Potential Eagles' prospect Oher hopes to turn page after best-seller on his life story

INDIANAPOLIS - There was a best-selling book written about Michael Oher, but Oher hasn't read it.

The University of Mississippi offensive tackle whom some mock drafts have going to the Eagles in the first round said yesterday at the NFL Scouting Combine that he figures he lived the book - he doesn't need to read about his climb from ghetto homelessness and horrific deprivation in Memphis, Tenn., to being adopted by a wealthy white family, to college football stardom.

Thanks to "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game," many thousands of people know Oher's story, which was chronicled against the backdrop of the elevation of the left-tackle position in an NFL obsessed with protecting the quarterback. Michael Lewis, the author of baseball's "Moneyball," made Oher the subject of his 2006 exploration of football. His interest was spurred by Oher's adoption by Lewis' childhood friend, former Ole Miss point guard Sean Tuohy, a Memphis businessman. Movie rights were sold for seven figures; Oher said he has no preference for an actor to play him.

"I don't have any say-so about it . . . I think it's a good book. Something's being made into a movie about you; I don't think too many people get a chance to do that; I think that's special," Oher said. "But I don't think it's changed a lot [about Oher's life]. A lot of people know about my life [now], and just a lot of things that I overcame.

"From what a lot of people have said about it, I think it was fairly accurate. I think it was a good look. [Lewis] talked to me a lot about the stuff; we went over a lot of things. I didn't need to read it."

Some of the "stuff" Oher and Lewis went over was how he lived for months with his drug-addicted mother and six of his brothers in an old Chevy Monte Carlo, the boys sleeping on top of one another. How when he got to Briarcrest Christian School in Memphis, thanks to the intervention of a youth coach and father figure, he was a high school student who had no concept of what a noun was or what the Civil War had been. How when the Tuohys, a prominent Briarcrest family, adopted him, his new mom, Leigh Anne Tuohy, quickly grew tired of listening to speculation from her friends about the lurid dangers of bringing a large, young black man into the home where she was raising her white teenaged daughter. How Oher's altercation with an Ole Miss teammate was spurred by the teammate's derision toward Oher's "cracker family."