Words cannot adequately describe how smug, entitled, and pigheadedly wrong Lewis comes off in that clip; you really have to see it to believe it.
I’ll never consciously purchase anything he writes ever again, barring an apology. It’s just that off-putting.
Here is Lewis’ full google talk from 2007.
The part where he talks about Michael Oher being on the Dean’s list at Ole Miss starts around 37:40. There are more cringey moments in the talk.
“Meanwhile, Oher wrote in his memoir, I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to the Blind Side and Beyond, the film portrayed him as “dumb” instead of as a kid “who had never had consistent academic instruction.” Oher has publicly said that the film negatively impacted his career.”
You can certainly see why a kid who had gone to 11(?) schools would fall behind. Not sure Oher would have gotten to college football without the Tuohy help. And perhaps it was the tutor that they provided that was key to getting him through college (though I’m sure football programs must have tutor contacts - game schedules are hard on all players). The book and movie though didn’t seem to do him any favors.
The movie was accurate in the main, Mitchell said, although details were changed to translate more easily to cinema. One thing Mitchell did note was that Michael was much smarter than he was played in the movie. Brutally disadvantaged and without resources, he still possessed great potential, intellectually as well as athletically.
Nor did the Touhys pick her up “off the street.” They had known Mitchell for years and asked her if she would help with Oher’s English.
“I never left,” she said.
In the movie there is one teacher (a science teacher) who fights for Michael and says he is a lot smarter than he tests, that when she asked him the questions as an oral test he knew the answers. Of course he should have had an IEP and other academic helps, but that wasn’t the fault of the Tuohys but probably of the first 6 schools he went to. I’ve seen the movie a lot and always had the impression that Oher was not stupid but didn’t have the fundamentals to read the assigned reading, to write an organized paper, to do the math problems. If fact, it made him appear smart that he was able to learn things despite not having the tools. He had to learn by listening, he had to imagine some things because he’d never seen a picture of it or been on a field trip to a museum.
Hugh Freeze was walking a thin line and said both the Tuohys and Oher were great, but did add that Michael would not have gotten to college without the Tuohys’ help. He was the football coach. He was the one getting players into colleges on scholarships and knew how hard it was to do. Freeze could probably compare him to others he had coached, both rich and poor, good students and not so good students, and known whether Michael could have done it on his own (no) or if another person would have helped. I’m guessing he didn’t see anyone else stepping up (even Freeze himself didn’t step up, although he was happy to take the job at Ole Miss).
Colleges certainly have tutors but they aren’t personal for each athlete. Miss Sue was Michael’s personal tutor. If my daughter wanted help, she had to go to the writing center or to professors’ office hours just like any non-athlete would. A lot of the athletes helped each other with class notes or doing homework together, but that is more of a study session, not a paid tutor situation.
I’ve been casually reading this thread over the last few days. The conservatorship was initially surprising and piqued my curiosity. Legalities aside what I found interesting in this thread are the ideas of gratitude and exploitation. Simply put, is Michael Oher ungrateful or has he been exploited?
So I started to Google.
One of the first things I came across was a video with Sean Tuohy and Michael Lewis at the New Orleans Book Festival from 3/15/23. It’s long and I admit I didn’t pay close attention through the entire thing but it just didn’t sit right with me. It created more questions concerning recent events.
While listening my ears perked up when I heard Nick Saban mentioned. I was surprised to hear his assessment of Michael Oher from the spring before his junior yr of high school (aka sophomore yr…lol). Do we really believe that if Saban and a recruiting analyst (Tom Lemming) had Oher on their radar (as a number 1 offensive line prospect), at that age, that Michael Oher would not have escaped a life of poverty, eventually becoming a professional football player??
Read this article from 2009.
So in my mind (but probably not everyone’s) the question of whether Oher would’ve gotten where he is without the Tuohys has been debunked. (And to be clear, that isn’t to say he should not feel grateful for the nice things they did do for him.)
From there I was curious about the exploitation question. From the book festival video I learned that Sean Tuohy is a NYT bestselling co-author. Really? I did a quick Amazon/Goodreads search and in my opinion, both books seem to be offshoots of their relationship with Oher. I didn’t read the books but did notice the word “adoption” was used, which frankly, I now view as a bit of deception.
I didn’t want to spend much more time on the Oher/Tuohys relationship…I figure the media will continue to dig into it…but I will mention the Tuohys not only wrote books after the success of The Blind Side, there were lots of speaking engagements and a foundation.
Everything may be above board. I don’t know. But on some level exploitation (we don’t know for sure if that’s the case here) can be mutually beneficial to some degree. It seems like Michael Oher believes there was considerable unfairness in the relationship…which makes me sad. And frankly in my mind, mutually beneficial exploitation is still exploitation. It’s the degree of the imbalance that is in question.
Lastly, I believe it’s been reported The Blind Side movie money (not sure about the book) was supposedly evenly split between the Tuohys and Oher…with the Tuohys consisting of the parents and the son and daughter. This means the family received 80%, while Oher got 20%. I’m sorry. This does not compute in my mind.
