I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [69]
He began to do some digging to see what he could piece together about my past. In the meantime, my senior year started, my football really began to take off, and the college recruiting began to really crank up. The more Lewis tried to learn about me, the more he felt that there was too much of a story just for a magazine article. At the same time, he had begun to research the left tackle position for his next book, which, in his usual style, was going to be a study of how something seemingly minor changed the whole shape of the game. In this case, it was how Joe Theismann's career-ending injury when he was sacked by Lawrence Taylor in 1985 changed the nature of football. This led a lot of coaches to see the importance of the left tackle to protect right-handed quarterbacks (and right tackle for lefties). Basically, they need someone strong to protect their blind side, since they can't see how or when they are being charged. The position grew to be much more heavily scrutinized, trained for, and highly paid than before--and it could all be traced back to that one game.
Lewis quickly figured out that since I also played left tackle, he'd found a link for his story line: Something as small as enrolling in a private school or making a bond with the Tuohy family could change my life the way that one play on one night changed the game of football. He talked to his editor at the Times magazine again and they agreed that instead of the article they were planning to run, the magazine would instead get first dibs to run a chapter from the book that Lewis was going to write.
For the next year and a half or so, Lewis worked on his book, analyzing football rosters and team payrolls, as well as traveling to Memphis to talk to a lot of people who had known me when I was younger. A few times he would call Sean and Leigh Anne late at night to report his location, as he knew he was in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Memphis. I guess he figured if he got killed, they would know roughly his last location. He went by a lot of my old schools and old hangouts and tried to talk with anyone he could who had a connection to me, in an effort to piece together the details of my early life. Of course, by that point, I was getting to be a well-known college prospect and then a successful freshman at Ole Miss, so a lot of people suddenly were willing to step up and take credit for my success.
For a long time, though, I was pretty unaware of what Lewis was doing as he tried to get my story right for his book. He had talked to me about wanting to work me into a book he was working on, but that just sounded so crazy to me that I didn't give it a lot of thought and I didn't share much information with him. I mean, what was so interesting about me? Who would want to write a book about my life? What was there even to say that would fill up a newspaper column, let alone two hundred or more pages? Besides, I had tried to put a lot of stuff out of my mind in order to make it to where I was. At the time, I really couldn't see the point in pulling it all back up again. I just kind of figured he was some eccentric friend of Sean's and it would all blow over soon. Besides, I was starting college, so I had a lot more pressing things on my mind.
Eventually, I got the message that this Michael Lewis guy was actually planning to do something with my story. I had started hearing from people that he had talked to them about me--it seemed he had talked to everyone about me. So I decided to do two things that I thought were important: I googled his name and I gave him a call.
First of all, I wanted to learn more about him. I mean, it's only fair if he was trying to learn all about me, right? I typed in his name and read all about Moneyball and how he broke down the way that some baseball teams were able to build surprisingly good teams without having the highest payroll. What he said really made sense, and it occurred to me that maybe this guy knew a thing or two about sports after all. Then, when I saw that he had a number of other books