The Blind Side Blog Post

The Blind Side Blog Post-  “ When people first saw Big Mike they immediately became afraid of him, but what they didn’t really know was that he was more afraid of them.”

So far I’ve only read five chapters in Michael Lewis’s true story, “The Blind Side”. But already I’ve learned a lot about the main character “Big Mike”, really Michael Oher, and his flaws. I also caught on to a theme in the book. Big Mike is not the average size of a high school student and his size gives him a reputation from people without them even hearing his voice! The Blind Side is not just about an amazing athlete but the person beneath all of that.

Michael Oher is a very unique person. Big Mike’s biggest traits include being huge, being very silent and very shy, and having a lack of intelligence. Big Mike’s silence is something it seems like he just can’t control. When Michael faced the best football scout in the country, Tom Lemming, this is what happened: “What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming’s twenty-seven-year football scouting career. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him…and refused to speak. ‘He shook my hand and then didn’t say a word,’ said Lemming (‘His hands: they were huge!’) Lemming asked him the usual questions. ‘What colleges are you interested in?’… “What do you want to major in?’, and ‘where do you think you’ll be in ten years?’ They were met by silence.” This trait is visible everywhere. When Big Mike walks the halls of Briarcrest Christian School his completely silent and in the classroom he doesn’t speak. Now to the second big trait that Michael Oher has: his size. From his nickname, “Big Mike”, you now he’s big but just how big? Big Mike is exactly six-foot-five-inches and three hundred and forty four pounds and this is in the ninth grade. He’s described as a “giant” and a “wall”. When he first meets Hugh Freeze, the athlete director at the Briarcrest Christian School this is how the encounter goes down: “‘Big Mike! Come on in here!’ Hugh Freeze will never forget the next few seconds ‘He just peeks around the corner, with his head down.’ Hugh didn’t get a good first look—it was just a silver of him but suggested an improbably large whole. Then Michael Oher stepped around the corner and into his office. Good God! He’s a monster!”  Just one more example, when Leah Anne Tuohy, who would later adopt Big Mike with her husband Sean Tuohy, was shopping for Michael she called her husband to say, “Do you know how big a size fifty-eight long jacket is…too small.” In other words a size fifty-eight suit jacket did not fit Big Mike. A size fifty-eight long jacket is huge; the biggest person I personally know wears a fifty long jacket and that is huge. So there’s a comparison, I could only imagine wearing a fifty-eight jacket, I wear a forty-jacket. So, the last trait is that Big Mike is not very intelligent. The book says, “Still, when the file on Michael Oher from the Memphis City school system hit his desk, Simpson was frankly incredulous. The boy had a measured IQ of 80, which put him in mankind’s ninth-percentile. That means only nine percent of the world had an IQ lower than Big Mikes. It also says, “In his first nine years of school Michael Oher had been enrolled in eleven different institutions, and that included a hole of eighteen months, around the age of ten, when he apparently did not attend school at all.” This part was shocking to me; I was surprised that Big Mike missed so much school and changed schools so much. Finally, it says, “The grade point average the boy would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.” But these traits only make Big Mie special and unique in his own way.

People give a false reputation to Big Mike because of his physical attributes and special traits and others even think too much of him. For example, “When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym, staring at basketball practice, he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question is how to take him there.” This was a very surprising line to me because you don’t usually and actually shouldn’t make an assumption about someone especially before you even met the person. I don’t disagree that Big Mike is very talented, in fact today he’s a NFL left tackle who just recently signed with the Minnesota Vikings, but I just don’t agree with the way people immediately make an opinion on a person before they meet them. I think this often troubled Big Mike; in fact he wasn’t even into football before people pushed him to play because of his size. Another example of this is, “Briarcrest offered a class in weightlifting, and Jennifer Graves had gotten him into it on an assumption it might offer him some relief from relentless failure. If there was one class Big Mike should have been able to ace, this was it. But the weightlifting teacher, Coach Mark Boggess, said that the boy was neglecting even to change into gym clothes.” This is a great example of a wide assumption that Jennifer Graves just made because of Big Mike’s size. I think it’s unfair that Big Mike was forced to take this elective class even when he never chose it and I actually agree with the way he responded he didn’t even want to be in the class in the firs place. A third great example of this same thing is, “ When people first saw Big Mike they immediately became afraid of him, but what they didn’t really know was that he was more afraid of them.” This is the perfect description of the point that I’m trying to make, just because of his size it doesn’t mean that Big Mike is a monster or something else that’s very scary. Again the track and field coach says, “From the moment he’d laid eyes on Michael Oher, Coach Boggess thought he might invite him onto the track team as a shot putter. He was shaped like a shot putter and also like the shot itself, round and heavy.  It hadn’t occurred to Boggess to ask Big Mike to throw anything else”. Again his size gives Big Mike a reputation all its own.  

But Big Mike proved all of these people wrong; in fact Big Mike is actually an athletic phenomenon who is bigger than a center in basketball and faster than the point guard. This guy is awesome. He’s not just a big, fat guy like many people thought he was. He also is just a unique person in the way he learns and in the way that he communicates. As I mentioned before today is an amazing left tackle and was recently signed with the Minnesota Vikings after leaving the Baltimore Ravens for free agency. Big Mike is actually just a kind and shy guy who lived a tough childhood but is definitely an amazing athlete. On page 77 it says, “When Coach Boggess led him out Briarcrest’s back door and onto the old grass field for the first meet, he sensed, rightly, that Michael Oher was witnessing track and field for the first time in his life.” Only seconds later was Big Mike throwing discusses like he was a professional and was doing things that couldn’t be taught. To show how impressive of an athlete Big Mie really was, “One afternoon he took a sack of footballs out to midfield. Standing on the fifty-yard line he threw them, one by one, though the goalposts at the back of the end zone. Here was a kid, a sophomore in high school, shaped nothing like a quarterback, chucking the ball 70-75 yards. And making it look easy.” Big Mike is one heck of an athlete and he did an amazing job of showing people who he really was and teaching them that they didn’t need to assume that he could do a certain thing or was a certain way for the way he looked.

Big Mike is one very unique person, he is huge and quiet and not very intelligent but is an amazing athlete. He’s shaped like a center in the NBA and is faster than a point guard in the game. But because of his physical appearance and special traits people often made false assumptions of Big Mike but he did a great job of proving those people wrong and showing who he really was.