"I'm a big Michael Lewis fan," says Hancock. "I was just 50 pages into 'The Blind Side' when I said, 'Gosh, this really is a movie.' " The first chapters plunge the reader into a sea change in NFL strategy - and the pressurized world of football team recruiters - before it even gets to the story of Oher's bizarre, unlikely entrance into the cushy Briarcliff school. Hancock saw Lewis' unconventional structure "not as an obstacle but as an opportunity. ... To me, it was all about the same thing: How did the stars align to shine so brightly on this one kid in the projects in Memphis?"
From the beginning, Hancock viewed the "The Blind Side" as far more than another tale of an underdog becoming a top dog. True to Lewis' subtitle, "evolution of a game," it is also about how the triumph of the San Francisco 49ers' passing game in the 1980s transformed football strategy. The new dominance of the quarterback brought unprecedented importance to the left tackle: the offensive lineman who protects a right-handed quarterback's blind side.
FOR THE RECORD - A story in Friday's Movies section referred incorrectly to the school attended by Ravens rookie Michael Oher, whose story is told in the coming film "The Blind Side." He went to Briarcrest Christian School.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.
The position called for Big Mike's physical type: as Lewis wrote, "wide in the rear and massive in the thighs," with "long arms," "giants hands" and "great feet."
The book also provides, in the most matter-of-fact and powerful way, a paradigm of social evolution. Oher at age 16 was so amazingly under-educated and under-socialized that for him, a book was a foreign object, and a trusted adult an unknown. Yet he came up from rock-bottom with the help of a rich, white, stunningly resourceful and caring husband and wife.
Leigh Anne Tuohy is the daughter of a racist U.S. marshal, but she shed any vestiges of prejudice when she married a fellow who (as she puts it) "doesn't know his own skin color." Sean Tuohy is a self-made man. He achieved fame as a star point guard for the Ole Miss basketball team and does radio play-by-play for the Memphis Grizzlies; he also used his full-court savvy to amass a mini-empire of 60 franchise restaurants.
He has a gift for connecting with white and black kids from hardscrabble backgrounds. But Leigh Anne, even more than Sean, became the driving force behind the Tuohys' drive to give Oher the chance to make good on his promise. What occurred when the Touhys took him under their wing offers a terrific clarification of the debate over nature vs. nurture. Oher's extraordinary physicality and native smarts could only be released in a nurturing environment.
