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      How the Drama of ‘The Blind Side’ Helped Sports Fans Look Past Questions

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      “The Blind Side” played on sports fans’ penchant for too-tidy narratives, our columnist writes. A legal battle between the N.F.L. player and the family depicted in the film seeks to answer questions the dramatization looked past.Michael Oher, center, filed a lawsuit against Sean Tuohy, left, and Leigh Anne Tuohy, right, over their conservatorship of his business affairs.Matthew Sharpe/Getty ImagesOf course America loved “The Blind Side,” the 2009 movie about a homeless and hapless Black teenager rescued from a bleak future by a wealthy, white family. It was based on the true story of the Tuohy family, led by Sean and Leigh Anne, who took the future N.F.L. player Michael Oher into their home and raised him proudly as he made it to college and beyond.It’s the type of story we’re used to in sports, one that undergirds our beliefs about sport’s power to create lifelong bonds, help its participants overcome hardships, and build character. It’s also a simplified rendering of race in America, one that hinges on the trope that white people can be magically redeemed by coming to the aid of a Black character.Audiences sucked it up. The film took in over $300 million and Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, self-possessed belle of the New South.But “The Blind Side,” based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, renders a complicated reality in the most digestible format. This week, surprising news of a lawsuit filed by Oher against the Tuohys spurred many to reconsider the movie, searching for answers to questions raised by the legal claim and obscured by the film’s comfortable, tidy narrative.Oher is suing the couple for a full accounting of their relationship. He claims that when he thought he was being adopted at 18, the Tuohys urged him to sign a conservatorship that gave them control to enter into contracts on his behalf. He says that the familial bond, warmly portrayed in the movie, was a lie and that the Tuohys enriched themselves at his expense.The Tuohys have defended their actions, arguing in a statement that the conservatorship was a legal necessity so Oher could play football at the University of Mississippi without jeopardizing his eligibility.In a story with at least four versions — those of Lewis, the movie studio, Oher and the Tuohys — it’s almost impossible to discern who is telling the truth.When Michael Oher was selected in the first round of the 2009 N.F.L. draft, the Tuohy family was by his side.Jeff Zelevansky/Getty ImagesUntil this week, I must admit, I had never seen “The Blind Side.” I’d purposefully avoided it. I’m leery of movies that lean on simple racial clichés — a fatigue that began as a child, when so many of my Black heroes died at the end of films so white heroes could live.News of Oher’s lawsuit convinced me that it was time to plop down on the couch and take in the film, with the benefit of 14 years of hindsight — 14 years in which race and sports have re-emerged as essential platforms for the examination of America’s troubles.My assumptions were proved correct early in the film, while Oher’s character was taking shape. As the story unfolds, he is shown as a lost cause before meeting the Tuohys and attending a well-to-do Christian school in Memphis. The film portrays him in easy terms: as a body, first and foremost — a gargantuan Black teen whose I.Q., we are told, is low, and who has no idea whatsoever about how life operates in worlds that are not swamped in poverty and despair.Sandra Bullock won an Oscar in 2010 for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy.Warner Brothers Pictures/AlamyThe Oher of the film, particularly early on, has little agency and no real dreams of his own. When I saw that, it felt like a gut punch. “What?” I muttered. “There’s no way this characterization is true.”The Baltimore Ravens selected Oher in the first round of the 2009 N.F.L. draft. No one makes it that far in sports without a foundation of years of motivation and training, which gives credence to Oher’s long-held criticism of his portrayal in the film. He is an intelligent person, Oher has said, again and again, and he was a skilled football player well before meeting the Tuohys.Not someone who needed the Tuohys’ young, pint-size son, Sean Jr., to teach him the game in the easiest of terms — by using bottles of condiments to show formations and plays. We watch Sean Jr. at a park, delighting in putting a clueless Oher through workouts.The movie also shows the Tuohys using sports as a vehicle for Oher to develop confidence, enter a world of prestige and riches — and eventually to attend Ole Miss, the couple’s alma mater, where Sean Tuohy once starred in basketball.Oher protects Leigh Anne Tuohy when they dare to go to the neighborhoods where he’d grown up — “That horrible part of town,” she says. He saves Sean Jr.’s life when the two are in a car crash by using his massive arm to shield the young boy from the force of an airbag. When Oher struggles on the practice field as he learns the game, Leigh Anne Tuohy bounds from the sidelines and drills him with firm instruction: He must shield the quarterback the same way he guarded her and her son.“Protect the family,” she insists.A lesson delivered to Oher by a feisty white woman as if he were a first-grader (or a servant) is a turning point. Oher begins transforming from a football neophyte raised on the streets into an offensive lineman with the strength of Zeus, the nimbleness of Mikhail Baryshnikov and the size of an upright piano.Soon, we watch him play in a game, enduring aggressive and racist taunting from an opponent who initially has his way with an inexperienced rival.Suddenly, Oher snaps. He does not just block the opposing player: Enraged, Oher lifts him and drives him across the field and over a fence.