Blind Side

From homeless to the NFL: Oher's journey to draft unique - USATODAY.com

He was two years old, maybe, he figures. They were walking alone, dangerously on the side of a highway. Just Michael Oher and his brothers. He has no idea where they were headed, or their condition when they arrived. Details are fuzzy.

But he swears it happened. Oher still sees the cars speeding by, a snippet in the back of his mind.

It is the earliest memory of his life.

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"That's all I can remember," Oher, 22, a projected first-round NFL draft pick, said as he tore into a shrimp po' boy last week. "We were trying to get to where we needed to be."

The vision apparently does not haunt, badger or even slightly irritate Oher, a survivor who now tools along highways in a black Hummer. He seeks no explanation.

"It means absolutely nothing now," he says, cheerfully.

Like so many perilous encounters from his life, it rolls more than it lingers.

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Meet Michael Oher (pronounced OAR), a 6-5, 309-pound All-America tackle from the University of Mississippi who is the subject of a best-selling book —The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, which is being turned into a movie — but until a few years ago was legally Michael Williams.

Among 13 siblings from the poorest part of Memphis, he never knew his father, whose murder he learned of months after the fact in high school. His mother, Denise Oher, was addicted to crack cocaine. The kids were scattered about.

Michael attended 11 schools in nine years.If not in a foster home, he lived with friends. He was homeless.

"As I look back on stuff, it's crazy how I got here," he says. "But it didn't seem tough at the time. I just lived day to day, did the best I could."

A turning point came when Tony Henderson, who allowed Michael to crash on his sofa, brought him along when he took his son Steven to enroll at Briarcrest Christian School on the other side of town. Oher ultimately was admitted as a special-needs case.

Another pivotal moment occurred during his first Thanksgiving break, when Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy spotted Oher as they drove past a bus stop near the school. It was snowing. Oher, then 16, was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts.

Sean, then a volunteer assistant basketball coach at the school who had met Oher at the gym, says Leigh Anne grabbed the wheel. Next came a U-turn.

"She cried the second she met him, and it was over," Sean recalls.

The Tuohys took in Oher, allowing him a safety net in their home in upscale East Memphis two blocks from the school. For months he came and went as he pleased, and Leigh Anne worried when he didn't spend the night. They hired a tutor to address severe academic deficiencies, paid his tuition and gave him a wardrobe and other essentials. Sean says the generosity was not the result of any epiphany or even as much as a family meeting.

"We think God sent him to us," Sean says. "Earthly explanations don't make sense."