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Written by Brendan O’Meara
I finished The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. I was worried the book would be too much like the movie (which I haven’t seen, but the previews were enough for me to avoid it), that it would be all about Leigh-Anne Tuoly and her savior mentality for rescuing Michael Oher from poverty and propelled him to the heights of the NFL.
The book uses Oher as a vehicle to tell the story of the book’s subtitle: Evolution of a Game. The book’s opening chapter is its highlight: a several-page breakdown of a single play. One single play. Most of you have seen it. I have not and will not for fear of vomiting on my keyboard. The scene is when Lawrence Taylor, a linebacker for the New York Giants, tackled Joe Theisman, quarterback for the Washington Redskins, and compound fractured Theisman’s tibia and ended his career.
Taylor blitzed off his right side, a right-handed quarterback’s blind side. He terrorized quarterbacks and in the Darwinian evolution of football’s offensive line, put a selective pressure on the line to change. Namely, the left tackle.
Lewis masterfully crafts what is essentially a magazine piece around this one play that changed the game of football. One play. He builds a story around this with the players and coaches involved.
This can happen anywhere. The story of one hit, one run, one drive (several plays), an orange, etc. The beauty of nonfiction lies in the power of narrative expansion, to be able to lift what seems on its surface to be a mundane happenstance to a truly compelling story.
All it takes is a hunger and to be one helluva reporter.
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