“Where were you taking him, Mike?” his coach asks as Oher stands on the sidelines.“To the bus,” Oher deadpans, his tone innocent and childlike. “It was time for him to go home.”By the film’s end, the transformation is complete. We learn that under the watch of a wealthy white family, Oher’s I.Q. has improved to an average level! We see him become a high school champion! We watch a parade of coaches — real coaches, playing themselves in the film — fawn over Oher as they try to persuade him to suit up for their school.It is hard to figure out, by the movie’s telling, Oher’s motivation, or his savvy, because he continues to be portrayed as a prop — quiet, docile, a young man who, for the most part, does as his newfound family says. This, by the way, makes it hard to even figure out, all these years later, the truth of his lawsuit.Oher has disputed his portrayal in the film, telling his version of events in two memoirs.Scott Cunningham/Getty ImagesWhat we do see in the movie is that he shines in college and the pros. There he is in the N.F.L., in his Baltimore Ravens gear. He had made it to the sports Promised Land and through it all, the Tuohy family was at his side.This film had everything.The dumbed-down trope about race and class in America that Hollywood has always peddled.The simplified narrative that uncritically hails sport and its purity, the way it can change lives, always for the better, by shaping diamonds in the rough into jewels. The shadowy side of sports — the cheating, the lies, the broken promises, which, in this legal tussle, could be coming from either side — never encroach on the fairy tale. More

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      Michael Oher, Depicted in ‘The Blind Side,’ Says He Was Conned With Adoption Promise

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      Michael Oher, whose life was depicted in the 2009 film, says in a lawsuit that he was never fully adopted by the family that took him in and was swindled into signing away his decision-making powers at 18.The former N.F.L. player Michael Oher, whose journey out of poverty and into football stardom was dramatized in the 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” asked a Tennessee court on Monday to formally end his legal relationship with the family who took him in, claiming that he had never actually been adopted and had been tricked into signing away his decision-making powers so the family could make millions of dollars off his life story.Oher, 37, is seeking a termination of the conservatorship that began when he was 18, plus money that he says he should have earned from the movie, as well as an injunction preventing Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy from using his name and likeness.The petition, filed in Shelby County in Tennessee, claims that when he thought he was being adopted, the Tuohys urged him to sign a conservatorship in which he relinquished his ability to enter into contracts. The lawsuit also claims that Oher, who started living with the Tuohys at age 16, unknowingly signed away the rights to his life story to 20th Century Fox in 2007.Oher’s lawyer, J. Gerard Stranch IV, declined to comment beyond what was stated in the lawsuit.For “The Blind Side,” the hit film that starred Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy, Tim McGraw as Sean Tuohy and Quinton Aaron as Oher, the Tuohys negotiated a contract of $225,000 plus 2.5 percent of future “defined net proceeds” for themselves and their biological children, the lawsuit said.Oher says in the lawsuit that he received nothing while the movie generated more than $300 million in revenue worldwide.The Tuohy family did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The New York Times. In an interview with The Daily Memphian on Monday, Sean Tuohy said that he had been “devastated” to hear about the lawsuit and that it was “upsetting to think we would make money off any of our children.” Tuohy said that he would be willing to end the conservatorship and that everybody in his family, including Oher, got an equal share from the movie, around $14,000.Sean Tuohy went on to say the conservatorship had been intended to allow Oher to play at the University of Mississippi, which he and his wife attended.Sean Tuohy Jr., the son of Leigh Anne and Sean, said in an interview with Barstool Sports on Monday that he made “60, 70 grand over the course of the last four, five years” from the movie.In Tennessee, a conservatorship is defined as an arrangement in which a court removes at least some “decision-making powers and duties” from “a person with a disability who lacks capacity to make decisions in one or more important areas” and grants those duties to a conservator or co-conservators. The 2004 order that granted Oher’s conservatorship to the Tuohys states that Oher appeared to have “no known physical or psychological disabilities.”According to the petition, Oher only recently found out — in February this year — that he had not been legally adopted. Oher agreed to enter into the conservatorship thinking that it was a required part of the adoption process, the lawsuit says.Oher, who retired from football in 2017, was selected with the No. 23 overall pick in the 2009 N.F.L. draft by the Baltimore Ravens and played eight N.F.L. seasons as an offensive tackle for the Ravens, the Tennessee Titans and the Carolina Panthers. He won the Super Bowl with the Ravens in 2013.He played college football from 2005 to 2009 at Mississippi, where he earned two first-team All-Southeastern Conference honors, in 2007 and 2008, and was named a consensus first-team all-American in 2008.