Thus began the great Mormon grade-grab. Mainly it involved Sue Mitchell grinding through the character courses with Michael. Every week or so, they replaced a Memphis public school F with an A from B.Y.U. Every assignment needed to be read aloud and decoded. Here he was, late in his senior year in high school, and he had never heard of a right angle or the Civil War or “I Love Lucy.” But getting the grades was far easier than generating in Michael any sort of pleasure in learning. When Briarcrest gave him a list of choices of books to write a report on, Mitchell, thinking it might spark Michael’s interest, picked “Great Expectations.” “Because of the character of Pip,” she says. “He was poor and an orphan. And someone sort of found him. I just thought Michael might be able to relate.” He couldn’t. She tried “Pygmalion.” Again, he hadn’t the faintest interest in the thing. They got through it by performing the work aloud, with Michael assigned to the role of Freddie. “He does wonderful memory work,” Mitchell says. “It’s a survival technique. You can give him anything, and he’ll memorize it.” But that’s all he did. Engaging with the material in any deeper way seemed impossible. He was as isolated from the great works of Western literature as he was from other people. “If you asked him why we’re doing all this,” she says, “he’d say, ‘I got to do it to get to the league.”’

XI. Graduation

There was one final piece of unfinished business in Michael Oher’s Briarcrest career. The senior yearbook picture was due, and Michael didn’t have one. It was a Briarcrest tradition for every senior to have his baby picture in the senior program. Her lack of a baby picture for Michael drove Leigh Anne to distraction. “You don’t want to be the only senior who doesn’t have a baby picture in the annual!” she told him. She made Michael give her the name of the foster home he admitted to having lived in when he was 8. She called the foster mother, who sounded vague; at any rate, she had nothing on him. She went down to his biological mother’s apartment and harassed her for pictures. Later, she finally came upon one shot, taken by an employee of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services when Michael was about 10 years old. She brought it home and gave it to Michael.

Michael looked at it and exclaimed, “Mama, that’s me!”

“That sure is you!” she said.

Then he took it into the den and stared at it for 15 minutes.

But the picture didn’t solve the problem. It wasn’t a baby picture. One spring night Leigh Anne had an idea. She flipped on her computer and went online and found, as she puts it, “the cutest picture of a little black baby I could find.” She downloaded the stranger’s photo and sent it in to Briarcrest.

The Briarcrest Christian School held its graduation ceremony in a church in May 2005. The Tuohys were all in the audience, of course, and they brought Sue Mitchell with them. Steve Simpson was there, and so was Jennifer Graves, who says that she has never seen anyone work so hard for a piece of paper as Michael Oher worked to get his Briarcrest diploma. Big Tony was on hand — even though his son, Steven, wouldn’t graduate until the following year. The Briarcrest president gave a long speech filled with many words of warning to the graduating class. He explained that when they left Briarcrest and went out into the world, they would encounter “all kinds of groups that claim some kind of privilege based on their lifestyles or perversions.” (There was no need to say “gay”; they knew all about sodomy.) He spoke sternly about the danger of “seeking false happiness in a variety of narcissistic pleasures.” After that final jolt of fear from God, the graduates were called forward to collect their rewards. Steve Simpson called their names, one by one; one by one, they stepped up. Michael wasn’t called until nearly the end. He sat waiting in the back row, upper lip tucked beneath lower, either choking back his emotion or settling his nerves.

“Michael Jerome Oher,” said Steve Simpson and smiled.

XII. Collegebound

The N.C.A.A. still needed its proof of Michael’s new and improved grade-point average by Aug. 1. Ole Miss was willing to admit Michael Oher as a student, but the N.C.A.A. stood between them in a couple of ways. First, it had opened an investigation and voiced the suspicion that the Tuohys had become Michael’s guardians and put him into their wills as an equal of their own children only so that he might play left tackle for their alma mater. Next, the N.C.A.A. said his grade-point average was just a tad too low for him to play college football. On July 29, Michael took his final B.Y.U. test — another character course. Sean sent the test to Utah by Federal Express, and the B.Y.U. people promised to have the grade ready by 2 o’clock the following afternoon. “The Mormons may be going to hell,” Sean says. “But they really are nice people.” With Michael’s final A in hand, Sean rushed the full package to the N.C.A.A.’s offices in Iowa. The N.C.A.A promptly lost it. Sean threatened to fly up on his plane with another copy and sit in the lobby until it was processed — which led the N.C.A.A. to find Michael’s file. While it remained suspicious and didn’t close its investigation, the N.C.A.A. on Aug. 1, 2005, informed Michael Oher that he was going to be allowed to go to college and play football.

One year later, Michael Oher was a first-team freshman All-American, the starting left tackle of the Ole Miss Rebels and the most awesome force on a football field that a lot of college line coaches had ever seen. He was on a collision course with the second-highest-paid job in the N.F.L. He could read and write and now blended so well socially into rich white Memphis that rich white Memphis almost forgot he was black. Drowned in nurture, his I.Q. test score had risen between 20 and 30 points. And his new parents, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, were so pleased with the results of their experiment that they began to figure out how best to go back into the inner city and do it all over again.