The appeal of The Blind Side story for me was valuing people in less fortunate circumstances and helping however you can. This family was well off. If they wanted to be compensated for their investment…having provided a roof over his head, a tutor, etc…I guess that’s their prerogative. But in my opinion their characterization of their charitable (“turn around”) nature sounds like a huge, disappointing con.
Excellent post overall and a spot on summary/characterization of this thread.
Thank you.
I have worked with many limited income athletes, at all academic levels. Some extremely gifted athletically speaking, some less so, lots in the middle. Most go on to play in college. Some have become professional athletes.
It can be extremely difficult even with focused resources that are expensive (athletic training, academic tutoring, test prep, college counseling/recruiting help) to launch these students. Once they get to college they have resources, but have to use them. There is also the injury factor which has derailed many top prospects’ pro dreams.
Oher’s GPA was .76 at one point (maybe after soph year)? Had someone knowledgeable not intervened, he wasn’t going to make it to a 4 year college. That’s a lot of GPA repair needed that requires retaking (and paying for) classes, likely with intense tutoring and exec functioning support required for the student to succeed and become NCAA eligible. I live this every day with the students I work with. I could say a lot more, but have made my point.
I’m not on any side in this sad situation, and am confident there is much more going on that we don’t know about.
If there’s been no rapport for ten years between Oher and Tuohy - then yeah it seems slimy he’d still be promoting himself. I’ll say that.
If your family, you wouldn’t be doing that.
Not to keep piling on with more details, but for those not from the area, it’s hard to imagine how many conflicts of interest are inherent in this saga.
Author of the book, Michael Lewis, was a close personal friend since childhood and high school classmate (at Isadore Newman in New Orleans, which is probably familiar to many as school of the Manning clan) of Sean Tuohy’s. Any reliance on Michael Lewis’s version and subsequent recounting of events should be viewed through this lens
.As to the allegation that unfair Hollywood accounting practices meant no substantial royalties had been earned, this movie was actually financed by Fred Smith, CEO of Federal Express. He also happens to be a neighbor and close personal friend of the Tuohys, and in 2016 his youngest son married the Tuohys daughter. Smith’s daughter, Molly, was a co-producer of the movie.
Again, this whole matter reeks of exploitation to me, not necessarily for the money but all the fame and adulation that went with it. Did Oher gain “something” from the Tuohys? Of course, but I would argue that they gained much more from him.
I think it is easy to, retrospectively, look back and find disingenuous players. However, no one knew that the movie/story would be successful at the time.
And to be more clear, the movie was financed by a billionaire dad to help launch his aspiring producer daughter’s career. Her father financing the film allowed a twenty-something to be a first time executive producer and bypass the industry’s totem pole. Its success allowed her to co-found her own production company a few year’s later. I find it very hard to believe anyone would consider Fred Smith’s primary motivation to be to promote his neighbor’s story as a favor to them rather than to make his daughter’s dream come true.
I maintain there are truths and faults to be found on both sides of where this ‘story’ currently stands and why its only just coming to its breaking point, but there is certainly no merit in trying to re-write it. Its much more likely, given her very first film and only experience two years prior (for which she was not executive producer) was also based on a novel, that her dad’s friendship with the Tuohy’s is how she and he came to know of the book, which led to his eventual financing of the movie for her to produce, not the other way around.
These ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. I think the point was that everyone involved in deciding how the story would be told in the book and the movie had preexisting strong personal relationships with the Tuohys. Its not realistic that this didn’t introduce bias in their takes on the story.
It’s interesting that Sean Tuohy and Michael Lewis still were appearing together at the New Orleans Book Fair in March 23 to talk about the “Blindside and Beyond.” Especially if there has been a level of estrangement with Michael Oher. The book was written in 2006!
It is amazing how many people have fed at the trough. The family, the family friend/author, the coach, the neighbor/financier, the neighbor/financier’s daughter, Hollywood, etc. Even the tutor was given a job at Ole Miss, as well as speaking gigs. Michael Oher wasn’t just a great football player, he is a job/prestige creating machine for all those patting themselves on the back for all they did for him.
Do you mean Fred Smith financed it to help his daughter-in-law become a co-producer, not his daughter? Seems like her own parents had the money to finance this, if they chose. Fred Smith (my former CEO), is most definitely the real deal, he obviously believed this was a story worth telling.
Yikes! The “ Forgery indictment and car crash” section on his wiki is shocking to me if true!!
I believe he was not convicted of any of the charges. It was also almost 50 years ago. People are complex. I’ve heard stories of things, who knows what’s true. I can tell you, the employees at FedEx miss having a CEO who actually cares about the long term future of the company, and not just the current stock price. PSP (people, service, profit) has gone to the wayside, replaced by layoffs, inattention to customers, and using the profits for stock buybacks to please activist investors. Sad.