The Sunday Read: ‘The Blind Side’ Made Him Famous. But He Has a Different Story to Tell.

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

It was an overcast Monday afternoon in late April, and Michael Oher, the former football player whose high school years were dramatized in the movie “The Blind Side,” was driving Michael Sokolove on a tour through a forlorn-looking stretch of Memphis and past some of the landmarks of his childhood. In the movie, Oher moves into the home of the wealthy white couple Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy. They take him shopping for clothes, help him obtain a driver’s license, buy him a pickup truck and arrange for tutoring that helps improve his grades and makes him eligible to play college football. In real life, Oher went on to play eight seasons as a starting offensive tackle in the N.F.L. and won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens. Now, Oher is suing the Tuohys, claiming that they have exploited him by using his name, image and likeness to promote speaking engagements that have earned them roughly $8 million over the last two decades — and by repeatedly saying that they adopted him when they never did.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Michael Sokolove. I'm an author and I've been a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine for more than two decades.
0:12.0	So in 2009, this film comes out,
0:16.0	and it's based on a book by Michael Lewis,
0:19.0	the same guy who wrote the Big Short and Moneyball.
0:22.0	The film is called The Blind Side. It tells the real life
0:26.6	story of a black teenager named Michael Orr, who grew up poor and shuttling between couches without a regular home and how he was
0:36.3	taken in by this very wealthy white family during his high school football career in Memphis. This family, Sean and Leanne Toey,
0:47.0	do all kinds of things for Michael. They give him a new truck and new clothes and they get him tutoring to raise his grades and
0:55.2	make him eligible to play college football.
0:59.1	The Tewe's call him their adopted son.
1:07.0	Michael goes on to become a football star at the University of Mississippi, and then he has an eight-year career in the NFL.
1:10.0	It's really this kind of American fairy tale.
1:15.3	The movie was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and it became one of the
1:19.9	most beloved sports movies of all time. It touched people on an emotional level.
1:26.9	But as we all know, it's common for movies to embellish real life.
1:32.9	And that was the case for the blind side, which was told almost exclusively through the perspective
1:38.8	of the Tewies and their account of their own charity and good works,
1:43.5	and much less from Michael Ours' point of view.
1:46.3	His character in the film is virtually silent.
1:50.4	But now a more realistic version of the Blindside story has emerged.
1:56.3	One of ruptured relationships squabbles over money and a family come asunder.
2:08.8	Last year, Michael Orr filed a lawsuit against the Tewe's.
	...

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