WHEN MICHAEL OHER STOPS OVER, PLEASE SEND HIM IN ANOTHER DIRECTION

The star of the film, “The Blind Side,” wants more sums of money from Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who set him up for ample millions of dollars in eight years of NFL work — any word from Sandra Bullock?

     Next time a kid from a violent side of town stops in my garage stall, I will pass. Michael Oher might warrant my help and tutelage in his teens, but he can’t turn around at age 37 and decide all I did was lie about him. There is no way a family from Memphis, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, brought Oher into their home with the idea in many years that a movie called “The Blind Side” would be turned into a $300 million hit.

     That eventually happened in 2009. The two Touhy children, Sean Jr. and Collins, received $225,000 plus 2.5 percent of the defined net proceeds — $4.6 million each. The star who won an Oscar for best actress, Sandra Bullock, was handed $5 million for playing Leigh Anne. Neither parent claims to have been paid much, sharing what they had with Oher. If he wants that kind of money for his role then, you know, give him the damned money. But if he doesn’t understand the meaning of redemption and goodwill, will he ever realize what his two “conservative” co-parents did for him?

     “We didn’t make any money off the movie,” said Sean Tuohy, telling the Daily Memphian on Monday, “well, (book writer) Michael Lewis gave us about half of his share. Everybody in the family got an equal share, including Michael. It was about $14,000 total, each.”

      Anything else? “Insulting,” said Tuohy, “and devastated.”

      Otherwise, what didn’t Oher gain by hooking up with the Tuohys? They led him to the University of Mississippi, their alma mater. They watched Oher become a first-round selection of the Baltimore Ravens, where he signed a five-year, $13.8 million deal and won a Super Bowl in 2013. He then signed a four-year, $20 million deal with the Tennessee Titans but had to leave early with a toe problem, which led him to a two-year, $7 million deal with the Carolina Panthers where he played in another Super Bowl. He was out of the league in 2017, but made plenty of money. I should have listened that morning in San Francisco, when he spoke of the white family that helped him after his underprivileged youth and led him to a productive money countdown — none of which he gave to the Tuohys.

     “I’m not trying to prove anything,” Oher told ESPN. “People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie. They don’t really see the skills and the kind of player I am. That’s why I get downgraded so much, because of something off the field. Offensive linemen don’t get looked at. Nobody is paying attention to the offensive line. But me? I’m getting watched for everything.”

     Today, many seasons later, Oher is a father of four who wants larger money from a family that “falsely and publicly” represented themselves as his adoptive parents. In a petition he filed Monday in Shelby County Probate Court, he said the Tuohys had him sign a contract titled “Life Story Rights Agreement” — “purportedly signed by Michael Oher’’ — and dated April 20, 2007, which came weeks before Oher turned 21. By then, he knew months earlier that Lewis had released a book on his life, based on his childhood friendship with Sean Tuohy, but that no one had a clue of how a movie possibly might do years later.

     Oher did not make a stab to determine whether he was an adoptive or, merely, a conservatorship. Should he have known? Said the petition: “The lie of Michael's adoption is one upon which Co-Conservators Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the expense of their Ward. Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February 2023, when he learned the Conservatorship to which he consented would make him a member of the Tuohy family, which. in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys."

     On the focus of the conservatorship, Tuohy said he told him to take that route because of the parents’ “boosters” status at Ole Miss. “I sat Michael down and told him, ‘If you’re planning to go to Ole Miss — or even considering Ole Miss — we think you have to be part of the family. This would do that, legally.”

     Really? This is how low a kid would go? We will find out how much money the Tuohys made off the movie. “We divided it five ways,” they said in their 2010 book, “In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving.” Later, when Oher asked who decided on the conservatorship, he said the Tuohys told him, “They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as ‘adoptive parents,’ but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account," he wrote in his 2011 best-selling memoir, titled “I Beat the Odds.”

     That would be a best-selling memoir, by the way. How much money did Oher make off the Tuohys? If I were a judge, the financial issue would be a mission. He made a bunch of money in the NFL. They made a lot less.

     Go home, Michael. Next time, bother someone else.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.