The Blind Side

Lewis says that Michael’s mother Denise (“Dee Dee”) never felt loved or cared for. Her father was murdered when she was a little girl. Her mother was an alcoholic. Children’s Services placed her and her brother, Robert, in an orphanage. At fifteen, she dropped out of school and drifted into drugs. By twenty-six, she had five sons, then met Michael’s father through her brother, who was in prison for murdering his wife. By the time Michael was five, Dee Dee had seven boys and three girls in her care, though she had become addicted to cocaine and was incapable of caring for her children. She bought her drugs from gang leader Delvin Lane, who had been a promising quarterback with a scholarship to the University of Wyoming until he went to prison on “an aggravated assault charge” (248). When he got out, he put his skills to work running a “huge and growing drug business” with a security chief called Big Brim whose job “was to watch Delvin’s back. His blind side” (248).

Michael recalls his first six years being marked by hunger and homelessness, yet by the age of seven, his greatest fear was to be taken from his mother (241). She often told her children she loved them, and never hit them. Michael and his brothers vowed to stay together. A month before Michael’s eighth birthday, police cars arrived at the shed where Dee Dee and the children were staying. The boys ran, but police later caught Michael at school and placed him in a foster home. Michael cried himself to sleep every night. He ran away and found his mother, but she took him back to the foster home, to avoid trouble. He ran away again, with the same result. After the third time, Children’s Services put Michael in a hospital for psychological evaluation. Though the living conditions were an improvement, he grew tired of the hospital. He was ten and missed his mother. He broke out and found her at Hurt Village. They hid during the day and foraged at night. Michael stayed out of school for eighteen months, figuring if he hid long enough, the authorities would stop looking for him. He was right.

In The Blind Side, Michael reports never feeling unsafe at Hurt Village. He befriends a quiet, shy, new boy, Craig Vail, and the two “became inseparable” (250). Michael calls Craig the one person “he fully trusted” (250). Michael also has a big brother figure in Zachary (“Big Zach”) Bright, “a highly sought after college football” prospect (251). Lemming praises him. Florida State University head coach Bobby Bowden flies Big Zach to Florida, but his girlfriend is pregnant and does not want to move. Additionally, Big Zach does not want to bother with keeping up his grades. Bowden comes looking for him, but he hides until Bowden goes away.

When Michael is seven, he sees a basketball game and knows he was “meant to be” the “next Michael Jordan” (242). He hates the nickname “Big Mike” because he wants “to be lithe and fast” like Jordan. With few mirrors and opportunities to see his own reflection, Michael does not know his own size. He focuses on developing his quickness and agility. He “willed himself to be graceful,” and college coaches later call him “a freak of nature” (253). Lewis wonders how much, for Michael, is nature, and how much is nurture.

At fifteen, Michael meets Big Tony, who comes to Hurt Village looking for athletes to play on the football and basketball teams he coaches. In Michael, Big Tony sees a quiet loner with big dreams and wants to help him. Big Tony sneaks Michael into a basketball camp. On the first day, he receives a call that Michael has run away. Big Tony finds him walking home with tears running down his face. The coaches have told him he is not “a perimeter player” like Jordan. In his new position, older kids “started shoving and hitting him,” and Michael doesn’t like to be touched (254). The frustrated coaches tell Michael “he’d never be nothing” (254).

Big Tony enrolls Steven and Michael into a high school far from Hurt Village. He realizes Michael is growing big enough to attract college coaches’ attention, but worries that Michael will not make it through school, as Michael is failing and plans to drop out. Though he does not have a large group of friends who tempt him “with the fast life,” as Big Zach had, both Big Tony and Lewis know a high school dropout will have a hard time putting distance “between himself and the ‘hood” (254). Big Tony’s mother died around this time, which brings Big Tony, and thus Michael, to Briarcrest.

Recalling his first few weeks there, Michael notes that the white kids all “looked alike” and are “bizarrely enthusiastic and friendly” (255). They seem “ill-designed for survival,” making a fuss of the smallest injuries and leaving “their most valuable possessions unattended” (256). When Big Tony discovers Steven and Michael with “money that wasn’t theirs,” he explains that they have to obey the laws white people created “to preserve their species”: no stealing, fighting, or trouble of any sort (256). To break those rules means risking being cast out of that world.