US English-The Blind Side: Home

Before Oher spent eight years in the NFL, he was one of the subjects of acclaimed author Michael Lewis’ 2006 book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and then the sole focus of its big-screen adaptation, The Blind Side. The movie, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, traced Oher’s journey from homeless teenager to Division I All-American left tackle for Ole Miss. A smash hit that made over $300 million at the box office, the film won Bullock an Oscar but took some liberties with the particulars of Oher’s life story. In some ways, the real story is even more amazing than what was shown in the movie.

Oher’s birth parents were troubled addicts
Oher was born in 1986, right smack in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic that swept the United States’ inner cities. He was one of 12 children born to a mother who had fallen victim to the cheap and ultra-addictive narcotic, which set him along a troubled path from the start. His father disappeared early on, while his mother, Denise, struggled with addiction for many years.

"When my mother was off drugs and working, she would remember to buy groceries and there would be a mad scramble to grab whatever you could before anyone else got to it," he wrote in his 2014 memoir. The problem was that she was rarely off drugs and working, so Oher was a nomad from an early age. Child services removed him and his siblings from their mother’s home when Oher was at the tail end of first grade, and he bounced around between foster families, friends’ couches and wherever else he could find a warm place to rest his head.

With little adult supervision or stability, Oher barely made it to school — he repeated both first and second grade, attended nine different schools over the course of 11 years and missed dozens of school days per year even when he was passed along to the next grade. The most stable home he had was in a housing project called Hurt Village, where he lived from 11-years-old until he began high school.

By the time he was 15, Oher was bunking up with a local athletic program director named Tony Henderson, who had an extra room in his house. Oher was already 6-foot-5-inches and 350 pounds, which made him a prime recruit for drug dealers seeking some muscle. He was less of a desirable prospect for prestigious private schools, but when Tony took his son Steven to the local Briarcrest Christian School, Big Mike, as he was called, tagged along for the ride anyway.

"He wasn't no trouble kid, nothing like that, you know?" Henderson later told ABC News. "He was real quiet, you know, and just stayed to himself."

He was so quiet, in fact, that Briarcrest’s admissions team couldn’t really find a reason to admit him, let alone offer him a scholarship. Having spent his life just trying to survive, getting into an expensive private school wasn’t really on Oher’s radar. He barely spoke during interviews, his reading comprehension level was closer to elementary school and tests showed he had an IQ that barely cracked 80.

A chance trip to a prestigious private school changed his life… eventually

Still, the school football coach was interested in Oher, not just as a prospect for the team but as a redemption story. This was a kid who’d never been given half a chance, he told the school president and principal, making the case for a very large exception to their typical admissions process. The principal, Steve Simpson, felt stirrings of sympathy and issued Oher a challenge: get his grades up in another private school and he could enter the far more prestigious Briarwood the next semester.

Within a few months, Simpson had a change of heart and admitted Oher to his school. But entering Briarwood was no panacea and produced no immediate change. The kid was out of place, shy, awkward and way behind.

This is where the movie and real life began to diverge. In reality, Oher couch-surfed at the homes of his fellow students and foster families for his first few years at school and played three sports — basketball, track and field and football — before ever meeting the Tuohy clan in 2003. In the movie, Oher — played by Quinton Aaron — is fully homeless and has nothing to do with athletics until the very wealthy and generous family took him in.

The Tuohys are conservative Christians and taking Oher in raised eyebrows in their community, but it was quickly a natural fit, even if it didn’t go exactly the way the movie suggested.

In The Blindside, Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the outspoken matriarch of the family and wife of Sean Tuohy (Tim McGraw), a former college basketball star and wealthy fast food entrepreneur. The movie posits that their young son S.J.’s mismatched schoolyard friendship with Oher is the catalyst for their involvement in his life, while in reality, it was actually Sean noticing Oher on the sidelines at the gym that prompted their involvement.

It’s a minor point, but one that cascades throughout the movie and led to Oher’s big disagreement with how his story played out on the big screen. Just as in real life, the fictionalized Oher ultimately becomes a force of nature in high school football, but how that happened and the timeline his development followed was a real bone of contention.

“I felt like it portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who had never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it,” Oher wrote in his 2014 memoir, I Beat the Odds. “Quinton Aaron did a great job acting the part, but I could not figure out why the director chose to show me as someone who had to be taught the game of football. Whether it was S.J. moving around ketchup bottles or Leigh Anne explaining to me what blocking is about, I watched those scenes thinking, 'No, that's not me at all! I've been studying — really studying — the game since I was a kid!' That was my main hang-up with the film.”

From Biography.com

In the 2009 NFL Draft, Oher was selected 23rd overall by the Baltimore Ravens. He started all 16 games for the Ravens and helped the team reach the playoffs in his first season with the team.

During the 2012-13 season, Oher helped take the Ravens all the way to Super Bowl XLVII. Held in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Super Bowl pitted the Baltimore Ravens against the San Francisco 49ers. Oher and his teammates emerged victorious in this battle for the championship in a tight game, scoring 34 points to the 49ers' 31 points. After his impressive win, Oher told ABC News that "I came so far—from nothing to a Super Bowl championship," Oher told ABC News. "I'm in shock right now."

A free agent following the 2014 season, Oher joined the Carolina Panthers after being recruited by the team's quarterback, Cam Newton. Oher's strong performance in 2015 helped Newton win the MVP award, and served as a major cog in the team's run to a berth in Super Bowl 50. He was released from the Panthers in 2017.

The Blind Side is a 2009 American biographical sports drama film written and directed by John Lee Hancock. Based on the 2006 book of the same name by Michael Lewis,[2][3] the film tells the story of Michael Oher, an American football offensive lineman who overcame an impoverished upbringing to play in the National Football League (NFL) with the help of his adoptive parents Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy. It stars Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy, Tim McGraw as Sean Tuohy, and Quinton Aaron as Oher.

The film was a commercial success, grossing $309 million on a $29 million budget. Despite mixed reviews from critics, Bullock's performance was universally praised, leading to her winning the Academy Award for Best Actress. Bullock also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role. The film also received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The football star made famous in the hit film (and book) The Blind Side reflects on how far he has come from the circumstances of his youth. Michael Oher shares his personal account of his story, in this inspirational New York Times bestseller.

Looking back on how he went from being a homeless child in Memphis to playing in the NFL, Michael talks about the goals he had to break out of the cycle of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness that trapped his family. Eventually he grasped onto football as his ticket out and worked hard to make his dream into a reality. With his adoptive family, the Touhys, and other influential people in mind, he describes the absolute necessity of seeking out positive role models and good friends who share the same values to achieve one's dreams. Sharing untold stories of heartache, determination, courage, and love, I Beat the Odds is an incredibly rousing tale of one young man's quest to achieve the American dream.

Source: Amazon