The Blind Side by Michael Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

Briarcrest had a rule that if a student missed fifteen days of any class he had to repeat the class no matter what his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D’s to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade point average the boy would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.
If there was a less promising academic record, Mr. Simpson hadn’t seen it—not in three decades of working with public school students. Mr. Simpson guessed, rightly, that the Briarcrest Christian School hadn’t seen anything like Michael Oher, either. And yet here he was, courtesy of the football coach, seated across the desk staring hard at the floor. The boy seemed as lost as a Martian stumbling out of a crash landing. Simpson had tried to shake his hand. “He didn’t know how to do it,” he said. “I had to show him how to shake hands.” Every question Simpson asked elicited a barely audible mumble. “I don’t know if ‘docile’ is the right word,” Simpson said later. “He seemed completely intimidated by authority. Almost nonverbal.” That, in itself, Simpson found curious. Even though Michael Oher had no business applying to Briarcrest, he showed courage just being here. “It was really unusual to see a kid with those kinds of deficits that wanted an education,” he said. “To want to be in this environment. A lot of kids with his background wouldn’t come within two hundred miles of this place.”
The disposition of Michael Oher’s application to Briarcrest was Steve Simpson’s decision, and normally he would have had no trouble making it: an emphatic, gusty rejection. Beneath the crest of the Briarcrest Christian School was the motto: Decidedly Academic, Distinctly Christian. Michael Oher was, it seemed to Simpson, neither. But Mr. Simpson was new to the school, and this great football coach, Hugh Freeze, had phoned Simpson’s boss, the school president, a football fan, and made his pitch: This wasn’t a thing you did for the Briarcrest football team, Freeze had said, this was a thing you did because it was right! Briarcrest was this kid’s last chance! The president in turn had phoned Simpson and told him that if he felt right with it, he could admit the boy.
Simpson thought it over and said: sorry. There was just no chance Michael Oher could cut it in the tenth grade; the fourth grade might be a stretch for him. But the pressure from the football coach, coupled with a little twinge inside his own heart, led Simpson to reject the applicant gently. “There was just something about the boy’s desire to be here,” he said. “I couldn’t justify sending him away without any hope.” He granted a single concession: if Michael Oher enrolled in a home study program based in Memphis called the Gateway Christian School, and performed at a high level for a semester, Briarcrest would admit him the following semester. Simpson knew there wasn’t much chance Gateway would pass him, and suspected he’d never hear from the football coach, or Michael Oher, again.
He was wrong. Two months later—six weeks into the school year—his phone rang. It was Big Tony. It was a sad sight, said Big Tony, watching Big Mike stare at these books sent to him by the Gateway Christian School, without any ability to make heads or tails of them. Big Tony didn’t have the time or the energy to work with him. Big Mike was trying so hard but getting nowhere, and it was too late for him to enroll in a public school. What should they do now?
That’s when Mr. Simpson realized he’d made a mistake. In effect, he had removed a boy from the public school system. He’d tried to handle this problem the easy way, for him, and it had backfired. “It was one of those things,” Simpson said. “I should have said, ‘You don’t qualify and there’s no chance you will ever qualify.’ When Big Tony called back, I thought,