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Michael Lewis The Blind Side More praise for THE BLIND SIDE “Yet another triumph…[The Blind Side] is about much more than college football recruitment…it is actually about the American dream itself.” —A. G. Gancarski, Washington Times “Lewis has such a gift for storytelling…he writes as lucidly for sports fans as for those who read him for other reasons.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times “Grabs hold of you.” —Allen Barra, Washington Post “[Lewis] is advancing a new genre of journalism.” —George F. Will, New York Times Book Review “Lewis has perfected the art of analyzing interesting changes inside American institutions—the bond market, Major League Baseball—and then decorating the scene with personalities behind the statistics.” —Jay Hancock, Baltimore Sun “No reader with even a passing interest in the current state of our games should fail to read it.” —Bill Littlefield, Boston Globe “In The Blind Side, Michael Lewis provides a compelling book…explaining how this subtle and brutal game has changed as the balance of power has shifted between talented athletes and clever, devoted coaches.” —The Economist “Lewis knows how to put the reader on the field…. The Blind Side displays all of Lewis’ particular writing strengths: the ability to drive a story forward, the eye for both the big picture and telling detail, shrewd wit, and an unerring instinct for discerning social complexity…. You’ll be tempted to stand up and cheer as you read.” —Susan Larson, Times-Picayune, New Orleans “Lewis is a terrific reporter and a gifted prose stylist. He absorbs the vibrations of the world he immerses himself in without getting carried away. So as the book progresses, he never loses track of Michael Oher.” —John Freeman, Houston Chronicle “Entertaining and illuminating…about racial division, sporting tactics and financial arbitrage.” —John Gapper, Financial Times “Combining a tour de force of sports analysis with a piquant ethnography of the South’s pigskin mania, Lewis probes the fascinating question of whether football is a matter of brute force or subtle intellect.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Lewis delivers a thunderous hit.” —Bryan French, Fort Worth Star-Telegram “As he has done before, Lewis brilliantly deconstructs a culture.” —Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News “A penetrating tale…an engrossing, if anguished, story of serendipity and salvation.” —Mark Hyman, BusinessWeek “Grippingly told.” —Library Journal, starred review “[Lewis has] a gift for narrative pace, for sly wit, for the telling detail, for the clarity and verve of his sentences.” —George W. Hunt, America magazine “[The Blind Side] works on three levels. First as a shrewd analysis of the NFL; second, as an exposé of the insanity of big-time college football recruiting; and, third, as a moving portrait of the positive effect that love, family, and education can have in reversing the path of a life that was destined to be lived unhappily and, most likely, end badly.” —Wes Lukowsky, Booklist, starred review “A book about idiosyncratic idealism—but with a hopeful ending.” —Jacob Weisberg, Slate “It’s the sort of book that one might understandably categorize as just another (true) story about football…but Lewis goes much deeper.” —Brian Cook, Sky magazine “In my recent reading of Michael Lewis’s outstanding The Blind Side, I cried any number of times, such was the powerful effect of that story.” —Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News “[A] superbly written and exhaustively interviewed tale.” —Steven Goode, Vindicator “As good a portrait of contemporary American society […] as anything that Tom Wolfe produced in his prime.” —Brian Zabcik, Corporate Counsel “A gripping tour through the world of college recruiting, professional football strategy, and the volatile mix of faith and sports.” —Christianity Today “An extraordinary and moving story of a young man who will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the NFL.” —The Octavian “A look at the strategy, the underpinnings, the personalities of modern football, told personally and clearly in the form of one young player.” —Blue Ridge Business Journal “Lewis effortlessly moves back and forth between subtle football tactics and major social issues.” —John Lawson III, Tampa Tribune “A brilliant investigation of what determines success in American football and, separately, in American society.” —Mike Steib, Void magazine THE BLIND SIDE ALSO BY MICHAEL LEWIS Home Game Panic Coach Moneyball The Money Culture Pacific Rift Losers The New New Thing Next Liar’s Poker THE BLIND SIDE Evolution of a Game MICHAEL LEWIS W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York London Copyright © 2009, 2006 by Michael Lewis All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Lewis, Michael (Michael M.) The blind side: evolution of a game / Michael Lewis.