Sixteen years have passed since Michael Lewis, the best-selling author, was interviewed during an event at Google headquarters.
For over an hour, he answered questions in his charming manner, many about The Blind Side – Evolution of a Game, his then latest book detailing Michael Oher’s extraordinary journey from homeless teen behemoth taken in by a Memphis family to college grid iron star, and future Super Bowl-winning tackle maker with the Baltimore Ravens.
A feelgood yarn already on the way to being transformed into a feel even better movie by Hollywood. At one point, the moderator asked how Oher was faring at university.
“Google him now, he’s on the dean’s list at Ole Miss,” said Lewis, pausing and shaking his head for dramatic effect before delivering the punchline, “which says a lot about the dean’s list at Ole Miss.”
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The crowd laughed uproariously at an exceptionally mean-spirited dig, a snide put-down of a young man whose inspirational life story provided such fecund material and had just earned the writer a truckload of cash.
It was a troubling snapshot, somebody who grew up in the maw of white southern privilege and New Orleans money deriding an African American, one of 12 kids born into dire poverty with a crack-addicted mother and felon father later murdered in jail.
The unseemly clip resurfaced recently when it emerged that Oher, who later graduated on the Honour Roll, had filed a lawsuit against Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, the family he had lived with for a time during high school, the period covered by Lewis in his tome.
In the court case, Oher alleges the Tuohys tricked him into believing he was adopted by them, instead subjecting him to a controversial conservatorship a la Britney Spears, and exploiting his name, image, and story for financial benefit. They strenuously deny the accusations.
Friends with Sean Tuohy since childhood, a fact he omitted from the book, Lewis appeared to take great umbrage at the legal action. While doing the promotional circuit for Going Infinite, his latest work about Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX, he took time out from defending his kid gloves treatment of the now-convicted cryptocurrency fraudster to take another egregious swipe at Oher.
[ Michael Lewis on the dethroning of crypto king Sam Bankman-FriedOpens in new window ]
“What we’re watching is a change of behaviour,” he told The Guardian. “This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head; they run into problems with violence and aggression.”
Given how many NFL players have been diagnosed with CTE, using that trope to undermine an individual who endured eight sapping seasons in the league, each campaign reflecting further and greater glory on Lewis’s book from all those years earlier, was an example of a writer punching down and punching low. A comment so churlish indeed that he eventually rowed it back. Only after it caused uproar. And, even then, the apology was of the trite variety.
“I got pushed and I said something in anger that I probably shouldn’t have said,” explained Lewis. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just don’t know. It breaks my heart though.”
How quickly and conveniently he moved from knowing Oher was wrong and speculating whether he was brain damaged to pleading ignorance of the whole affair, an admittedly murky business with competing narratives.
The pro-Tuohy faction depict Oher as an ingrate, lashing out at his one-time benefactors because he spent his way through his estimated NFL earnings of $34.5 million. No evidence exists to support the latter point.
On the other side, the retired footballer’s supporters contend he has always railed against how The Blind Side portrayed him as a gormless simpleton in service of a storyline portraying Leigh Anne Tuohy as his guardian angel, one now capable of charging $50,000 a time for public speeches about her altruism.
“The movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviours, coming to the rescue of blacks who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them,” wrote Melissa Anderson in The Dallas Observer.
“The filmmakers would like to lull you to sleep with this milk of amnesia, hiding behind the fact that this bewilderingly condescending movie is based on an actual person – but one who you end up knowing almost nothing about.”
The film cost $29 million to make and earned a reported $309 million at the box office, out of which Oher was paid $138,000. The Tuohys filed court documents showing that much last week, as if it represented definitive proof the family always did right by him.
Except any guardian who signed away a person’s story and image rights for .05 per cent of what it grossed in cinemas might be deemed guilty, at the very least, of negligence or stupidity. Or not. According to Lewis, Oher getting ripped off was merely down to traditionally nefarious Hollywood accounting practices that ensure nobody ever gets their fair share. Ho-hum. His luck out.
When she won an Academy Award for her feisty portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, Sandra Bullock gave a heartfelt speech, praising her fellow Best Actress nominees, effusively thanking the Tuohy family and Warner Brothers and all the moms “that take care of the children and the babies no matter where they come from”.
Funnily enough, the one person she didn’t thank in her lengthy monologue was Michael Oher. The kid whose life earned her and Lewis and the Tuohys so much money and acclaim. Blindsided.
