Wealth, poverty, faith, love and football: Lewis tells story of 2 extraordinary people

Review Sports

The Blind Side

Michael Lewis

W.W. Norton / 288 pages / $24.95

The Blind Side is about big-time college football, the black inner city, the nouveau-riche white South and evangelical Christianity.

Even if you have no interest in the topics individually, read the book. In Michael Lewis' hands, The Blind Side's whole exceeds its parts and dissolves its genres. It's not a jock book. It's not a sociology book. It's a storybook about modern society, ancient virtues and the power of love, money and talent to do a little good.

There are two extraordinary people in the book. The more obvious is Michael Oher. "Big Mike," when introduced, is 16, basically homeless, 6-foot-5and 340 pounds with the grace and speed of a youth half his size. He is black.

The other extraordinary person, Leigh Anne Tuohy, is a former cheerleader for Ole Miss University who married the basketball team's star point guard and with him achieved the millionaire American dream via a Taco Bell franchise.

Leigh Anne and Big Mike meet by chance when her husband, Sean, becomes acquainted with a very large, troubled boy who has just enrolled as a scholarship student at the private school attended by the two Tuohy children.

Sean Tuohy, the Taco Bell tycoon, has helped other poor black kids at the academy, but not the way he's going to help Big Mike. Leigh Anne Tuohy, a decisive, empathetic woman who lives her faith and likes to take on projects, makes Big Mike her biggest project of all. She starts by buying him clothes and food. Then, realizing Michael Oher has nowhere to call home, the Tuohys invite him to sleep on their couch. Then they give him his own room. Then they adopt him.

We come to know Big Mike as the Tuohys did. First he is an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a size 58 jacket they buy him. He barely speaks. We know nothing of his background, why he fails tests, who his parents are or why he likes hanging out in the gym when there's no practice.

Little by little, truths emerge. His father is dead. His mother is a crack addict who has borne more than a dozen children to several men. He has never had his own bed. He sleeps in a different run-down house each night. He likes the gym because it's heated, unlike other places to which he can repair.