Michael M. Lewis Quotes

“He needed overt drama in his life. He was a person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands. He’d played the role for so long that he’d become the role.”

″‘What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,’ he said, ‘was what not to do: beat up a kid. It’s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.‘”

“And by the time he met Big Mike, he had a new unofficial title: Life Guidance Counselor to whatever black athlete stumbled into the Briarcrest Christian School. The black kids reminded him, in a funny way, of himself. Sean knew what it meant to be the poor kid in a private school, because he’d been one himself.”

“When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym, staring at basketball practice, he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.”

“Of course she took him out and bought him clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before, and would do it again.”

″‘God gives people money to see how you’re going to handle it’ she said. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.”

“Once he had his hands inside the Munford player’s shoulder pads, he lifted him off the ground. It was a perfectly legal block, with unusual consequences. He drove the Munford player straight down the field for 15 yards, then took a hard left, toward the Munford sidelines.”

“She’d been taking care of his material needs for a good year and a half, and his emotional ones, to the extent he wanted them taken care of, for almost as long. ‘I love him as if I birthed him,’ she said.”

“Leigh Anne listened to the doctors discuss how bizarrely lucky Sean Junior had been in his collision with the airbag. Then she went back home and relayed the conversation to Michael, who held out his arm. An ugly burn mark ran right down the fearsome length of it. ‘I stopped it,’ he said.”

“A big part of the tutor’s job was to steer the players away from the professors and courses most likely to lead to lack of performance. The majority of the football team wound up majoring in ‘Criminal Justice.’ What Criminal Justice had going for it was that it didn’t require any math or language skills. Criminal Justice classes were also almost always filled with other football players.”

“When asked what he recalls of his first six years, Michael said, ‘Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.‘”

“‘Big Mike was going to drop out,’ said Big Tony. ‘And if he dropped out, he’d be like all his friends who dropped out: dead, in jail, or on the street selling drugs, just waiting to be dead or in jail.‘”

“In 1995, Steve Wallace of the San Francisco 49ers became the first offensive lineman to sign a contract worth $10 million. The quarterback might still get all the glory. But the guy who watched his back would be moving into a bigger house.”

‘His name was Michael Oher, but everyone just called him ‘Big Mike.‘”

“When a star running back or wide receiver is injured, the coaches worry about their game plans. When a star quarterback gets hurt, the coaches worry about their jobs.”

“When the Ole Miss defense gathered in a single room, the only white people were coaches. On the football field the players became honorary white people, but off it they were still black, and unnatural combatants in Mississippi’s white internecine war.”

“‘I lived here my whole life and I’ve never been to this neighborhood.’ And Big Mike finally spoke up. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I got your back.‘”

“From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five.”

″‘We all have fears,’ he said. ‘We all have fears.‘”

“Michael’s gift is that the Good Lord gave him the ability to forget. He’s mad at no one and doesn’t really care what happened. His story might be sad, but he’s not sad.”