There are some situations in which everyone involved comes out looking bad, and that clearly seems the case regarding the controversy surrounding former college and pro football star Michael Oher. What was once considered the ultimate “feel-good” story about a family adopting a young man and helping him become a successful and productive adult has instead been called a lie and sham, and cited as another case of the exploitation of a gullible young Black athlete. When the film “The Blind Side” was released in 2009, the story of how Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, a Mississippi couple, took into their family a gifted but direction less athlete and gave him the motivation and desire to reach the NFL earned an Oscar for Sandra Bullock.
But last Monday, Oher, who in fairness has been critical of the film for many years, filed a bombshell petition. It claimed that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy put him under a legal conservatorship in the summer of 2004 without his informed consent. His petition alleges that the conservatorship gave the Tuohys “total control” over Oher’s ability to “negotiate for or enter any contract,” and claims that the Tuohys and their children made millions of dollars in royalties from “The Blind Side.”
According to the petition, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who invited Oher to live with them in July 2004, saw Oher as a “gullible young man whose athletic talent could be exploited for their own benefit.”
Oher also alleges he never saw any profit from “The Blind Side,” which “would not have existed without him,” though the film made more than $300 million dollars worldwide.
Instead, Oher’s petition claims that the Tuohys negotiated “a contract price of $225,000 plus 2.5% of all future ‘Defined Net Proceeds’ for themselves and their natural-born children with Twentieth Century Fox. The filing also states that Oher gave away his life rights to the production company without payment because “nobody ever presented this contract to him with any explanation” of what he was doing.
Per Monday’s filing, Oher is seeking an end to the conservatorship, which was meant to end when he was 25 years old. The 37-year-old is also seeking compensation plus interest based on the money he believes the Tuohys received from the success of “The Blind Side” and the sale of his life rights, along with compensatory and punitive damages.
The Tuohys have disputed those claims, with Sean Tuohy telling The Daily Memphian that the Tuohy family didn’t make “any money” from the film adaptation of ‘The Blind Side.’ He said that Michael Lewis — who wrote the book upon which the film was based — gave the family half of what he made from the book, and they split the money five ways, giving Oher “about $14,000.”
Regarding the conservatorship, Sean Tuohy said that it was put in place to satisfy the National College Athletic Association so that Oher could play football at the University of Mississippi. He said attorneys told him he couldn’t adopt Oher at the time because, at 18, he was considered a legal adult.
On Wednesday, a lawyer for the Tuohys told reporters that the couple is ready to end the conservatorship and plans to enter into a consent order to end it, the Associated Press reported.
Different folks from across the spectrum have weighed in, and the Tuohy’s son has even made an accusation that implied Oher engaged in attempted extortion, alleging that Oher asked for an exorbitant amount of money prior to filing the petition. Quinton Aaron, the actor who portrayed Oher in the film, has defended Bullock against charges from various online types that she should return her Oscar for engaging in a “false portrayal.” Black sports journalists Jim Trotter and Bill Rhoden have blasted the original film as “typical white savior” stuff, and called the entire situation emblematic of how Black athletes frequently are exploited because they sign documents in good faith given them by whites who don’t have their best interests at heart.
Author Michael Lewis has claimed everyone involved in the film, including Oher, has been cheated thanks to the questionable Hollywood accounting system. “Everybody should be mad at the Hollywood studio system,” Lewis said. “Michael Oher should join the writers strike. It’s outrageous how Hollywood accounting works, but the money is not in the Tuohys’ pockets.”
According to Lewis, Twentieth Century Fox, as it was then known, paid $250,000 for the option to make “The Blind Side” a movie, which he split 50-50 with the Tuohy family. The Tuohys have said they split their share evenly, including with Oher. After taxes and agent fees, Lewis said, his half was around $70,000.
Lewis claims that the film made around half a billion dollars, but the equity stake in the movie was not as lucrative as it would appear. In fact, he said, he had called his own representatives at Creative Artists Agency over the years, following the movie’s success, asking about his share of the profits. Lewis said that ultimately after agent fees and taxes, he and the Tuohy family received around $350,000 each from the profits of the movie. Lewis said the Tuohys planned to share the royalties among the family members, including Oher, but Oher began declining his royalty checks.. Lewis said he believed the Tuohy family had deposited Oher’s share in a trust fund for Oher’s son.
Oher has refused additional comment on the story, asking for privacy and saying that the legal filing “speaks for itself.” But Lewis also has emerged from the situation not looking very good. Some comments from interviews he gave around the time of the book’s publication offer a less than flattering portrait of how he viewed Michael Oher. During one talk for instance, Lewis said this to an audience:
“Google him now, he’s on the dean’s list at Ole Miss, which says a lot about the dean’s list at Ole Miss,” leading to laughs from the Mountain View audience.
Then Lewis added: “There are schools like Ole Miss, and Ole Miss isn’t even the best example, they seem mainly to exist to sustain a football team. And then they take these kids, many of whom are from the underclass — poor black kids from ghettos around America — and let them into the school. … And then they make a track for them inside the school — and the track is not designed for them to get an education or even to engage with the school outside the football team.” Lewis subsequently accused Black athletes of majoring in criminal justice because it’s an easy degree, saying “all the poor black kids are majoring in criminal justice,” but he tried to praise Oher later in the conversation for engaging in his studies. Oher eventually received his degree from Ole Miss.
Sure, you can argue that times and people change, and what someone said many years ago shouldn’t necessarily be held against them today. But those are not enlightened, nor favorable comments from a white author about a Black athlete whose life story he profited from, whether he got everything he should have materially or not.
Finally, the question also needs to be asked of Michael Oher and by extension all Black athletes: are you getting quality management and representation, and are you carefully reading and examining all documents before you sign them?
Ultimately, this looks like a sad story all around. Only time will tell how it turns out.
