The Blind Side’s white savior tale was always built on shaky ground | NFL

In late 2009 I used to be despatched to Baltimore for a Sports Illustrated feature story on Michael Oher, a uncommon family identify amongst NFL offensive linemen. Oher was a number of months into his rookie yr and getting ready to a crucial showdown in opposition to the Indianapolis Colts.

In the book version of The Blind Side, which locations Oher inside the NFL’s evolution right into a passing league, he’s set on a collision course with the game’s high quarterback cruncher – Indy’s Dwight Freeney. And after devouring the Michael Lewis guide, his Moneyball for soccer geeks, I used to be eager to dig into this and extra with Oher. By this level he was over the guide and sad with the much-hyped movie that sprang from it and was on account of premiere that very same weekend. The Ravens PR group cautioned that Oher would flip me away quicker than a nook blitzer if I requested too many questions on The Blind Aspect. Simply how sensitive a topic it was for him has grow to be that a lot clearer within the wake of a feud that incorporates private wounds, cultural rifts and profession penalties that run deep.

It kicked off on Monday with information that Oher had filed a petition in a Tennessee court docket in opposition to Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who play an enormous half in The Blind Aspect. In the petition, Oher alleges the Tuohys, who took him in as an adolescent and claimed him as their adopted son, duped him into appointing them his conservators after his 18th birthday and went on to make enterprise offers for themselves as his energy of legal professional.

Principally at difficulty is the in depth exploitation of Oher’s identify and likeness in The Blind Side movie – a $300m field workplace smash that allegedly resulted in seven-figure royalties for the Tuohys and their two natural-born youngsters. Oher, in the meantime, is presupposed to have signed away his life story for no return. In the meantime, the Tuohys had been backed by CAA, the highly effective Hollywood company that additionally represents Lewis – one among Sean Tuohy’s greatest associates from highschool.

The allegations have reportedly “devastated” the Tuohys. Martin Singer, an legal professional for the household, called the motion a “shakedown”, claiming that Oher threatened to go public together with his story except the Tuohys paid him $15m. The feud has not solely resonated with those that adopted Oher’s on-field profession, but in addition those that solely know these folks from the film. Even a New York Post tweet of a narrative on the household’s lavish post-Blind Aspect spending forgoes a lead picture of Leigh Anne Tuohy for one among Sandra Bullock, who received an Oscar taking part in Tuohy within the movie. In headlines and on social media, there have been no scarcity of jokes riffing on the blindsiding irony of the information. However anybody who had been paying shut consideration all alongside may have seen this present day coming.

Regardless of a welter of form opinions and in depth business acclaim, the film model of The Blind Aspect has come to characterize a low level for the white savior trope – the unlikely story of the wealthy white girl who turns a downtrodden Black teen hulk into an unbelievable Sunday professional. Jeffery Montez de Oca, the founding director of the Middle for Vital Examine of Sport on the College of Colorado in Colorado Springs, took goal on the movie’s framing of adoption as “a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not solely make charity potential, but in addition creates an city underclass in want of charity”. In her seminal tome White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo excoriates the movie as “essentially and insidiously anti-Black”. In his one-star Guardian assessment, Peter Bradshaw pronounced The Blind Aspect “dead from the neck up and the neck down”.

Over time Oher himself has oscillated between endorsing the movie’s message of perseverance and recoiling from its characterization of him as a charmless simpleton who may barely learn or write, not to mention fathom soccer’s many complexities. In one of many movie’s cringier scenes, the Tuohys’ younger son makes use of ketchup bottles to show “Massive Mike” – who in actuality was already a sought-after faculty recruit at this level – primary soccer ways. As a result of soccer is as a lot a sport of popularity as it’s one among talent, the stylized notion of Oher turned his story.

Earlier than the movie’s launch, Oher was already aggrieved by its suggestion that he was someway fortunate to make it out of highschool after lacking giant elements of his early training on account of his deprived upbringing. “The factor folks don’t perceive is I needed to convey my grades up,” he advised me of the work he put into graduating with a felony justice diploma in the identical yr he turned professional – an uncommon feat in elite US sports activities. “An individual can’t get sensible in a pair days.” It was “issues like that” that the majority bothered him.

Regardless of writing two autobiographies over the previous decade, Oher has but to shake off standard perceptions that he’s dim. “The most important for me was being portrayed [in the film] as not having the ability to learn or write,” Oher just lately mentioned. “Whenever you go right into a locker room and your teammates don’t suppose you possibly can study a playbook, that weighs heavy.”

The Ravens locker room has a reputation for being especially hard on rookies. And yet Oher quickly proved he belonged thanks to his smarts and obsessive-compulsive approach – attributes that enabled him to thrive at tackle, a position that requires vast tactical and technical knowledge. Teammates especially loved his disdain for the spotlight, a quality intrinsic to offensive linemen. Oher was proud to tell me he had “flipped through” the Lewis book and would miss the film’s red carpet premiere because “we got a big game, this is what I do for a living, so that’s what I have to focus on.” (Instead, Quinton Aaron, the actor who played him in the film, took his place with the Tuohys. That he, too, has struggled to capitalize on The Blind Side’s success further reinforces DiAngelo’s point about the Oher character’s fundamental flaws.)

Although the Ravens wound up losing the game against the Colts, Oher held his own in the few instances he faced Freeney and rounded into a solid pro, playing eight seasons and appearing in two Super Bowls – winning one with the Ravens – before calling it quits after the 2016 season. By most metrics, his was a successful career – and yet it’s hard not to imagine how much better it could have turned out had Oher gone to college football powerhouse Alabama. In The Blind Side, much is made of Oher being recruited by Bama and other top-tier college football programs – only for him to wind up choosing to sign with Ole Miss, a perennial loser that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy attended and vigorously supported as athletic boosters.

Though Oher did help improve Ole Miss and wound up the 23rd pick in the 2009 draft as a result, many will wonder what might have been if he had spurned the Tuohys and gone to Alabama, which went on to become a seven-time national championship winner and a robust NFL talent pipeline. At worst, Oher would have been a top-10 pick in the draft, guaranteeing him a huge signing bonus and setting him up for even more lucrative paydays; at best, could have been a true NFL great. Either way, that’s tens of millions Oher may have lost out on because of the Tuohys.

Interestingly, while Singer, the family’s lawyer, said the Tuohys would “defend their good names”, he also acknowledged the family would release Oher from the conservatorship – a concession that would appear to validate one of the biggest claims in the petition. How the story ends is anyone’s guess. At least now there’s no more refuting the fact that the “official” Oher story was built on shaky foundations. It’s only fair that after years of having everyone else’s back, Oher is finally protecting his own.