Sports fans blindsided by feel-good story gone bad
Michael Oher came out with a book last Monday, the very same day he turned his fairytale, feel-good football story into a cold pail of water doused over the many of us who’d prefer to be left free to roam in fairyland.
Once again, it looks like fairyland has been lost, the pixie dust rendered fool’s gold. To sports fans, the Oher saga is just another reminder we just can’t have nice things, at least not for very long.
Oher, the central figure of the inspiring 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” about a homeless Black kid rescued off the street by a well-meaning white family who ultimately becomes a prosperous NFL offensive tackle, believes he’s owed an eight-figure slice from the movie’s $300 million in sales.
But that’s just the math, a reported $15 million that Oher, now age 37 and retired since 2016, believes should be in his pocket. The cringier edge to it all is his contention that he was bamboozled out of that dough by the very couple, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who plucked him off the streets and lovingly nurtured him in their home.
All along, until February of this year, Oher claims, he believed he was legally adopted by the Tuohys, only to find out the papers he signed at age 18 actually placed him into conservatorship. Per Monday’s court filing, he basically contends the Tuohys used that conservatorship as shield to funnel movie money their way instead of to
Oher.
The breach of the Tuohys’ fiduciary duty as conservators, noted Oher’s petition to the court, was “gross and appalling.”
Now that sure takes the shine off the movie, doesn’t it? Not even the superb Sandra Bullock, who earned an Oscar for her performance in “The Blind Side,” could put a shine to gross and appalling.
Per myriad reports throughout the week, in fact, Oher, now married and a father of four, almost 20 years later remains subject to that conservatorship. The twist there: It reportedly was written to terminate upon his 25th birthday, though apparently neither Oher nor anyone on his behalf filed for termination.
The case mirrors in part that epic spit fight that pop singer Britney Spears (#FreeBritney) had for years until November 2021, when
Spears, days prior to turning 40, finally succeeded in terminating the conservatorship held by her father, Jamie.
Folks, you know the joy in Mudville has plummeted to sub-Caseyan levels when we’ve dragged the life and times of Britney Spears as a “comp” into the sports pages. That in itself is a blind-side smack that Oher in his prime NFL days with the Ravens (2009-13) couldn’t have handled. To steal one of Spears’s Top 10 titles, “Toxic!”
It’s been a hard few weeks here on the sports money beat, replete with some mind-numbing numbers.
The two biggest gems, in case you missed out:
■ According to a former pal of Phil Mickelson, a guy who contends good ol’ Lefty remained silent when a word or two could have spared him a five-year jail sentence for insider trading, the golf star piled up $100 million in sports betting losses across a stretch of some 30 years.
The ex-pal, sports gambling guru Billy Walters, has a book coming out Wednesday, titled: “Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk” by Simon & Schuster. Among his claims, Walters writes that Mickelson in 2012 considered betting $400,000 on his US brothers to win the Ryder Cup played that year at Medinah Country Club CC just outside Chicago. Overall, Walters says, Mickelson bet a total of $1 billion. “Phil,” writes Walters, “is not always the person he seems to be.”
Walters lost a daughter to suicide while in the slammer and feels he had a chance to talk her out of it, had Mickelson spoke up, exonerated him in court, and spared him the jail stint.
■ About a month earlier, the New York Times reported that ex-Patriots quarterback Tom Brady suffered a $30 million hit amid the collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency outfit for which Brady signed up as TV pitchman in 2021.
When the company went belly-up, so did the $30 million worth of shares that Brady pocketed for touting FTX on commercials. So did the $18 million in shares that Brady’s then-wife, Gisele Bundchen, carved off the same deal.
Not to make light of that $15 million that Oher believes he’s owed, but man, he’s kicking rocks down Baltic Avenue while Mickelson and Brady-Bundchen are pondering hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk.
The crypto crash could get worse for the nowdivorced Brady-Bundchen. FTX shareholders, with no shot to recover their losses, are going after the gaggle of celebrities who signed on to pitch the now-fallen financial empire, which once was valued at $32 billion. The group includes Brady, Bundchen, Shaquille O’Neal, Larry David, Naomi Osaka, and Stephen Curry.
We’ve watched these sad financial sagas play out for years, though the plot twists seem more convoluted and the numbers ever larger.
Bobby Orr was scammed by his agent, Alan Eagleson, who failed to inform the great Bruins defenseman he could have remained in Boston as a fractional owner of the franchise. Unaware, Orr signed on in 1976 as a free agent with Chicago.
Onetime Celtic Antoine Walker, bedeviled by carefree spending and the gambling bug, frittered away a purported $108 million in career earnings. The crushing blow came amid the Great Recession (2007-09), leading to bankruptcy. He sold his NBA championship ring, earned with the Miami Heat, three years ago for $21,500 — a night’s party money in his spending heyday.
Remember Jack Clark, who wrapped up his lengthy major league career in Boston in the early ’90s, with a three-year deal the Red Sox wrote for $8.7 million?
In 1992, the year he took his last licks in majors, Clark was $7 million in debt, in part because of an expensive home and his 18 cars, including, per a Los Angeles Times report, a $700,000 Ferrari. It was the same year, at 37, the age Oher is today, that Clark filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and became a rookie driver on the National Hot Rod Association circuit. Vroom.
“I paid everybody back,” Clark told the LA Times two years later, “100 percent on the dollar.”
Clark got some of the nice things back. We should all be so lucky.