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN: 978-0-393-07902-9 1. Oher, Michael. 2. Football players—United States—Biography. 3. University of Mississippi—Football. 4. College sports—United States. I. Title. GV939.O44L49 2006 796.332092—dc22 [B] 2006023509 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT For Starling Lawrence Underpaid guardian of the author’s blind side. CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE BACK STORY CHAPTER TWO THE MARKET FOR FOOTBALL PLAYERS CHAPTER THREE CROSSING THE LINE CHAPTER FOUR THE BLANK SLATE CHAPTER FIVE DEATH OF A LINEMAN CHAPTER SIX INVENTING MICHAEL CHAPTER SEVEN THE PASTA COACH CHAPTER EIGHT CHARACTER COURSES CHAPTER NINE BIRTH OF A STAR CHAPTER TEN THE EGG BOWL CHAPTER ELEVEN FREAK OF NURTURE CHAPTER TWELVE AND MOSES STUTTERED Afterword to the Paperback Edition Author’s Note THE BLIND SIDE CHAPTER ONE BACK STORY FROM THE SNAP of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. One Mississippi: The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It’s what most people know as a “flea-flicker,” but the Redskins call it a “throw back special.” Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming straight at him. It’s a runing down—the start of the second quarter, first and 10 at midfield, with the score tied 7–7—and the New York Giants’ linebacker has been so completely suckered by the fake that he’s deep in the Redskins’ backfield. Carson thinks he’s come to tackle Riggins but Riggins is long gone, so Carson just keeps running, toward Theismann. Three Mississippi: Carson now sees that Theismann has the ball. Theismann notices Carson coming straight at him, and so he has time to avoid him. He steps up and to the side and Carson flies right on by and out of the play. The play is now 3.5 seconds old. Until this moment it has been defined by what the quarterback can see. Now it—and he—is at the mercy of what he can’t see. You don’t think of fear as a factor in professional football. You assume that the sort of people who make it to the NFL are immune to the emotion. Perhaps they don’t mind being hit, or maybe they just don’t get scared; but the idea of pro football players sweating and shaking and staring at the ceiling at night worrying about the next day’s violence seems preposterous. The head coach of the Giants, Bill Parcells, didn’t think it preposterous, however. Parcells, whose passion is the football defense, believed that fear played a big role in the game. So did his players. They’d witnessed up close the response of opposing players to their own Lawrence Taylor. The tackle who had just quit the Philadelphia Eagles, for instance. Jerry Sisemore had played tackle in the NFL for eight years when, in 1981, Taylor arrived. Sisemore played on the right side of the offensive line and Taylor usually came off the other end, but Sisemore still had to worry about the few times Taylor lined up across from him. Their teams were in the same NFL division and met twice each regular season. The week leading up to those games, Sisemore confessed, unnerved him. “Towards the middle of the week something would come over you and you’d just start sweating,” he told the New York Times. “My last year in the league, opening day, he immediately got past me…. He just looked at me and laughed. Right there I thought I had to get out of this game.” And after that season, 1984, he did. The feelings of those assigned to prevent Taylor from hurting quarterbacks were trivial compared to those of the quarterbacks he wanted to hurt. In Taylor’s first season in the NFL, no official records were kept of quarterback sacks. In 1982, after Taylor had transformed the quarterback sack into the turning point of a football game, a new official NFL statistic was born. The record books defined the sack as tackling the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage as he attempts to pass. Taylor offered his own definition: “A sack is when you run up behind somebody who’s not watching, he doesn’t see you, and you really put your helmet into him. The ball goes fluttering everywhere and the coach comes out and asks the quarterback, ‘Are you all right?’ That’s a sack.” After his first NFL season Taylor became the only rookie ever named the league’s most valuable defensive player, and he published a treatise on his art.

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