It was a different office from the one I remembered.
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To me, they seemed to stand for everything that had gone wrong in my childhood, every bad memory, every feeling of hopelessness and loneliness and fear. I never would have dreamed a dozen years ago that I would walk willingly up to those doors. I felt myself breaking into a sweat as I walked up to the doors of the Department of Children's Services office, and it had nothing to do with the fact that it was summertime in Memphis. One of the many challenges for kids navigating the system, Oher says, is a stigma that foster children are "problem kids." Many social workers are too quick to label children, he says: "They think that this kid's bad and … they automatically give them a bad name."īut many young people, Oher argues, "want to do right … and live on the right path. "I was supposed to have been part of it … but I had a strong will and I was not going to be a part of that cycle." "We found numbers that were unbelievable," says Oher. Oher and Yaeger were sobered by what they found - high levels of homelessness and post-traumatic stress syndrome - and very low college attendance rates. Oher wrote the book with assistance from author Don Yaeger, and together they did extensive research on the fate of young people who age out of America's foster care system. I Beat The Odds: From Homelessness, To The Blind Side, And Beyond As Oher heard from more and more former foster children, he realized that sharing his story in his own words had the power to help others. "I started to get so many letters … hundreds and thousands of letters," he says. Oher knew that he needed to do more than just play football to inspire the children looking to him for answers. With the film's tremendous reception - Sandra Bullock won the Oscar for playing Oher's adoptive mother, Leighanne Tuohy - the letters from former foster kids kept piling up. It is a seemingly perfect story, wrapped up in a bow of sporting success. He then went on to become a football star.
#BLIND SIDE MOVIE#
The movie told the tale of a poor (and hulking) kid growing up with a crack-addicted mother, moving from home to home and school to school, until he found familial love and support with an adoptive family. bothered with it."īut Oher isn't just a typical football star - he was the inspiration for the feature film The Blind Side, which won an Academy Award for Best Actress and inspired millions of Americans to take an interest in his story. "I'm a football player first," he tells NPR's Neal Conan. Michael Oher, an offensive tackle for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens, never really wanted to write a book.
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Michael Oher - the inspiration for the feature film The Blind Side - is now an offensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens.