy who could grow up to shield quarterbacks is his high score on protective instincts. What we see and marvel at in Lewis’s retelling is a coming of age transformation where weeks and months stand for years in building for a teenager a new inventory of trust, thought, knowledge and habits.

The plotting quickens our interest as it begins with the mysterious silence and deep reserve of a young man sought out by one of the nation’s top spotters and rankers of high school football talent. Lewis then traces the history of the adoption of Oher, and how his natural, prodigious body and his tutored mind carry him from private school, and are carried by pleas and pressures, schemes and love, astonishingly to college eligibility and the avid press of football coaches.

Lewis does this in an idiom and muscular style common to serious journalism on contemporary matters. Sometimes this means, for me, some turgid patches in the NFL zones (for those with an quenched appetite for the mood and manner of NFL life, see Adam Gopnick’s very good piece in The New Yorker’s January 8 edition which mentions TBS).

I left TBS with a small wish for a novelist’s touch as to know more on the interior life of all I had met. Nonetheless, Lewis’s rightly way leaves the reader to be taken in by the compelling wonder of the story, but not to evade what disconcerts when considering the Touhys’ goodness, mother wit and steely determination, the academic bendings and the place of football in a university, and how the rescue of Oher’s life is a triumph that cannot help but remind the Touhys and us of how many are left behind.

8.5 out of 10

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Steven L. Isenberg is the Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, where his well-populated courses include my personal favorite--Literary Journalism: The Violent Worlds of War, Murder, and Boxing. He was formerly the publisher of New York Newsday and the Chief of Staff for Mayor John Lindsay. He is also the author of many of young I-Berg's neurotic complexes and feelings of inadequacy.