The Patriot Post® · Michael Oher Blind-Sides His Family
Within the dust jacket of Michael Lewis’s bestselling book The Blind Side, we learn that the subject of the story, future NFLer Michael Oher, “is one of 13 children by a mother addicted to crack,” and that he doesn’t even know “his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school — like, say, how to read or write.”
Talk about being dealt a bad hand.
What happens next is well known and became the subject of a blockbuster movie and an Academy Award for Sandra Bullock. “Big Mike” is taken off the mean streets of Memphis by a wealthy, evangelical family — a Republican family — and afforded an opportunity that a poor, homeless black kid with virtually no experience playing organized football couldn’t possibly have imagined: to go to an elite high school, to play major-college football, and to make millions as an offensive tackle in the NFL.
Oher’s good and great fortune was anything but foreordained, though. As Lewis writes: “Big Mike was heading at warp speed toward a bad end.” He’d just finished the ninth grade, but those who knew him also knew that he was unlikely to return for tenth grade. Would anyone be shocked to learn that his dad, Michael Jerome Williams, was frequently in prison? Or that Michael Oher, a kid who so desperately needed a good father’s influence and the love of a stable family, had nothing of the sort?
Today, though, Oher, who’s now 37, is turning on the family that changed his life in such profound ways. According to NBC News, he’s alleging that the couple who took him into their home “misled him into believing they were adopting him — and that they instead placed him in a conservatorship, according to a court filing Monday.”
According to the petition filed by his legal team to terminate the conservatorship in Shelby County Court in Tennessee, “The lie of Michael’s adoption is one upon which Co-Conservators Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the expense of their Ward, the undersigned Michael Oher.”
As NBC News continues, “The Tuohys negotiated a deal with 20th Century Fox that left Oher without any payment for the rights to his name, likeness and life story, while the Tuohy family received a contract price of $225,000 and 2.5% of the film’s net proceeds, the petition states.”
According to the petition, “The Blind Side” has since grossed more than $300 million, but Oher made no money off the film. Nor, the petition claims, does Oher recall signing the agreement for the rights to his life story, even though his signature appears on it.
Of course, there are at least two sides to every story, and the Tuohys are now telling theirs. As Fox News reports, “An attorney who represents Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy said in a bombshell statement on Tuesday that former NFL player Michael Oher threatened to ‘plant’ a negative story in the press about the Tennessee family unless they paid him $15 million.”
According to the family’s attorney: “Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that the outlandish claims made by Michael Oher about the Tuohy family are hurtful and absurd. The idea that the Tuohys have ever sought to profit off Mr. Oher is not only offensive, it is transparently ridiculous.”
Columnist Jason Whitlock, who himself is black, destroys the lie that is “the lie of Michael’s adoption,” writing at The Blaze:
The 2009 movie The Blind Side does not state or imply that the Tuohy family adopted Michael Oher. Neither does Michael Lewis’ 2006 book. … In 2011, when Michael Oher published his first memoir, I Beat the Odds, he stated directly that the Tuohys secured a conservatorship when he was a senior in high school. He wrote that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy insisted that he maintain a relationship with his biological mother and 11 siblings. Oher wrote that his mother participated in the procedures necessary for the Tuohys to become conservators.
Seems pretty open-and-shut, no? And it’s not as if the Tuohys needed the money. After all, they sold their family business for $200 million. As Whitlock continues: “What Michael Oher is doing to the Tuohy family is despicable. He’s telling an obvious lie that he knows most of the media will be too afraid to question because of the racial dynamics. … Oher lacks self-awareness, humility, and, quite possibly, intelligence. Making $34 million as an average professional athlete will certainly create some delusion.”
In retrospect, we’d say things have turned out pretty well for Michael Oher. He was a college All-American at Ole Miss, and he made many millions during his eight-year career with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, Tennessee Titans, and Carolina Panthers. Don’t get us wrong: We don’t pretend to know the whole story of Oher’s relationship with the family that took him off the streets, and we believe that he is indeed a victim here — but not of the Tuohy family. He’s a victim of childhood abandonment and the everyday pandemic of a 70% fatherlessness rate within the black community. That’s the real source of Oher’s victimhood.
Our Mark Alexander, who’s spent countless hours pondering, pointing out, and pushing back against the plague of fatherlessness and its destructive consequences, especially in the black community, sees similarities between Michael Oher’s situation and what he calls “the Kaepernick Syndrome,” which refers to the understandable anger of abandonment that a fatherless black man carries with him from childhood, and the misdirection of that anger toward targets of opportunity — in this case, the Tuohy family.
Of course, as we noted earlier, there’s a lot of money at stake here, and perhaps, just maybe, just possibly, Oher’s legal team has a monetary motive beyond the mere emotional well-being of their already wealthy client.
We wonder: What does Michael Lewis think of all this? And might he next train his considerable literary talents on the issue of black fatherlessness?
POSTSCRIPT: Author Michael Lewis, who’s been a friend of Sean Tuohy’s since their days in high school together, thinks the blame belongs in Tinseltown. “It’s outrageous how Hollywood accounting works,” he says, “but the money is not in the Tuohys’ pockets.” He adds: “What I feel really sad about is I watched the whole thing up close. They showered him with resources and love. That he’s suspicious of them is breathtaking. The state of mind one has to be in to do that — I feel sad for him.”
Updated with a postscript and additional info about who knew what and when regarding the Tuohys guardianship of Oher.