The Problems With Big Mike

I highly recommend Kottke's thoughtful comments on Michael Lewis's deeply troubling chronicle of Big Mike, a massive, once-homeless black kid who a Christian family adopted, forced into football, and pushed upward on the path to success. The story, which seems on its face like a pleasant fairly tale, is actually rather disturbing. You have this hulking black kid, who grows up severely deprived and damaged, who can barely speak, won't talk, exhibits no inner life to speak of, and is, by luck, enrolled in a random Christian private school that means to not accept him. From there, his size and power attract the attention of a father who never got over his past athletic exploits, and his abject poverty attracts the Christian mother:

On a cold and blustery morning, Sean and his wife, Leigh Anne, were driving down one of the main boulevards of East Memphis when just ahead of them a huge black male stepped off the bus. He was dressed in the same pair of cutoffs and T-shirt he always wore. Sean pointed him out to his wife and said: “That kid I was telling you about — that’s him. Big Mike.”

“But he’s wearing shorts,” she said.

“Uh-huh. He always wears those.”

“Sean, it’s snowing!”

And so it was. At Leigh Anne’s insistence, they pulled over. Sean reintroduced himself to Michael and then introduced Michael to Leigh Anne.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To basketball practice,” Michael said.

“Michael, you don’t have basketball practice,” Sean said.

“I know,” the boy said. “But they got heat there.”

Sean didn’t understand that one.

“It’s nice and warm in that gym,” the boy said.

So he's adopted. Once word of his unbelievably physique goes around, they all -- and by they all, I mean the family, not the kid -- decide he simply must get to college to play football. And through a variety of tutors, he makes it. And they all live happily ever after. Right?

Only it's never clear that Mike wants to play football. When he's initially approached by a recruit, he refuses to speak to him. And for all the warm-fuzzies offered by the tale, for every extreme physical specimen like Big Mike, how many kids inhabit torturous worlds of material deprivation but are never rescued by sports-obsessed evangelicals? And does this story serve to paper over that fact, or expose it? And was this family seeing dollar signs and fame in Mike, or truly acting out of concern? And what sort of country do we live in that athletic ability should be necessary to lift children out of hellish poverty?

As I said -- it's disconcerting. But it's an amazingly well-told tale, and I highly recommend folks read it.