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Touhy/Oher reports seems to touch on a lot of culture war issues. Though it could just be a family feud.
They only became a part of his life when he was 17/18. But I guess they decided to become a forever family then. Photos for the next 6-8 years looks like a happy family. They put him in conservatorship at 18 instead of adopting. It gave them a bunch of legal rights over him. Sounds a little bad since he was an adult but it did make a formal tie. And let’s be honest a normal 18 year old often needs adults in the room. An 18 year old who never had a family life definitely needs it. Sort of gets down to whether they were acting in good faith or using him. I lean on good faith.
The movie I believe portrayed him as a little dumb. His childhood issues probably did limit him. By the time he got to the nfl he scored a 19 on the wonderlich. Which when I’ve looked it up before is like American average IQ and around 100. So not dumb just average.
He apparently wants more money now. The family and the author Michael Lewis seem to indicate that they never made much in the movie. Like $700k between all of them. While Oher indicates they got bank. Lewis says this just means Hollywood bad and writers aren’t getting paid. Fwiw Oher never got paid a lot in the nfl. As a first round pick he got 5 years 13.8. For nfl contracts I’d do a simple formula of guessing you get about half after taxes and agent fees. The big money in the nfl is from free agency contracts. He signed two. First one he didn’t finish but was $5/year and played one year. Then signed elsewhere at $3. He played well so they extended him immediately but he got hurt mid year and cut with 9.5 guaranteed. Lifetime earnings probably around $30-35. 15 after taxes and fees. If your life story become a movie that grossed $300 million I think it would be reasonable to think it could boost those earnings and would be meaningful.
The white savior storyline. I’m curious how much current politics could have soured what was a happy relationship. The family no doubt used him some and loved the having a football star in the family thing and doing things like getting draft picks taken together. From my own background I saw the same storyline as my football coach adopted a black kid who was a great athlete (I played midgets football with him and high school basketball). Would have been a Catholic version of the same story. Curious if current politics are ruining these types of relationships.
Slightly different topic but I tend to think the people who make it to play pro sports are significantly above group level IQ. Like Oher being 100 IQ. I just can’t see a 70-80 IQ functioning well enough to understand pro-sports concepts or being capable of training themselves to get there.
People like the idea of human beings as like character creation in DnD, you put too many points in Str and you don't have any left for Int! It feels just, it feels fair, it allows for humans to see a role for themselves in an Eigen Plot, even if they're not the big strong hero they still have a role.
The reality is human traits aren't distributed fairly. [John Urschel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel#::text=John%20Cameron%20Urschel%20(born%20June,of%20the%202014%20NFL%20Draft.) and Frank Ryan are guys who played in the NFL while obtaining and holding PhDs in mathematics from MIT and Rice respectively. Some people are just better than others. The idea of the dumb jock, and of the nebbish nerd, are copes designed to help people feel better about their own lacks.
I've never actually seen the movie, or read the book, it didn't seem like a plot that would interest me. But consider that as many as 80% of NFL players declare bankruptcy within three years of retirement [ETA: This number is probably wildly inflated, but it points to the general concept that a non-HoF level NFL player typically goes from making millions to making almost nothing in a year when they retire]. It is very common for players to think the money will never stop, to spend themselves into game-day paycheck to game-day paycheck, for their career to run out earlier than they thought, and next thing you know they're broke. It is quite likely that Oher is looking for alternative sources of revenue.
Simultaneously, he will never ever escape the movie. Even if he had been a truly great NFL player, he would always be "that guy from The Blind Side." As the poem goes, O-Line isn't a famous position for anyone other than Jason Kelce:
Ultimately, he quickly became a top 1000 O-Line player in the world, a fringe guy hanging around the edges of the NFL, rather than a top 150 player in the world who starts for an NFL team. For virtually any NFL player, they have defined their life by football for a decade or more. In high school he's the best player on their team, in college he's royalty. The end of their career becomes a crisis of self-definition, who am I if I'm not a football player? The lucky ones become coaches or commentators, the rest have no good answer to the question. Oher faces the additional obstacle towards his identity, he faces the Oscar-Winning film, he's stuck. In every room he enters he is "that dumb kid from the movie" before he is even "Super Bowl Winning Baltimore Raven." Even the sympathetic articles introduce him primarily by the movie, rather than as a starter in two Super Bowls. Viewed in this light, I suspect this is more of a tragic personal lashing-out played on a national gossip circuit. It's sad to me, and even worse that race is going to get dragged into it.
In general, when I see a celeb complaining about the contracts they signed early in their career, my prior is that they hit their sell-by date and can't understand what happened and they are lashing out. From Tab Hunter to Ke$ha, products of systems think they did it all themselves and wonder why the system claims so much of their money.
The NFL bankruptcy thing is a bit like the sexual assault thing in college. It’s not that reliable. I found this. Especially since it includes “financial stress”. A udfa guy might get a 15k signing bonus. If he ends up working a $40k a year college grad job I would probably say “financial stress”.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/theres-a-difference-between-broke-and-bankrupt-for-ex-nfl-players/
One thing I find funny in the study is it lists 45% of nfl athletes who played more than 3 years have at some point lost a significant amount on a financial investment. Which is meaningless. Ken Griffin says he’s lost $70 billion in various bets in markets (and make 100 elsewhere). So that question would include him and basically every VC guy.
Most arguments in the US have some variant of this. The obese mother of 3 who is "choosing between eating and paying the electric bill"... To me she's suffering from hypermacronutrition. To the NYT? Food insecurity.
If the straightforward issue such as hunger or poverty isn't true they make up an alternative, meaningless term.
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