[The main figures in the Oscar-winning movie are embroiled in an
ugly legal dispute. But the story never sat comfortably with many
observers]
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THE BLIND SIDE’S WHITE SAVIOR TALE WAS ALWAYS BUILT ON SHAKY GROUND
 
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Andrew Lawrence
August 16, 2023
The Guardian
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_ The main figures in the Oscar-winning movie are embroiled in an
ugly legal dispute. But the story never sat comfortably with many
observers _

Michael Oher shown with the Touhys, Sean, Leigh Anne, Michael,
Collins and S.J. (left to right),

 

In late 2009 I was sent to Baltimore for a Sports Illustrated feature
story on Michael Oher
[[link removed]], a rare
household name among NFL offensive linemen. Oher was a few months into
his rookie year and on the brink of a critical showdown against the
Indianapolis Colts.

In the book version of The Blind Side
[[link removed]],
which places Oher within the NFL’s evolution into a passing league,
he is set on a collision course with the sport’s top quarterback
cruncher – Indy’s Dwight Freeney. And after devouring the Michael
Lewis book, his Moneyball for football geeks, I was keen to dig into
this and more with Oher. By this point he was over the book and
unhappy with the much-hyped film that sprang from it and was due to
premiere that same weekend. The Ravens PR team cautioned that Oher
would turn me away faster than a corner blitzer if I asked too many
questions about The Blind Side. Just how touchy a subject it was for
him has become that much clearer in the wake of a feud that contains
personal wounds, cultural rifts and career consequences that run deep.

It kicked off on Monday with news that Oher had filed a petition in a
Tennessee court against Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who play a huge
part in The Blind Side. In the petition
[[link removed]],
Oher alleges the Tuohys, who took him in as a teenager and claimed him
as their adopted son, duped him into appointing them his
conservators _after_ his 18th birthday and went on to make business
deals for themselves as his power of attorney.

Principally at issue is the extensive exploitation of Oher’s name
and likeness in The Blind Side
[[link removed]] film – a $300m
box office smash that allegedly resulted in seven-figure royalties for
the Tuohys and their two natural-born children. Oher, meanwhile, is
purported to have signed away his life story for no return. Meanwhile,
the Tuohys were backed by CAA, the powerful Hollywood agency that also
represents Lewis – one of Sean Tuohy’s best friends from high
school.

The allegations have reportedly “devastated” the Tuohys. Martin
Singer, an attorney for the family, called the motion a
“shakedown”
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claiming that Oher threatened to go public with his story unless the
Tuohys paid him $15m. The feud has not only resonated with those who
followed Oher’s on-field career, but also those who only know these
people from the movie. Even a New York Post tweet
[[link removed]] of a story on
the family’s lavish post-Blind Side spending forgoes a lead photo of
Leigh Anne Tuohy for one of Sandra Bullock, who won an Oscar playing
Tuohy in the film. In headlines and on social media, there were no
shortage of jokes riffing on the blindsiding irony of the news. But
anyone who had been paying close attention all along could have seen
this day coming.

Despite a welter of kind reviews and extensive industry acclaim, the
movie version of The Blind Side has come to represent a low point
for the white savior trope
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the unlikely story of the rich white lady who turns a downtrodden
Black teen hulk into an improbable Sunday pro. Jeffery Montez de Oca,
the founding director of the Center for Critical Study of Sport at the
University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, took aim at the film’s
framing of adoption as “a signifying act of whiteness that obscures
the social relations of domination that not only make charity
possible, but also creates an urban underclass in need of charity.”
In her seminal tome White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo excoriates the
film as “fundamentally and insidiously anti-Black.” In his
one-star Guardian review, Peter Bradshaw pronounced The Blind Side
“dead from the neck up and the neck down.”

Over the years Oher himself has oscillated between endorsing the
film’s message of perseverance and recoiling from its
characterization of him as a charmless simpleton who could barely read
or write, let alone fathom football’s many complexities. In one of
the film’s cringier scenes, the Tuohys’ young son uses ketchup
bottles to teach “Big Mike” – who in reality was already a
sought-after college recruit at this point – basic football tactics.
Because football is as much a game of reputation as it is one of
skill, the stylized perception of Oher became his story.

[Michael Oher was depicted as struggling with basic football concepts
in The Blind Side]

Michael Oher was depicted as struggling with basic football concepts
in The Blind Side. Photograph: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy

Before the film’s release, Oher was already aggrieved by its
suggestion that he was somehow lucky to make it out of high school
after missing large parts of his early education due to his
disadvantaged upbringing. “The thing people don’t understand is I
had to bring my grades up,” he told me of the work he put into
graduating with a criminal justice degree in the same year he turned
pro - an uncommon feat
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elite US sports. “A person can’t get smart in a couple days.” It
was “things like that” that most bothered him.

Despite writing two autobiographies over the past decade, Oher has yet
to shake off popular perceptions that he is dim. “The biggest for me
was being portrayed [in the film] as not being able to read or
write,” Oher recently said. “When you go into a locker room and
your teammates don’t think you can learn a playbook, that weighs
heavy.”

The Ravens locker room has a reputation for being especially hard on
rookies. And yet Oher quickly proved he belonged thanks to his smarts
and obsessive-compulsive approach – attributes that enabled him to
thrive at tackle, a position that requires tactical and technical
knowledge. Teammates especially loved his disdain for the spotlight, a
quality intrinsic to offensive linemen. Oher was proud to tell me he
had “flipped through” the Lewis book and would miss the film’s
red carpet premiere because “we got a big game, this is what I do
for a living, so that’s what I have to focus on.” (Instead,
Quinton Aaron, the actor who played him in the film, took his place
with the Tuohys. That he, too, has struggled to capitalize on The
Blind Side’s success
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reinforces DiAngelo’s point about the Oher character’s fundamental
flaws.)

Although the Ravens wound up losing the game against the Colts, Oher
held his own in the few instances he faced Freeney and rounded into a
solid pro, playing eight seasons and appearing in two Super Bowls –
winning one with the Ravens – before calling it quits after the 2016
season. By most metrics, his was a successful career – and yet
it’s hard not to imagine how much better it could have turned out
had Oher gone to college football powerhouse Alabama. In The Blind
Side, much is made of Bama coach Nick Saban, a brilliant developer of
talent, visiting the Tuohys expressly to recruit Oher – only for him
to wind up choosing to sign with Ole Miss, a perennial loser that Sean
and Leigh Anne Tuohy attended and vigorously supported as athletic
boosters.

Though Oher did help improve Ole Miss and wound up the 23rd pick in
the 2009 draft as a result, many will wonder what might have been if
he had spurned the Tuohys and followed Saban, who went on to win six
national championships and built Alabama into an NFL
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Oher would have been a top 10 pick in the draft, guaranteeing him a
huge signing bonus and setting him up for even more lucrative paydays;
at best, could have been a true NFL great. Either way, that’s tens
of millions Oher may have lost out on because of the Tuohys.

Interestingly, while Singer, the family’s lawyer, said the Tuohys
would “defend their good names,” he also acknowledged the family
would release Oher from the conservatorship – a concession that
would appear to validate one of the biggest claims in the petition.
How the story ends is anyone’s guess. At least now there’s no more
refuting the fact that the “official” Oher story was built on
shaky foundations. It’s only fair that after years of having
everyone else’s back, Oher is finally protecting his own.

_Andrew Lawrence is senior features writer for the Guardian US, based
in Atlanta. Twitter: @by_drew_

* Michael Oher
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* white savior
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* NFL
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* conservators
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