{"id":632,"date":"2006-09-25T10:48:27","date_gmt":"2006-09-25T10:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/25\/the-problem-of-big-mike\/"},"modified":"2006-09-25T10:48:27","modified_gmt":"2006-09-25T10:48:27","slug":"the-problem-of-big-mike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/25\/the-problem-of-big-mike\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of Big Mike"},"content":{"rendered":"

We get the Sunday New York Times<\/cite> delivered every week (which accounts for the higher-than-usual number of stories from the Times<\/cite> that I link on Sundays…), and I read most of it, but I usually run out of steam before I get to the Magazine, unless the cover story really grabs me. This week was one of those times, with their profile of Michael Oher<\/a>. I’m bothered by this particular story, in a way that’s a little hard to explain, so I’m going to babble about it here a bit, and see where that leads.<\/p>\n

On the surface, it’s a really heartwarming story. Michael Oher is a poor black kid from the slums of Memphis, and the article tells about how a series of people went out of their way to help him. He was admitted to a good Christian school in the suburbs, and basically adopted by a well-off white family, who worked overtime to help him make up for his lack of education. They even got him a private tutor, and now he’s a sophomore in college.<\/p>\n

He’s also a 6’5″, 330 lb highly-regarded left tackle<\/a>. And that’s pretty much where I start to have a problem with this.<\/p>\n

(Continued below the fold…)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong– the story is great. Oher’s parents were casualties of drugs, and his past is more or less lost– he won’t talk much about it, and the records are sketchy. The staff at Briarcrest Christian School took a big chance by letting him enroll. The Tuohy family’s actions in taking him in look like the very best of Christian charity– Sean Tuohy arranged for him to get free lunches, and Leigh Anne Tuohy started buying him clothes after seeing him walking through the snow in shorts and a T-shirt because those were the only things he owned. They took him into their own home after finding out that he was more or less homeless, sleeping over at different classmates’ houses, and carrying his belongings in trash bags. They’re a wonderful counter to the notion that born-again white folks in the South are all ignorant rednecks.<\/p>\n

And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that had this appeared on the sports pages of the Times<\/cite>, it might’ve had a very different slant. Oher carried a D average into his senior year of high school, and the Tuohys hired a private tutor to help him get A’s and B’s. When his GPA was still below NCAA requirements, they arranged for him to wipe out a bunch of bad grades through correspondence courses at BYU (leading to my favorite quote from the article: “‘The Mormons may be going to hell,’ Sean says. ‘But they really are nice people.'”), to get him eligible to play at Ole Miss. The courses he used for this purpose sound a little dodgy, and the NCAA investigated, but eventually cleared him, after some badgering by Sean Tuohy.<\/p>\n

Were this story to turn up in the Sports section, you might expect it to be yet another tale of academic abuses by the athletic department. It’s got all the usual hallmarks– the sudden change from D student to Honor Roll in the crucial last year of high school, the dodgy prep courses, the wealthy booster smoothing the way. If you look at the photo credits for the article, you’ll even find that Michael Oher’s high-school coach is now an assistant at Mississippi, another classic sketchy recruiting move.<\/p>\n

And yet, in the Magazine, and the book the article is based on, it’s presented as a straight-up heart-warming human-interest story. It’s a touching story about a kid who caught a break from some nice folks, and who just happens to be a football prodigy.<\/p>\n

I don’t mean to minimize what the people who helped Michael Oher out did. Even if they did personally benefit from helping him, or stand to benefit from it down the road, they did a great thing for him, and deserve to be commended for it.<\/p>\n

But I can’t help wondering how many kids there are out there in Michael Oher’s situation who aren’t<\/strong> future NFL prospects, and whether anybody is picking them up while they trudge through the snow in shorts. How many people are bending the rules to give a scrawny 5’4″ girl a spot at an exclusive Christian academy? How many kids are out there mired in poverty and squalor, who won’t get the same shot that Michael Oher got, because their talents are less visible? What about the kids who could’ve been great musicians, or mathematicians, or doctors, but weren’t noticed?<\/p>\n

Michael Oher has been given a rare shot to make a good life for himself, through the generosity of others, because he has prodigious athletic gifts that will make some team a whole lot of money. It’s great to see him get that shot, and I hope he makes the most of it.<\/p>\n

It’s presented as an uplfting human interest story, and there’s certainly plenty of uplifting material. And Michael Oher was certainly lifted up. At the same time, though, we should spare a thought for the kids who are left behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We get the Sunday New York Times delivered every week (which accounts for the higher-than-usual number of stories from the Times that I link on Sundays…), and I read most of it, but I usually run out of steam before I get to the Magazine, unless the cover story really grabs me. This week was… Continue reading The Problem of Big Mike<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,31,28,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class_issues","category-football","category-politics","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}