Quote:
Originally Posted by GoldenEagle
I have never seen the film, but I think the movie acts like just found him on the street. That is not the case at all.
They adopted him after his freshman year in high school. It was already established he was going to be a heck of a football player.
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Well, sort of. They didn't actually adopt him until late in the NCAA recruiting process, since they had already given him tons of "gifts". The movie does "gloss" (kind word) over the fact that he was already a football player and already on All-American lists, but the fact was at the time he was NOT a very good football player. He was a freakish athlete, so he was being drooled over, but knew very little about football itself. It took a LOT of work to turn him into one.
The movie does also essentially remove Sean Tuohy's role in all this, since he was the first to start helping Michael out with free lunches, something he was also doing for the other handful of poor black kids attending the school. Was he directing all of them to Ole Miss as well?
Granted there is lots of room to be cynical over the whole thing, and maybe everyone and the NCAA are right about it. But there's also a ring of just trying to help someone who really looks like a good kid and just needed some help. The book pulls very few punches over the NCAA, Coach Freeze, Big Tony, and the rest, and certainly broaches the subject. I'd recommend the book highly, it's an interesting read to me, not just on Michael Oher, but for all the other football bits in there.