This family 100% lied about him being adopted. She identified herself on advertisements for her $50,000 speaking engagements as his “adoptive mother”.
Reading this article makes them more despicable to me. Would Sean Tuohy sign off on a script that depicted a birth child in such a demeaning way? No, he wouldn’t.
And to hear a bunch of rich white people continually bring up that the Tuohys bought Michael a truck - a truck! How ungrateful can he be?!
My hope is that Michael can find peace. But I don’t t think he sounds ungrateful - I think he sounds heartbroken and confused and I get it.
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RE: the college tutor, was this a tutor before college or while in college? Because as a scholarship athlete in a big time program, there would have been a stable of tutors available to student-athletes provided by the athletic dept.
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Per the movie, the tutor was in high school and then college (with my assumption that Tuhoy paid for both).
Per linked article, I see now that the her college tutoring was actually done via university program. “ Her work with Oher didn’t end once he began attending Mississippi. Mitchell retired from teaching and moved to Oxford, Miss., to be near family, and she then accepted a position with the University of Mississippi as a learning specialist. From 2005 to 2009, Mitchell worked for the athletic department, tutoring Oher and other athletes with similar backgrounds.”
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I read both Ohre books. There is no question that the movie changed things, but I actually think they made him look smart, that he was able to basically raise himself and that he mostly lived in the projects, in Hurt Village when in fact the only times he went to school was when he was living in foster care (not always a good situation either as at least one home had them sleeping on wood boards and not getting food. He couldn’t read when he went into high school, or at least read at above a 3rd/4th grade level.
One thing the movie didn’t do well was that he was a good athlete going into high school but the coaches at the public school knew he wouldn’t make grades to play, and that as soon as he couldn’t play, he’d drop out. They got him into the private school and through all those private tutors and extra help they kept him eligible to play and eligible for college. Of course, he had to take classes on the BYU online school to become NCAA eligible.
IMO, the Tuohy’s did the conservatorship to get around the NCAA rules, not to take advantage of him or steal his money. The Tuohy’s didn’t get much money for the book (they were just sources, not authors) or the movie contracts. If anything, they failed him by not getting enough in a contract, but no one knew the book would be any good or that there would BE a movie. The author had written several other books and not made money off them. Then had wrote Moneyball and this one, and along came Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock and everyone is saying the Tuohys stole his money.
He’s suing them now for something that didn’t exist (NIL) when he was in the NCAA. They COULDN"T have paid for his tutors and the truck and given him clothing and food. If they would have been deemed boosters, he couldn’t have taken a scholarship at Ole Miss. The only way they could provide financial support for him was to do the conservatorship.
Was Michael tricked? He might have been too quick to accept the help, the free airplane trips, the truck but he knew it was the only way to get what he wanted, which was to play in the NCAA. In the book(s), he says it was always his decision of where to go to college (or if to go). It was his decision to return for his 4th year, and that part of that decision was because he’d gotten into some trouble and Sean got him out of it. Some of his decisions were made because of where his friends were going to college, and where Hugh Freeze was going to be.
Absolutely the Tuohys were boosters and wanted him to go to Ole Miss, but they didn’t get him into the private high school, just became his sponsors after he was already playing at the school.
In the books Michael wrote, he makes it clear that the decisions on where to go to college, how many years to play, who his agents and attorneys were he made for himself (of course he looked to the Touhys for guidance, but he hired his own).
Did the Touhys do a pretty bad job as conservators? I think so. They should have petitioned the court to dissolve the conservatorship, they should have filed accountings, but they did a bad job and just wanted Ohre to go to college and play football. And he did. And he treated them as family and called the Touhys as soon as there was any trouble or if he needed help.
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One thing that no one has mentioned. I agree with above that the conservatorship was done to avoid breaking NCAA rules for boosters. It also sound like it was only recently dissolved and that was agreed upon by the Toughy’s.
However, no one has said they executed any of the privileges of the conservatorship since college. No one has claimed that they tried to control his NFL contracts or anything since. I’m guessing that they didn’t dissolve it earlier because it was actually a non issue so it never occurred to anyone to do anything about it.
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The didn’t use it during college. They set it up quickly in the fall of his senior year (he only really moved in in May, before that he’d stayed with them occasionally) so that he could sign his NLI in February. They set it up, the NCAA was okay with it, and that was it. They never filed the (required) accountings. They didn’t use it at all, and should have cancelled it once he was in college and doing fine.
Exactly. They didn’t use it at all! So they didn’t use it to take advantage of him. It was a non issue.
Except for Michael Oher.
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The Tuohys read the script for the white savior movie prior to it being made ( financed by their inner circle). Sean Tuohy bragged about negotiating and reading the script ahead of time. This movie portrays Michael Ohre as basically mute, with no athletic knowledge or ability and no one else in his corner - all untrue.
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I agree the movie portrayed him as having no sports knowledge (he really knew more about basketball). The original Blind Side book concentrated a lot on the position of tackle, other players like Lawrence Taylor, sort of the politics of hs to college to pro football. But Ohre’s view that the book had him drafted at a lower number doesn’t ring true to me. Not that many had read the book, and he was already drafted and playing for Baltimore before the movie came out. He’d hired his own agent and lawyer by then. He was still involved with the Tuohys at that time and LeighAnn helped him with his apartment and the son spent a lot of time with him there. In Ohre’s first book, he has nothing negative to say about the Tuohys.
