Michael Oher Story

The Michael Oher Story

Back in the spring of 2004, someone sent a tape to high school football scout Matt Lemmings. The film quality was bad, but he knew immediately he just had to see this kid.

“When he came off the line, it looked like one whole wall was moving,” Lemmings tells Michael Lewis in The Blind Side. “When I saw the tape I guess I didn’t really believe it … No one that big should be able to move that fast. It just wasn’t possible.”

The kid had a name, Michael Oher, and as Michael Lewis reveals in this fascinating and unabashedly heartwarming book, his size and speed were not the only singular things about him.

For starters, the fact that Michael Oher (whose name is pronounced “oar”) was in school at all was a miracle. He possessed an IQ of 80, and a cumulative grade point average of .6. Oher’s mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict. Oher’s biological father was murdered.

Lemmings had no clue about this information when he came down to Memphis to see the physical oddity. As Lewis tells it, Oher was a blank canvas—a rather large, fast-moving one at that—upon which Lemmings saw the possibility of a masterwork: an NFL left tackle.

As in Moneyball, his previous book on baseball strategy, Lewis shows how a single moment in sports history embodies an enormous shift in how that game is played. Here, the need for Michael Oher began in the late ’70s, when the NFL’s passing game began to explode.