Quezi

“Football Drops” by Audreyjm529. CC-BY.

The Blind Side, the 2009 film featuring Sandra Bullock in a dramatic role, is promoted as a true story — and, indeed, it stays closer to history than many “true” films. It tells the story of Michael Oher, a societal nobody who seemed destined to be a another grim statistic of the slums before he was taken in by the Sean and Leigh Ann Tuohy family of Memphis, Tenn., and eventually became an all-star football player.

As it turns out, the film, as unbelievable as it may seem, isn’t embellished all that much from what really happened. The story of Oher is told in “The Ballad of Big Mike,” a New York Times Magazine book excerpt well worth the read. Most of the differences between the film and the book account are minor, or are details that are alluded to in the film but not spelled out in detail:

• Sean Tuohy actually had some connection with Oher before they brought him to their home for the first time, and he had long taken an interest in poor children.
• Although it is clear from the film that the Tuohys were Christians, they’re a bit more than that, being among the early backers of a major evangelical church in Memphis, and Sean Tuohy is currently on the evangelical Christian speaking circuit.
• The name of the school used in the film is the fictional Wingate Christian School; Oher actually attended Briarcrest Christian School.
• The conservative religiosity of the school is downplayed. Here’s what Oher’s tutor had to say about the school’s employment application form: “The application did not have one question about education. It was all about religion and what I thought about homosexuality and drinking and smoking.”
• In the film, Oher needs a 2.5 grade-point average and ekes out with 2.52. The part about a 2.52 is correct, but in fact he needed a 2.65 average. He was able to raise his grades to that average by getting high school credits through a remote-education program sponsored by Brigham Young University.
• A last-minute snag in getting Oher’s BYU grades accepted by the NCAA is omitted in the film. When Oher’s BYU grades were misplaced, Sean Tuohy threatened to fly in his personal plane to the NCAA offices with the BYU papers and sit in the lobby himself until they were accepted.
• In the film, Sean Tuohy seems like milquetoast. His life story makes that seem improbable.
• The time that it took Oher to be transformed from an ignorant slum kid into someone capable of legitimately graduating from high school was shortened in the film, probably because of the difficulty of portraying the changes in physical maturity for the young characters.
• In the film, Oher is correctly portrayed as having tested with an IQ score of around 80, well below average. And he had been so neglected he knew nothing about basic facts (such as what an ocean is) or of social niceties (such as what shaking hands is). Left unmentioned in the film is that after receiving plenty of nurturing, his IQ score was raised 20 to 30 points — making him of higher than average intelligence.

Overall, the film is about as close to what really happened as you could reasonably hope for (and the quip about the Tuohys having a black son before knowing a Democrat wasn’t made up for the movie). Although The Blind Side has its share of underdog-in-sports film clichés, the movie is inspiring — but no less so than the events it is based on.