I Beat the Odds (16 page)

One thing I definitely understood, though, was how the game worked. In the movie
The Blind Side
, you see S.J. teaching me different plays using ketchup bottles and spices. I know stuff like that makes for a good story on screen, but in reality, I already knew the game of football inside and out. Like I said before, I didn’t just watch it as a kid—I studied it, learning the plays and what each position did. When I was struggling with homework at school, studying sports was a subject where I could have been an honors student. I didn’t just learn the rules, but I studied every play and every position, trying to understand strategy and technique. Yeah, it might have taken a little while for me to get used to a new way of playing at Briarcrest, but it wasn’t because I didn’t know what was going on; it was because understanding the how and whys of something is a lot different from doing it in real life.

Learning to play with a lot of structure and a coach who was demanding in a different kind of way was very important, though. What I came to realize is that I would have to be able to do that in order to get to college and to survive there. You can be the best player in the world, but if you are un-coachable because of your attitude, you’ll never get anywhere. Talent will only take you so far. You’ve also got to be willing to work with your team and respect your coach.

In my case, I knew I was good, but I also knew I had a lot more to learn about putting everything I understood about the game into my body and making it totally natural when I played. I also was frustrated a lot because we couldn’t seem to find the right place for me on the team. Everyone said I was a natural-born football player, but no one seemed sure where to play me.

We had to try a bunch of different positions on the defensive line until we finally found the best fit. It was easy to see that right or left tackle was a good place for me, and I could play either one, but once Coach Freeze put me in at left tackle, everything changed. I started to love the game in a way I never knew I could before because I wasn’t just playing a game. I had a responsibility, a job. I was protecting the quarterback, but I also had to watch everyone else in the lineup and guess as to how the charge to the line would play out. I think that after quarterback, of course, left tackle is the biggest intellectual challenge in the entire game.

Some people may think after watching the movie that I’m a dumb kid who just blocks well, but I’d like to see any of them try to stand in as left tackle for even one play, and see how effective they are at reading the defensive line. This isn’t a position for dummies. I could tell that right away, and after each game, my brain felt almost as sweaty as my body. It was a workout for my mind, and I hit the showers feeling like I’d just finished reading some huge book, which was a great feeling.

Just like in basketball, though, I kept running into challenges with pointless calls by some refs. The rules required that your jersey had to stay tucked into your pants, but mine was never long enough, so it would always come out during games, no matter how many times I kept tucking it in. The rules also were very specific, for some reason, about the bottom of the shirt having a finished seam. Once Leigh Anne saw that this was an ongoing problem for me and that the refs seemed to be hung up on calling me out for this, she took my jerseys to a professional seamstress who sews curtains and other things for her decorating business. They got some jersey fabric and added about five or six inches onto the bottom of all of my football shirts and made sure that the edge was perfectly sewn in a professional seam. It was great! I could tuck my jersey into my football pants and not worry about it. I didn’t have to constantly check to make sure all the edges were tucked back in between every single block, or to make sure that the bottom didn’t sneak out when I got into position to run the next play.

At first, all of the excitement over my skills on the field seemed a little crazy. I knew I had been blessed with athletic talent, but I still thought of myself as a basketball player who just happened to be good at football, too. My stats started to climb, and I soon realized what a lot of college coaches were seeing: I was just about the toughest left tackle around. During my two years of varsity football at Briarcrest, I didn’t allow a single sack.

By the time recruiting visits started up my senior year, I was totally overwhelmed by the attention. I kept finding my name in the national rankings for high school recruits—ranking systems and top ten lists I didn’t even know existed. Suddenly, it seemed like every college around was beating on my door to get me to go there, when just a few years before it had been a bit of a fight just to get into high school.

It was a challenge, meeting all of those important coaches. I’ve always been shy, but I was especially nervous about sitting down and having a conversation with them. I was nervous about traveling overnight to visit the schools. All those old doubts about trusting people began to sneak back in. What would they think of me? They all knew my background—would they decide I’m not the kind of person they want on their team? And what about my manners? The last thing I wanted was to come off as ignorant.

That was a big issue in the Tuohy house. Leigh Anne threw herself into the task of making sure I knew my way around a fancy dinner table and that I had a good sense of what certain restaurant dishes were. We would go out to different fancy restaurants in town and we would order pretty much everything on the menu. She’d explain to me a little about each dish, and I’d try to get an idea of what it tasted like and how to handle it on my plate. Her goal wasn’t to “fix” me, as if not knowing those things somehow made me broken. Not at all. She just wanted to make sure that I would feel comfortable in any situation, and I am glad that she did. Now I can walk into any interview, any nice restaurant, any sporting event, and feel confident about how I come across.

It might sound like a silly thing to worry about with football coaches coming to town. A coach doesn’t care if you know the difference between the different forks in a place setting or if your tie comes from Walmart or Brooks Brothers. They really don’t. It’s not about impressing them with fashion or flashy jewelry or a nice house—I guarantee you that any Division I coach is probably richer than 99 percent of the kids he recruits. They aren’t there to be impressed by anything about you except the fact that you are a good athlete and a reliable player.

But I came to understand that first impressions do matter, and as a college athlete, you are ultimately a representative of your team, your coach, your program, and your school. The same is true wherever you go in life, whatever your job may be. There is a right way and a wrong way to act in different settings. It is so important to have a basic working understanding of etiquette. You can’t act the same way in a McDonald’s as you would in a fine dining restaurant. You can’t talk to a coach the same way you would talk to your friends. It is so important to have a sense of the situation and what kind of behavior it requires. It’s not a matter of snobbery; it’s a matter of understanding how the world works and showing your smarts by picking up on the difference of each setting.