He has his side, they have theirs, but school records do back up a lot of what the book/movie shows, that he didn’t have the grades to play football or basketball, that he had to have tutoring to get through hs and get into college, and the Tuohys paid for that. If they hadn’t have done something like the conservatorship (probably didn’t have time to do an adoption or even becoming licensed foster parents), he could not have gone to Ole Miss. Ohre says that’s where he wanted to go. Maybe he was tricked, I don’t know, but he says he chose it and chose to stay for a 4th year.
Remember this was at a time when the NCAA didn’t allow any funds from boosters to be given to athletes - no cash, no cars, no food, no jobs in the summer or school year. He could have taken a scholarship from another school but couldn’t take any money from those boosters or alums or coaches - no extra cash, no travel money, no extra food (at the time they ate at training tables). The Tuohys were still providing things for him through college -the extra food, the truck, cash, travel money. He probably would have received a Pell grant if someone had helped him fill out the FAFSA but he would have needed to use that for travel and extra food. Maybe the Tuohys would have helped him with money if he’d gone to another school, and I think they would have, but who knows. There was no NIL at that time, so not sure he could have contracted for his story on his own at the time. As it was, this was a family story so not a violation of ‘selling’ the story of an amateur athlete.
I’ve read the Blind Side (and articles about the author), both Ohre books, and seen the movie dozens of times. Ohre felt the movie made him look dumb and he of course has a right to that opinion, but I didn’t see it like that at all. I thought it made him look like a survivor, as street smart enough to get himself opportunities. I also know how much it took to get my kids into college, one a recruited athlete, and I don’t think Ohre could have done it on his own.
If he hadn’t gone to the private school, he never would have played one down of football because he didn’t have the grades to play in public school and no one was getting him academically ready. He would have dropped out; he had NO credits after freshman year, and could only read at about a 4th grade level. He wasn’t immediately accepted to the private school as a sophomore so went to a special (public) high school, and he wasn’t passing there. The private hs principal did admit him midyear after several people looking out for him (including a coach who wanted him for athletics) if he didn’t get some academic help, he was going to drop out. It didn’t have to be the Tuohys, but it had to be someone helping him (and it wasn’t the Tuohys at that time).
But the question is was Ohre hurt by the Tuohys helping him? Would he have gotten a better deal if he’d been on his own in hs, if the Tuohys had just said done nothing when he was in hs, or done what they did in hs but then said ‘Well, off you go. Unfortunately, you can’t go to Ole Miss because we are boosters and we gave you clothes and food and a place to stay. But you can go to other schools so off you go.’
If they not done the conservatorship (and I think everyone agrees that they did a bad job of that and the NCAA shouldn’t have accepted that as enough), he could not have gone to Ole Miss, and that’s what he said he wanted at the time.
The Tuohys didn’t make much off the book or movie. LeighAnn did make some off the speaking tour, but so did Ohre.
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I finally read (rather than skimming which I had done before) the NY Times magazine article. This is from the very end:
The lawsuit, it seemed to me, is part of a different kind of rebuilding project, an effort to make himself emotionally whole. Several times he referred to having been “robbed” by the Tuohys, which I came to understand as having a double meaning: robbed of money and perhaps, even more so, robbed of an identity.
But why had it taken him so long to go public and file the laws Why now? “Pro football’s a hard job,” he said. “You have to be locked in 100 percent. I went along with their narrative because I really had to focus on my N.F.L. career, not things off the field.” Away from the game, his focus turned to what he believed was his fair share of the money generated by the movie and the myths spawned by it.
“For a long time, I was so angry mentally,” he said. “With what I was going through. I want to be the person I was before ‘The Blind Side,’ personality-wise. I’m still working on it.”
I can understand his feeling of betrayal–most of all, he is hurt by the degree to which the Tuohys considered the relationship to be transactional alongside whatever affection they had for him. That comes out in the movie in the ways it denigrates him by minimizing his strengths, his humanity, that existed before the Tuohys were aware of his existence.
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Except he wrote two books during that time, got married, had children, went on the lecture circuit.
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It seems to me that absorbing the knowledge that your so-called adoptive parents looked at you as the ultimate money-making machine could take quite a while. For sure he was leading a successful personal and professional life, but trauma can bounce around throughout a lifetime. Again IMHO–none of us, as far as I know, are acquainted personally with the Ohers or the Touhys.
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You think the Tuohys made (or even ever expected to make) more money from their association with Oher than from their regular jobs, including selling a restaurant chain for $213M?
They may have achieved much improved social standing as a result of the book and movie, but financially it’s irrelevant to them.
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The amount is not the source of trauma. The transactional nature of how they viewed the kid they took in (as opposed to more normal parent-child relationships) is the problem.
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You used the phrase “ultimate money-making machine”. We don’t know if Oher ever thought that the Tuohys had “looked at” him like that. But if he did believe that at any point, then he was very likely wrong.
How so? They are still making money (and attaining glory) off him today.
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Leigh Anne Tuohy to this day refers to herself as the Blindside Mom and his adoptive mother on advertisements for her availability for speaking engagements.
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But she was already rich, so she couldn’t possibly be motivated by attaining even more fame or more money. As if rich people can’t possibly be greedy or attention seeking.
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