#Elementary football story cracked#
#Elementary football story movie#
#Elementary football story crack#

Still, the school football coach was interested in Oher, not just as a prospect for the team but as a redemption story. Getty Images A chance trip to a prestigious private school changed his life… eventually Michael Oher stands with his family during senior ceremonies prior to an Ole Miss game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs in November 2008.

#Elementary football story cracked#

He barely spoke during interviews, his reading comprehension level was closer to elementary school and tests showed he had an IQ that barely cracked 80. Having spent his life just trying to survive, getting into an expensive private school wasn’t really on Oher’s radar. He was so quiet, in fact, that Briarcrest’s admissions team couldn’t really find a reason to admit him, let alone offer him a scholarship. 'He was real quiet, you know, and just stayed to himself.' 'He wasn't no trouble kid, nothing like that, you know?' Henderson later told ABC News. He was less of a desirable prospect for prestigious private schools, but when Tony took his son Steven to the local Briarcrest Christian School, Big Mike, as he was called, tagged along for the ride anyway. Oher was already 6-foot-5-inches and 350 pounds, which made him a prime recruit for drug dealers seeking some muscle. The most stable home he had was in a housing project called Hurt Village, where he lived from 11-years-old until he began high school.īy the time he was 15, Oher was bunking up with a local athletic program director named Tony Henderson, who had an extra room in his house. With little adult supervision or stability, Oher barely made it to school - he repeated both first and second grade, attended nine different schools over the course of 11 years and missed dozens of school days per year even when he was passed along to the next grade.

Child services removed him and his siblings from their mother’s home when Oher was at the tail end of first grade, and he bounced around between foster families, friends’ couches and wherever else he could find a warm place to rest his head. The problem was that she was rarely off drugs and working, so Oher was a nomad from an early age. 'When my mother was off drugs and working, she would remember to buy groceries and there would be a mad scramble to grab whatever you could before anyone else got to it,' he wrote in his 2014 memoir. His father disappeared early on, while his mother, Denise, struggled with addiction for many years. He was one of 12 children born to a mother who had fallen victim to the cheap and ultra-addictive narcotic, which set him along a troubled path from the start.

#Elementary football story crack#

Oher was born in 1986, right smack in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic that swept the United States’ inner cities. Oher’s birth parents were troubled addicts In some ways, the real story is even more amazing than what was shown in the movie. A smash hit that made over $300 million at the box office, the film won Bullock an Oscar but took some liberties with the particulars of Oher’s life story. The movie, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, traced Oher’s journey from homeless teenager to Division I All-American left tackle for Ole Miss.

#Elementary football story movie#

Michael Oher may be the only Super Bowl champion to be more famous for being a character in a movie than, well, being a Super Bowl champion football player.Īfter all, it’s hard to outshine Sandra Bullock.īefore Oher spent eight years in the NFL, he was one of the subjects of acclaimed author Michael Lewis’ 2006 book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and then the sole focus of its big-screen adaptation, The Blind Side.