The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

perfect 100. He got a 59. After that first day of school he brought the test score home with him, along with a long reading list, and an assignment to write a term paper. At that point Leigh Anne had turned to Sean, and Sean said, “Don’t look at me. I majored

game, she said, Michael should pay less attention to the 107,000 people dressed in orange and cheering him at the top of their lungs than to the hands and feet of dead people set to poke up through the turf. She ended her speech with a cheery, “But it’s your decision where you play football. Don’t let me ‘influence’ you!” Michael, for his part, did an excellent imitation of a ditzy debutante

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employed specifically for his foot speed? The angle is all wrong, and yet…he seems to be catching up. As Ogden runs, you can’t see his facial expressions or read his mind, but his body language is eloquent: you little supposedly fleet-footed sonofabitch. Me and you. One on one. Twenty-yard

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football coach couldn’t have imagined it had anything to do with him. When, in 1962, James Meredith came and stayed, the campus was engulfed in riots, and the football coach watched as his practice field became a staging area for army helicopters—but his

and the Confederate army. In part because of the needs of their local football team, there wasn’t a town in America more concerned than Oxford, Mississippi, with seeming to have dispensed with race as an issue. The effort the locals put into avoiding obvious racism rendered

who now tutored football players, made this point routinely. To help the black kids feel as if they belonged at Ole Miss, Nix often took them into the places frequented by the old white affluent Ole Miss crowd. The Grove, say, or the Square. Usually he would end up feeling awkward and self-conscious. “When you show up with them,” he said, “you’ll get this look. It’s like you have the crying

first eighteen months after he’d fled St. Joseph’s, Michael stayed away from school, for fear of being taken by the authorities. For that year and a half he played what he thought of as a game of hide and seek with the Department of Children’s Services. In retrospect, it was never clear that the State of Tennessee knew the game was on.

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