By Michael Lewis
The Blind Side has been selected as this year's First Year Forum book at the University of Texas at Austin: the book that all students enrolled in first year rhetoric and writing classes (RHE 306) will read. Like most FYF books, this is a popular title that (loosely) engages a bundle of controversies: in this case, issues of race, academics, and sports.
In a nutshell, the book has two alternating parts.
One part examines a strategic change in football: the introduction of the quarterback sack -- a defensive move that can only be pulled off by a very swift, strong player who can surprise the quarterback on his "blind side" -- required a strategic, systematic response. The NFL's strategic response was to elevate the position of left tackle as a counterbalance, and to find incredibly rare offensive players who are fast, strong, and massive enough to block a QB sack. This position is now the second most highly paid position on the field.
The other part examines the discovery and grooming of a left tackle: a homeless African-American boy from Memphis who ends up at a Christian private school in the Memphis suburbs, is taken in and adopted by a wealthy Anglo-American family, and helped to reach his potential in academics and athletics. At the end of the book, he is pulling a 3.75 average at the University of Mississippi, the alma mater of his adoptive parents -- and playing left tackle.
It's a well written and interesting story. Although sympathetic to the adoptive parents -- in the Afterword, Lewis mentions that he knew the adoptive father since kindergarten and he stumbled onto the story when visiting the family on a social call -- the book attempts to look at all angles of the story, including one accusation that the NCAA investigated: whether a wealthy white family adopted a black son in order to guide him to their alma mater's football program. Lewis concludes that this was not the case, but allows us to make up our own minds.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment