The Blind Side story was too good to be true. We chose to believe it anyway

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Every once in a while in the course of doing the job you’ll hear something that forces you to accept that it is possible human decency exists. Someone in the sports or sports-adjacent world has done good deeds so generous that, despite all you know, you find yourself charmed.

When that happens, hacks who have seen it all will say the same thing: “That story is too good to report.”

Not report as in “tell.” But report as in “investigate.“ As in, “ask searching questions about.” As in, “inevitably debunk.”

Because there are no perfect sports stories and anyone who says different is trying to sell you something.

You could make a case that the Michael Oher story has been the No. 1 feel-good sports parable of this century. It’s certainly made the most money.

A book wrapped around Oher’s up-from-poverty childhood, The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis, was a global bestseller. The film version of the book made over US$300-million in theatres. Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for starring in it, and that’s something money can’t buy. Many have tried.

Oher also did okay out of it. No one can say for sure if being singled out as the player who would change football pushed him into the first round of the NFL draft. But it probably didn’t hurt.

Even if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, you kind of know how this one goes. There was a moment when it was unavoidable. That a Black kid living in poverty in the American South was taken in by a wealthy white family and turned into a footballing Six Million Dollar Man.

Mostly, your impression of all this is that someone did something selfless for a stranger, and that everyone involved was made the better for it. That script has been doing amazing box office since the Bible.

Oher’s biography had the halo of truth because someone with big-league bonafides had written a whole book about it.

But once Lewis had sketched the basics, once people got interested and Hollywood became involved, no one investigated what had happened since. Oher’s simplified morality tale was too good to report.

Now we find out that, like every single other thing, it’s more complicated than we thought.

Oher is suing the couple that took him in, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy. As it turns out, he wasn’t adopted. Instead, the Tuohys took a conservatorship over him just as he was becoming an adult. Oher claims they used that legal leverage to reap the vast majority of the profit from his story. He says he hasn’t seen a nickel of the movie money.

On Monday, an ESPN story reporting this landed like a neutron bomb in the middle of the Chicken Soup for the Sports Soul crowd. All those good vibes, vaporized.

Some of the Tuohys responded, though not very convincingly.

Sean Tuohy, Jr. – a biological son of the Tuohys – told Barstool Sports, “Me, personally … have made, like, 60, 70 grand over the last four, five years.”

So the guy who is the star of the movie says he got nothing, but some background player says he got a year’s pay off it? At the absolute minimum, it’s fishy. In my experience, whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.

So what do we – simple, story-loving people who don’t like things reported – do with that? We flip the story on its head. It’s still a moral instruction, but the characters have about-faced. Instead of a bunch of heroes, we now have one hero and the rest are pantomime villains.

The people who took Oher in were planning to rip him off the whole time. They were always in this to enrich themselves (even though when the tale began, there wasn’t any money, or the likely promise of any money, to steal).

This new version of the Oher story is still a comfort to the rest of us. Sure, we haven’t adopted a child in need, but nor have we then conspired with evil lawyers and filmmaking vampires to cheat a vulnerable person in our care. Having done nothing – because we’ve done nothing – our own humanity remains pristine.

That’s how stories like this function. They have nothing to do with the people involved. They are interchangeable types whose only purpose is to burnish our collective self-image.

When we hear that some kajillionaire ballplayer bought his chauffeur’s mother a house, that reassures us that people are good. When we find out he did it because he was hiding money from his ex-wife, that reminds us that we aren’t bad like those other people.

All stories are complicated, and getting to the real truth of them is difficult. Courts have the power to bankroll investigations, issue subpoenas and compel people to testify, and they can’t often manage it. So we settle for quick hits that skim the surface, and move on before we can be disabused of our illusions.

This daily barrage of wonderful and awful stories has dulled our patience for complexity. Complex stories take too much time, and end unsatisfactorily. They confuse and unsettle us.

Much easier to believe that everyone was good and rewarded for it, or everyone was terrible and suffered. That’s what most news is – happy ever after or burnings at the stake.

To accept that the Tuohys may have been good and then bad; well-intentioned and greedy; selfless and also in love with the image they had created of themselves – well, that requires a level of introspection most of us no longer choose to practice. That would take a lot of time, expense and effort that will not be expended because after a couple of news cycles it’s too boring.

The only inevitability is that there will be more stories exactly like Oher’s, accepted just as credulously. If you find yourself wondering which to trust completely on their face, good or bad, remember Bertolt Brecht’s rule: “First comes food, then morality.”

Which is to say, none of them.