From Family to Football to Fortune
How Michael Oher came to love football through family
Most of the NFL today is filled with players who had loveless, dysfunctional, and broken childhoods. Their passion is full of anger, an emotion that is essential for battle. Football is a sport centered entirely around the concept of battling, with individual battles between players, collective battles between teams, and sweeping battles between conferences and leagues. However, in the case of Michael Oher (offensive tackle, appropriately nicknamed “Big Mike”), he grew up in the same loveless conditions as these players, but he played without football’s central emotion: anger. Instead, Michael Oher played with love.
Big Mike grew up in the Memphis area, having attended over 11 different school institutions before he was 10 years old. He lived sporadically, moving from foster home to foster home because his father was in and out of prison, and his mother was a drug-addict. Until one day, his life was changed by the Tuohy family.
The Tuohy family was a typical southern, white, wealthy family who loved Ole’ Miss football. Sean Tuohy (star point guard, Ole’ Miss), is the father of the household. He saw Michael at a Briarcrest Christian School basketball practice and he watched as Michael looked on at a team that wouldn’t allow him to play. How Big Mike ended up at Briarcrest he didn’t know, but Sean knew of his presence before that basketball practice. Sean’s daughter, Collins (pole vault, Briarcrest), told stories of how everyone in the school was terrified of Big Mike until they realized he was far more terrified of them. He was the talk of the school nonetheless. At 6’4” and 315 pounds, there was nowhere for him to hide from the attention.
Big Mike then grabbed the attention of Sean.
After the Tuohys took Big Mike in, they quickly noticed his inability to go into deep thought or emotion- he was in survival mode. He only focused on the next two minutes, never focusing on the past or distant future. This translated onto the football field because Big Mike was a menace. Big Mike only played football because people told him he would be great at it. He had no direction or purpose. His only goal was to be on top of someone when the whistle blowed. This gained the attention of college football scouts, and they started coming to that little Christian school in the middle of nowhere. The scouts all had one thing in common, they liked his size.
Big Mike’s sheer size and strength couldn’t propel him to the next level of football, however. Football feeds off of passion and desire, and Big Mike didn’t have passion or desire at that point.
Big Mike now had a family though. He had a family that took him in and saved him from becoming something worse. He had a family that gave him his first bed, his first car, his first best friends, his first A in school, and his first loving parents. To that, he felt he owed his life to the Tuohys, and this is where Big Mike found his passion and desire.
Big Mike was only 17 when he was taken in by the Tuohys, and by his junior year, he had turned a full 180. Leigh Anne Tuohy (head cheerleader, Ole’ Miss), Sean’s wife, was the one who invited Michael to become part of their family.
“Well we want to know… If you want to become part of the family.”
“… Kinda thought I already was.”
He went from having no direction, purpose, or desire to finding his purpose on the football field. With the help of the Tuohys, he worked on his fundamentals, tried different positions on the offensive line, and became more of a team player. This extra effort made by the Tuohys to improve Big Mike’s football performance not only worked by making him a better player, but Big Mike started to love playing football because he saw how much better he was getting and how much joy it brought to the Tuohy family. Once in the national recruiting spotlight, he had some of the finest colleges in the nation offer him full ride scholarships to play football. But, being that his family is what helped him turn his life around, he chose to play at Ole’ Miss.
Big Mike had a stellar 4 years while playing for Ole’ Miss, earning numerous All-Conference and national awards. He was drafted in the first round by the Baltimore Ravens in 2009 and helped lead them to a Super Bowl victory in 2013.
His story was first written about in 2006 by Michael Lewis, and in 2009, the box office hit The Blind Side captivated millions worldwide. Although Michael’s life had a shaky start, he had the love and support from the Tuohy family, and he was able to find success by playing a sport that he came to love. His story shows that once someone finds their true passion and true desire they can beat the odds of what seems impossible.
