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Michael Oher’s life was the inspiration behind the 2009 movie The Blind Side.
Gotham Books
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Gotham Books
I felt myself breaking into a sweat as I walked up to the doors of the Department of Children’s Services office, and it had nothing to do with the fact that it was summertime in Memphis. I never would have dreamed a dozen years ago that I would walk willingly up to those doors. To me, they seemed to stand for everything that had gone wrong in my childhood, every bad memory, every feeling of hopelessness and loneliness and fear.
And now I was headed inside.
It was a different office from the one I remembered. The big state government building downtown was the one that always stayed in my mind, and that was where I thought I was headed until the directions I’d been given had me turn into an old strip mall lined with a payday advance center, a grocery store, and a lot of potholes in the parking lot. I’d driven past this shopping center I don’t know how many times in my life and had never really paid that close attention to what all was there. That afternoon in July, as I drove up for my appointment, I just circled past the stores in my car, looking for a place to turn back out onto the road because
I knew the directions had to be wrong. But then I saw the familiar DCS logo on the glass door toward the end of the mall and I knew I was in the right place.
Suddenly, I lost about three feet and two hundred pounds and became a scared little kid again.
I was a few minutes early, but I was ready for this to happen. There was no use sitting in my car to kill that time. I had come here as part of my work to write this book and I had an appointment to meet, for the first time in my adult life, the woman who spent years as the state’s caseworker on my file. I needed to go in while I still had the nerve, so I parked and walked to the building, past all the other cars parked outside, past the waiting room full of plastic chairs, and up to the little reception window that looked kind of like a bulletproof barricade that you see in convenience stores in the worst parts of town.
“Hi,” I said to the woman checking people in. I had to duck down so she could see my face through the glass. “My name is Michael Oher and I’m here to meet with Ms. Bobbie Spivey.”
“Ooh! It’s so nice to meet you!” she almost shouted. “Come on in! We’ve been expecting you! Ms. Spivey’s office is back here.”
A security guard opened the door and led me through a metal detector and back into a big room full of cubicles and offices. As I walked to the conference room where our meeting would be, a number of women crowded around—all DCS workers—and said hello or told me how much they enjoyed the movie The Blind Side. I shook hands and said hello, but none of the faces looked familiar.
And then, all of a sudden, I saw her. There was no mistaking who she was. I was face-to-face with the woman who had been one of the scariest people in all of my childhood.
“Hello, Michael,” she smiled, giving me a hug. She barely reached the middle of my chest as I bent down. “You look so different. You’re a lot taller. And your complexion is better.”
I had to laugh at that. She looked different, too. I couldn’t believe that the woman I’d thought of for years as a relentless “bounty hunter,” always chasing down my brothers and me and trying to take us away from our mother, was really just a tiny, pretty woman with a nice smile and a gentle voice.
We sat down at a table as we went over the rules of our meeting. Any kid who has been in the custody of the state has a right to their information once they become an adult. However, when there are siblings involved, it makes things a little more complicated because the law only allows me to get information about my own life and not about anyone else’s. She explained that rules like that have to be there to protect people’s privacy, so there might be some questions I would ask that she wouldn’t be able to answer. I understood. I was just happy to have a chance to finally start to put together the pieces of all of the memories I hadn’t let myself think about for so many years. Sean Tuohy said one time that one of my strongest gifts was my ability to forget. He was right. I had needed to forget a lot of stuff in order to not get swallowed up by the hurt and sadness. But I had finally decided that the time was right for me to start remembering.
I didn’t write this book just to revisit Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and it is not meant to be a repeat of Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy’s book In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving (which was released while I was working on this one). Lewis’s book was originally aimed at football fans who were interested in some game strategy and a personal story about it; the Tuohys’ book was designed to help carry on a discussion with people who had seen the movie about our lives and were inspired to find their own way to give.
My book is as different from the other two as they are different from each other, and I have a couple of goals that I’d like to accomplish with it. The first is that I want to help separate fact from fiction. After the movie came out, there were a lot of people asking me if my life was exactly how it was shown on screen. Obviously, the moviemakers have to make artistic choices to tell the story in the best way, but some of the details, like me having to learn the game of football as a teenager or me walking to the gym in November wearing cut-off shorts, just aren’t true. Since so many people seem interested in these details, I hope that I can help to make a little more sense out of it all for them.
My second goal with this book, and the much more important one, is that I want to talk about—and to—the nearly 500,000 children in America whose lives have been so rough that the
state has determined they’re better off being cared for by someone other than their parents. The odds are stacked against those children. Less than half will ever graduate from high school. Of the ones who drop out, almost half of the boys will be imprisoned for violent crimes. Girls in foster care are six times more likely to have children before the age of twenty-one than are girls in stable families. And of those kids, more than half will end up in foster care themselves. The outlook is pretty bleak for kids like me.
I beat the odds.
Reprinted from I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher with Don Yaeger by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright 2011 by Michael Oher.
From Homelessness, To the Blind Side, and Beyond
by Michael Oher and Don Yaeger
Paperback, 250 pages |
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