“The Blind Side,” which was released in 2009 and was adapted from a 2006 book by Michael Lewis, depicts Oher as a poor teenager growing up in Memphis and looking after his mother, who was addicted to cocaine. The movie portrays Oher as a naturally talented athlete, at both basketball and football, who is spotted by a coach at a local private school, which later admits him. Oher comes to know Sean Tuohy Jr. before moving in with the family and earning a scholarship to Mississippi.But Oher seemed uncomfortable with the movie’s depiction of him, and what it meant for his career. In a 2015 interview, when he was playing for the Panthers, Oher said that the movie had portrayed him as less intelligent than he was and had influenced how people saw him within the sport.“People look at me and they take things away from me because of a movie,” Oher said. “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.” More

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      Jim Brown, Football Great and Civil Rights Champion, Dies at 87

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      After a Hall of Fame career in the N.F.L., he pursued social activism and Hollywood stardom, but his image was stained by accusations of abuse toward women.Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns fullback who was acclaimed as one of the greatest players in pro football history, and who remained in the public eye as a Hollywood action hero and a civil rights activist, though his name was later tarnished by accusations of violent conduct against women, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.His family announced his death on Friday on Instagram.Playing for the Browns from 1957 to 1965 after earning all-American honors at Syracuse University in football and lacrosse, Brown helped take Cleveland to the 1964 National Football League championship.In any game, he dragged defenders when he wasn’t running over them or flattening them with a stiff arm. He eluded them with his footwork when he wasn’t sweeping around ends and outrunning them. He never missed a game, piercing defensive lines in 118 consecutive regular-season games, though he played one year with a broken toe and another with a sprained wrist.“All you can do is grab, hold, hang on and wait for help,” Sam Huff, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker for the Giants and the Washington team now known as the Commanders, once told Time magazine.Brown was voted football’s greatest player of the 20th century by a six-member panel of experts assembled by The Associated Press in 1999. A panel of 85 experts selected by NFL Films in 2010 placed him No. 2 all time behind the wide receiver Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers.He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.Brown in action against the Giants in Cleveland in 1968.Associated PressBrown was still in top form and only 30 years old when he stunned the football world in the summer of 1966 by retiring to pursue an acting career.He had appeared in the 1964 western “Rio Conchos” and was involved in the shooting of the World War II film “The Dirty Dozen” in England, with plans to attend the Browns’ training camp afterward. But wet weather delayed completion of the filming. When he notified Art Modell, the Browns’ owner, that he would be reporting late, Modell said he would fine him for every day he missed camp. Affronted by the threat, Brown called a news conference to announce that he was done with pro football.When the modern civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s, few elite athletes spoke out on racial issues. But Brown had no hesitation.Working to promote economic development in Cleveland’s Black neighborhoods while playing for the Browns, he founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union (later known as the Black Economic Union) as a vehicle to create jobs. It facilitated loans to Black businessmen in poor areas — what he called Green Power — reflecting his long-held belief that economic self-sufficiency held more promise than mass protests.Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor), seated from left, were among the leading Black athletes who met in 1967 to publicly voice their support for Ali.Tony Tomsic/Associated PressIn June 1967, Brown invited other leading Black athletes, most notably Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), to the office of his Economic Union to hear Muhammad Ali after Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and faced imprisonment for refusing to be drafted in protest over the Vietnam War.In what came to be called the Ali Summit, viewed as a watershed for the development of racial awareness among athletes, Brown and the others at the session publicly voiced their support for Ali.By the early 1970s, Brown’s Economic Union had largely faded. But in the late 1980s he founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation to teach basic life skills to gang members and prisoners, mainly in California, and steer them away from violence. The foundation expanded nationally and remains active.Handsome with a magnificent physique — he was a chiseled 6 feet 2 inches and 230 pounds — Brown appeared in many movies and was sometimes cited as a Black Superman for his cinematic adventures.