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one player is bigger than the game.”
Lemming had seen hundreds of NFL-caliber players with social problems come to inglorious ends. In 1995, Lemming picked as a first team high school All-American a sensational defensive end from Louisiana named Eric Jefferson. Jefferson signed to play football for the University of Illinois, and Lemming and a lot of other people couldn’t see him as anything but a future NFL star. Before he played a down of college ball he pled guilty to armed robbery and is now serving a five-year sentence in California state prison. In 1996, a Chicago kid named Michael Burden had been easily the nation’s most promising defensive back (“a future NFL star without a doubt”) when he was charged with rape. Ohio State still took him, and he even played a year—then got into trouble at school and vanished without a trace. In 1997, a defensive lineman named Boo Boo Williams had been the most likely future NFL player in the nation. “He was the next Reggie White,” said Lemming, referring to the Hall of Fame pass rusher for the Green Bay Packers. As a junior in high school, Boo Boo was six five, 265 pounds, ran a 4.7 40, and bench-pressed 375 pounds, despite never lifting weights. He’d not merely won the heavyweight state wrestling champion; he had picked up the runner-up, a 220-pound star running back, and lifted him straight over his head, then tossed him to the ground. Boo Boo Williams was the most promising player in a graduating class that included all kinds of future NFL stars. But Boo Boo’s grades were so bad that he was required to sit out of college ball not just one but two years. And then Boo Boo, too, vanished: poof.
And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside the game: aggressive people. Lemming was wary of kids with bad grades, criminal records, or anything else that suggested they’d never get to college, much less through it. To play in the NFL for money it was practically necessary to play three years in college for free. It was true, as Lemming put it, that “there are some colleges that would take Charles Manson if he could run a four-four forty and get his work release.” Their existence didn’t prevent the premature end of a shocking number of potentially lucrative careers.
After he’d seen Michael Oher’s tape, Lemming tried to reach the kid by phone. He found out that his surname was pronounced “Oar,” but that’s about all he learned. He was accustomed to the social lives of high school football stars: the handlers, the harems, the informal advisers, the coaches. The kids Lemming sought to meet were not, typically, hard to find. This kid not only had no handlers, he didn’t appear to exist outside of school. He had no home; he didn’t even have a phone number. Or so said the Briarcrest Christian School when Lemming called looking for Michael Oher. They had been mystified by Lemming’s interest in their student, but they were also polite, and finally agreed to have someone drive Michael Oher over to the University of Memphis football facility for a face-to-face interview. “I’ll never forget when he walked into the room,” says Lemming. “He looked like a house walking into a bigger house. He walked in the door and he barely fit through the door.” He wasn’t just huge, he was huge in exactly the right ways. “There’s the big blob three-hundred-pounder, and there’s the solid kind,” said Lemming. “He was the solid kind. You also see big guys, tall guys who weigh a lot, but they have thin legs. They’re fine in high school, but in college they’ll get pushed around. He was just massive everywhere.”
What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming’s twenty-seven-year football scouting career. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him…and refused to speak. “He shook my hand and then didn’t say a word,” said Lemming. (“His hands: they were huge!”) Lemming asked