OHER’S ODYSSEY

JACKSON, MISS. —  When Michael Oher sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, there was turkey, dressing, potatoes and all the other traditional trimmings, including family.

Five years ago, the Mississippi left tackle couldn’t have counted on that.

One of 13 children born to a crack-addicted mother and the son of an absentee father who was murdered, Oher was a ghost with no permanent home, little education and no hope for a future.

Today, his is a life transformed. Oher’s a member of a rich family, a high-profile future NFL draft pick, a student who takes education seriously and the subject of a bestselling book.

Oher grew up in Memphis, Tenn., where he attended Briarcrest Christian and first met the Tuohy family. When Leigh Anne Tuohy saw him walking down the street wearing shorts in winter, she bought him new clothes and a jacket. She fed him and began to help with schoolwork. Before long, he was living with the family. By his senior year, the family adopted him and wrote him into the will.

“Without her I wouldn’t be here today,” Oher said. “She was the first one that loved me, the first one that cared about me, the first one to take me in. I owe a lot of stuff to her. I love her. She’s an amazing person. She’s just incredible.”

Sean Tuohy, whom Oher refers to as “Pops,” said the amazing transformation depicted in Michael Lewis’ “The Blind Side” reminds him just how far his adopted son has come.

“It’s impossible to imagine,” Tuohy said. “It is absolutely. And if you deal with it every day, you don’t see it.”

Lewis had a hard time believing the Tuohy-Oher story too.

Already interested in the changes in the NFL that have made left tackles some of the sport’s richest and most-coveted players, Lewis discovered Oher through former grade school schoolmate Tuohy.

“The contrast was so stark,” Lewis said from his Berkeley home. “I guess he could’ve been adopted by Donald Trump or Madonna. But apart from that he went from about the bottom to about the top. That was really to me very appealing.”

Oher was plucked from his desperate childhood by Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took charge of the 6-foot-5, 350-pound teenager’s life.

“I couldn’t think of a social class below Michael Oher,” Lewis said. “He was living essentially amid the underclass. But even in the underclass he was at the bottom. That that kind of child poverty exists in our society is shameful. I was shocked by it.”

So was Leigh Anne Tuohy. So, she did something about it.

All her work, especially helping Oher with his school work, allowed Oher to play organized sports for the first time in his life.

He really only wanted to play basketball so he could be just like Michael Jordan. But once he stepped on a football field, he became a national sensation -- long before he really knew how to play the game.

As Lewis tells it, prep scout Tom Lemming first saw Oher play on a grainy piece of game tape. But his size and explosiveness shone right through.

It was enough for Lemming to travel to Memphis in the spring of 2004 to interview Oher. For his efforts, he got nothing. Oher didn’t say a word. Not one.

No matter. Lemming still declared Oher the next big thing.

Almost overnight, he was the top-rated offensive line prospect in the nation with hundreds of letters from college recruiters in his mailbox, dozens of scholarship offers and a parade of coaches marching through the living room.

“He became effective on the football field the exact day he began being recruited,” Sean Tuohy said of Oher’s transition from basketball to football. “There was never a lead up. There was never time to wonder what schools were going to recruit him. He went from being a Division II basketball recruit to Michigan and Notre Dame writing letters.”

Oher wound up at Ole Miss for a lot of reasons, including his parents’ ties to the university. Sean Tuohy had been a point guard at the school, Leigh Anne a cheerleader. And their eldest child, daughter Collins, had plans to enroll at the Oxford, Miss., university the next year.

But the book’s rehashing of the recruiting process, including a fruitless NCAA investigation, was tough for the Tuohys to relive.

“There’s not very many secrets in my life anyway,” Sean Tuohy said. “A lot of this, people in Dallas know about now. But the people in Oxford, they probably knew about 95% of it anyway.

“Hanging your underwear out on the line and stringing it across Poplar Avenue for two years is not a very wonderful process. But you know it’s a great story, and it needed to be told. Sometimes you have to take one for the team.”

Tuohy said he has no complaints about the book, but Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t like the curse words.

“I took a little Sharpie and I marked them out of her book, so we’re OK,” Tuohy joked.

Lewis explained to the Tuohys that without the negatives of the major college football recruiting process the story would be a fairy tale with no credibility.

It’s still a fairy tale to Oher, one he says he sometimes can’t believe.

“It’s crazy,” Oher said. “The life that I had and the life I have now, I can’t even talk on it. It’s unbelievable.”