I’m thinking Sean Tuohy Sr has put in a call to his son to close his mouth, because even though he is trying to support his father’s narrative, he keeps contradicting him.
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Tuohy’s own lawyer is contradicting him as well. Tuohy said they “didn’t make any money off the movie.” His lawyer said they “received a small advance from the production company and a tiny percentage of net profits.”
But speaking of Tuohy, Jr., to give an idea of how weirdly nepotistic (for lack of a better term) and potentially sleazy southern football is, Tuohy, Jr. was hired in 2020 as assistant athletic director - football operations by Liberty University head coach Hugh Freeze, who was Oher’s high school coach who landed an assistant’s job at Ole Miss right after Oher committed. Before coaching at Liberty, Freeze had become Ole Miss’s head coach, but was forced to resign because of multiple ethical and recruiting improprieties. Here’s part of the Wikipedia writeup:
In January 2016, the NCAA charged Ole Miss with numerous recruiting violations. An investigation turned up evidence that Ole Miss employees and boosters arranged numerous “impermissible benefits” for players, such as car loans and cash. At least one recruit was suspected of getting help on his college entrance exam.[29] Ole Miss officials began calling reporters, telling them falsely that most of the alleged violations had taken place under Freeze’s predecessor Houston Nutt.[30]
The investigation reopened soon after star offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil admitted taking money from one of Freeze’s assistants.[31] In February 2017—three months after suffering its first losing season since the year Freeze arrived—Ole Miss withdrew from bowl consideration for the upcoming season. The move came on the same day that the NCAA sent an updated notice of allegations charging the Rebels with eight additional violations. Most seriously, it accused Freeze of not monitoring his assistants, and also accused Ole Miss of not properly controlling the program.[29] The new allegations brought the total to 21: four under Nutt and 17 under Freeze.[32]
Freeze continued to recruit players during the investigation. Six Ole Miss players, including star quarterback Shea Patterson and future NFL players Van Jefferson and Tre Nixon, later said Freeze and other Ole Miss officials repeatedly lied to them during their recruitment about the severity of the pending charges. After the charges became public, these players sought to transfer to other schools; each requested and received a waiver to the NCAA rule that would have prevented them from playing for a year.[6][33][34]
Because it is southern football all this apparently no long matters, and he’s now Auburn’s head coach. 
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There have been ethical and sleezy incidents in many programs North, South, East, West. Southern Schools do not have a monopoly on unethical practices.
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True enough.
Correction that GALs can be used for conservatorships in TN, but the judge can waive that and it seems common to do that (there is a box on the form to waive it. And the judge did waive it.
It was clearly done to make the NCAA happy so that the Tuohys wouldn’t be considered boosters but ‘family’. When my daughter signed her NLI, I had to sign it too as she was only 16. I don’t know if the parents of 18 year olds have to sign the NLI.
The suit is to terminate the conservatorship and for an accounting of financial matters. Oher chose an agent for the NFL on his own.
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Where I (mostly) practice, the chancellors never waive appointment of a GAL in a conservatorship proceeding. Probably to avoid situations like this from developing.
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And now a lot of it is allowed. Penn State has an entire booster group, run by Joe Paterno’s son, that does nothing but raise money and give it to athletes. Pizza restaurants sponsor the defensive line. Athletes are making millions on NIL. ACT/SAT no longer required.
It’s a different world now.
It’s often about who you know, not what you know.
Another perspective from one involved - so obviously with bias (yes, he’s a childhood friend of the dad) but it doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
I read somewhere else Oher and the family are a decade estranged. Terrible.
‘Blind Side’ Author Michael Lewis Addresses Michael Oher Controversy (people.com)
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A childhood friend who made a lot of money off Oher’s story.
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Reading the articles that have been published it looks like originally the book rights were sold for 250K… as an option to make a movie. I do not know how Hollywood works, but selling an option that may/may not be used does not appear to be a big scam by the book author or Tuohy’s. The fact that the movie became such a big hit was probably surprising to everyone.
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Michael Oher has said he did not know about the conservatorship until this February. But in his 2011 memoir, he mentions them as his “legal conservators”, not adoptive parents (since he was already 18) , but he still considered them his family.
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Yes, its easy to forget nowadays that The Blind Side was the first of Michael Lewis’s books to be made into a movie - Moneyball and The Big Short came later. And his earlier hit book about Wall St (Liar’s Poker) is just being made into a movie now.
As an aside, I also loved “The New, New Thing” which was one of the seminal books of the dotcom bubble (and helped persuade me to move to Silicon Valley, along with Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift), but I doubt anyone reads it nowadays.
Also worth noting that its only the movie that makes the human interest side of Oher’s life story so prominent. Lewis writes analytical books with an additional hook of demonstrating the personal impact of the analytics. Hence it is called The Blind Side because its about how the Left Tackle offensive lineman became one of the most valuable positions because that player protects the QB, making it critical for football teams to find nimble, but huge individuals to play that role. The book also talks a lot about Lawrence Taylor as a catalyst for this change in tactics.
Similarly, Moneyball is about baseball analytics and undervalued players (underappreciated value of OBP rather than home runs), personified in Billy Beane and the Oakland As. The Big Short is about mortgages and the financial crisis of 2008, personified in Michael Burry, etc. None of these books are simply about telling someone’s life story.
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I was referencing the money he made writing the book about Oher.
I do not believe I referenced your comment? I was making a general observation.
You’ve taken a strong stance throughout and that’s fine. It’s your opinion Michael Oher was screwed over by greedy people.
I’ve acknowledged that I can’t know a person just because they’re in the public eye and I’m reading things on line.
This is a family relationship or was - and there’s a lot going on in one’s heart, in one’s head, etc. and it’s more complicated than any of us can ever know.
Does Michael Lewis have a bias? I don’t know. I don’t know him nor the Tuohy’s nor do I know Michael Oher.
So I’d rather not pass judgement on any of them.
My take(s)
(I read and enjoyed the book (and others of Lewis) around the time it came out. Also liked the movie, but haven’t seen it in a while.)
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Lewis is a writer (and a good one). The notion that it’s somehow wrong for him to make money off of a book is odd. I presume that both the Touhy’s and Oher knew he was writing the book at the time. It was a flattering book, and most folks would love to have a talented writer write a flattering book about them.
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As for the movie rights, I suspect (but don’t have inside information), that if and when the information is made publicly available, it will largely conform with the Touhy’s and Lewis’ accounts (i.e. a decent but not spectacular amount, reasonably split). An argument could be made that Oher should have received more than 1/5 of the Touhy/Oher split, but the movie did feature all 5 of them, and the key movie figure was arguably the mother, not Oher.
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As for the Touhy’s original motivations, it’s a little more speculative - hard to know exactly what was going through their minds, and they probably weren’t super-analytical about it at the time. They were a wealthy family, IIRC Christians who felt a call to act out their faith, and obsessed with sports and Ol’ Miss (both parents were former Ol’ Miss athletes).
They saw a struggling young black kid at their daughter’s HS, and opened their hearts and home (and wallet) to him. I doubt that their first thoughts were from the position of Ol’ Miss boosters (hey, we can get this kid to commit to Ol’ Miss). But Oher’s athletic gifts likely heightened the pull they had to the kid - the Touhy’s were all about athletics, and Oher was a kid with enormous (but undeveloped) athletic gifts. Once they had Oher under their wing, it was natural that they would encourage him to Ol’ Miss, and natural that he would be drawn their - it tightened the bond they probably all felt.
What would have happened to Oher if the Touhy’s hadn’t found him? Who knows? But a kid without any real family, academically struggling, poor and black, faces uncertain odds, even if he does have Oher’s physical gifts. There’s a decent chance he makes his way to an FBS college, and maybe to the NFL. But there’s a chance things go south, too.
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After which he says “They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as ‘adoptive parents.’”
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Do you know each of these people individually? You seem to favor one.
Maybe the Tuohy’s did wrong purposely.
Maybe they did wrong but accidentally, with the best intentions.
Maybe they did the best for him with the utmost love and care that they knew and in fact it was best.
None of us know.
A reminder that while this entire thread is speculative and people’s opinion, CC is not a debate society. State your position and move one, or take it to PM. Thank you.
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