It is a lesson I am very, very grateful for because it is definitely something I had never even considered when I was living in my old neighborhood, and it makes a big difference—fair or not—in how other people see you. It is the same reason that I always care about ironing my clothes and taking care of my appearance. I want to give the impression of being put-together and respectable. Commentator Chris Collinsworth made a remark to Bob Costas when they were doing the commentary for a Ravens game one time that when you first met me you’d think I had just left the local country club. I appreciated that because it meant that I came across as polite and intelligent.

When I sat down with each of those college coaches or went on those recruiting visits, I wanted to make sure that they knew what they would be getting in me: a guy who would play his heart out and give every ounce of effort to the game, but also someone who would represent the program well. After all, this wasn’t just a game to me. This was my life’s goal of achieving something better turning into reality.

In the end, after visits to several schools and meetings with a lot of coaches, I picked the University of Mississippi. Tennessee and Oklahoma were both schools I liked a lot, but in the end, I was most comfortable about being closest to the community I’d become a part of. Just like I had wanted to go wherever Steve went to high school, I wanted to be near wherever Collins went to college, close enough to see S.J.’s baseball games, close enough for Leigh Anne and Sean to come to my football games. I had been separated once before from the family I loved. Now I finally was part of a stable family, and had good mentors, good support, and a lot of people who believed in me. I wasn’t about to give all of that up to start over again somewhere else.

 

 

MY SENIOR YEAR, my mother started trying to make it to a lot of my Briarcrest games, sometimes bringing one of my brothers or Craig along, too. Before Senior Night for football, Leigh Anne gave her money to pick out a nice church dress to wear as the seniors were escorted out on the field by their parents. Tony was driving my mother over and they were running late. The announcer had gotten to just before the Os and they still weren’t there, so Sean and Leigh Anne brought me back in line to the Ts, where they were waiting to walk out with Collins. Just before they called us up, I spotted my mother running across the track in a gold dress. She was out of breath as she took my arm, but she made it and I walked out on the field with her on one side and the Tuohy family on the other.

That was me, my life. My past and my future were there on each side of me as we walked into the middle of the football field. I had come from one family and been welcomed into another—many others, including the Hendersons, the Franklins, the Tuohys, and the Briarcrest family at large. I smiled as I looked up at the crowd in the bleachers who were cheering for me because I knew I was home.

A
s my senior year got under way in the fall of 2004, and I was meeting with all those coaches to decide on which college to attend, I was so excited about my future. I had reached my full height of six feet four, and my weight matched that so I wasn’t just big or just tall and I looked like a man instead of a boy inside the body of a football player. But football alone wasn’t going to get me to college, and it certainly wasn’t going to help me graduate. My body finally may have slowed down growing, but my mind still was racing at a hundred miles an hour, hungry for whatever subject I was studying. That was where Miss Sue came in.

I can’t talk enough about the time and work Miss Sue put into helping me. She is retired now, but she deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. She was such a hugely important part of my success both in high school and in college because she was the one who really gave me the confidence to know that I
could
learn, which is the first step in beating the odds.

Sue Mitchell was an Ole Miss grad and a high school English teacher who had been teaching in the Memphis schools since long before I was even born, so she knew what she was doing and she knew how different people study. She was the perfect person to help me tackle my classes.

As one of the most important parts of my support structure, Miss Sue shared my short-term and longer-term vision for myself. My goals were to 1) graduate high school, 2) qualify to play NCAA football, 3) go to college, and 4) play in the NFL. Looking at me on paper with my still-too-low GPA, those goals must have seemed impossible. But Miss Sue didn’t judge me based on my transcripts and she didn’t make assumptions based on my past. She looked at me as a person, as someone who was determined to do whatever it took to succeed, and she believed in me—truly believed in me—from day one. She didn’t treat me in a patronizing way, like I was some little kid who needed applause or a crazy person with impossible dreams. She encouraged me and cheered me on, but she also kicked me in the butt and made me buckle down when that was what I needed, too. And I responded to that because I knew that she wasn’t doing it for show. She believed that I had it in me to do what I wanted to do because I’d already come so much further than anyone would have ever expected me to.

 

 

ONCE I MOVED in with the Tuohys permanently, Sean and Leigh Anne decided to look around for a tutor to work with me in the evenings to help me get my grades up to where they needed to be for college. Miss Sue was the person who stepped up and started coming over to the house, five nights a week for four hours at a time. Since I had sports practice after school, we usually didn’t get started on my homework until after six, and many nights we’d work until after ten. Sunday through Thursday (since I had games on Friday nights), she would sit down at the big dining room table with me and we would tackle my class assignments one by one.

I would read things on my own; we would read things out loud together; she would make me take notes on whatever we discussed and then encourage me to review them before going into class the next day. She also knew I was good at memorization, I guess because of having to remember the playbook in football, so we did a lot of memorization work to help me get the material in my head and then convert it into my own words to make that knowledge my own.

I don’t know how many hours she spent going over things until I really got them. I wasn’t just interested in learning for a test and moving on. I needed to know that I could learn whatever was necessary to succeed. Sometimes it took a while, but she never lost her patience. Well, she probably did lose her patience, but she never showed it.

The whole family got into that—especially Sean. He loves poetry and jumped at the chance to talk about it. Collins made sure her schedule matched with some of my classes so that we were able to study together, too. Everyone around me was pitching in to help me reach a potential I never knew I had. I mean, I never doubted that I could do whatever I set my mind to, but I had no idea that I could accomplish so much academically. But as we made parallels to my own life, sports, and other things that were more real to me than just the words on the page, all kinds of connections started to click. It was like a whole new world was opening up and I began to understand and appreciate science and literature as more than just subjects in school.