“Although the range of emotion Brown displayed onscreen was no wider than a mail slot, he never embarrassed himself, never played to a demeaning stereotype of the comic patsy,” James Wolcott wrote in The New York Review of Books in his review of Dave Zirin’s 2018 biography, “Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.” He called Brown “a rugged chassis for a more self-assertive figure, the Black uberman.”One of Brown’s best-remembered roles was in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played one of 12 convicts assembled by the Army for a near-suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a French chateau in advance of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He next played a Marine captain in the Cold War thriller “Ice Station Zebra” (1968).Brown, left, in a scene from the 1967 movie “The Dirty Dozen.” Donald Sutherland is at right.MGMIn 1969, his character was shown having sex with Raquel Welch’s character in the western “100 Rifles,” the first major Hollywood film depicting a Black man making love to a white woman.Brown was “becoming a Black John Wayne; or maybe John Wayne with just a hint of Malcolm X thrown in,” Gloria Steinem wrote in New York magazine in 1968. She quoted him as saying: “I don’t want to play Negro parts. Just cool, tough modern men who are also Negroes. And not good guys all the time.”But Brown had a problematic personal life.He was arrested more than a half-dozen times, in most cases when women accused him of violent behavior, at a time when prominent men like athletes, actors and political figures were generally not held accountable for purported transgressions against women.Brown was never convicted of a major crime. In some instances the accusers refused to testify, and in others he was exonerated by juries.The first accusation against Brown was lodged in 1965, when an 18-year-old woman testified that he had assaulted her at a Cleveland motel. Brown denied the allegation and was found not guilty in a jury trial. A year later, the woman filed a civil paternity suit claiming that Brown had fathered her baby daughter. The jury found in his favor.In June 1968, the police, arriving at Brown’s Hollywood home after a neighbor phoned to report a disturbance, found his 22-year-old girlfriend, Eva Bohn-Chin, a model, lying bloodied and badly injured on his patio. They suspected that Brown had thrown her off his second-story balcony. He said she had fallen. Ms. Bohn-Chin refused to testify, which resulted in the dismissal of an assault charge. Brown paid a $300 fine for interfering with a police officer who had been seeking entrance to his home.Brown’s wife, Sue Brown, with whom he had three children, obtained a divorce in 1972.Brown with Spike Lee, the director of the documentary “Jim Brown: All American,” in 2002.David Lee/HBOWhen Spike Lee released his documentary “Jim Brown: All American” in 2002, Brown was in jail in the Los Angeles area, having lost an appeal over a misdemeanor vandalism conviction in 1999. Brown’s wife at that time, Monique Brown, had called the police to report that he smashed the windows of her car with a shovel after an argument.Brown had been offered community service and anger management counseling, but he refused to accept that and was jailed for nearly four months. But the marriage endured.“I can definitely get angry, and I have taken that anger out inappropriately in the past,” Brown told Sports Illustrated in an interview at the jail. “But I have done so with both men and women.”In 1978, Brown was sentenced to a day in jail and fined $500 for beating and choking a male friend during their golf match in Inglewood, Calif., evidently after an argument over the spot where his friend had placed his ball on the ninth green.“So do I have a problem with women?” Brown added in the interview. “No. I have had anger, and I’ll probably continue to have anger. I just have to not strike out at anyone ever again.”Brown maintained over the years that he been victimized because of his race or his celebrity status. In an interview with Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times in April 1969, in which he spoke about the balcony incident, he said, “The cops were after me because I’m free and Black and I’m supposed to be arrogant and supposed to be militant and I swing free and loose and have been outspoken on racial matters and I don’t preach against Black militant groups and I’m not humble.”Rural BeginningsJames Nathaniel Brown was born on Feb. 17, 1936, on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast, a rural area where the Black populace lived off the land. When he was a few weeks old, his father, Swinton Brown, who had a reputation as a gambler and womanizer, abandoned him and Jim’s teenage mother, Theresa Brown. When he was 2, she took a job as a domestic in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, an overwhelmingly white but politically liberal community, leaving him in Georgia in the care of a great-grandmother, a grandmother and an aunt.She sent for him when he was 8, and they lived together for a while, she continued to work as a housekeeper. By his account he felt that she was more interested in her boyfriends than in attending to his needs; he eventually moved in with the family of his girlfriend in nearby Manhasset.At Manhasset High School, he became a brilliant running back and lacrosse player, and also competed in basketball and baseball and ran track.The second Black player in the history of Syracuse football, Brown became an all-American in football and lacrosse. In his final regular-season football game, a 61-7 victory over Colgate, he scored six touchdowns, kicked seven extra points and ran for 197 yards. Syracuse went to the 1957 Cotton Bowl, where Brown scored three touchdowns and kicked three extra points in a 28-27 loss to Texas Christian.Brown in 1957, when he was a halfback at Syracuse University. He earned all-American honors there in football and lacrosse.Associated PressCleveland selected Brown as the No. 6 pick of the 1957 N.F.L. draft. He won the first of his three Most Valuable Player Awards, as selected by The Associated Press, when he ran for a league-leading 942 yards as a rookie.After the 1962 season, Brown led a group of players who complained to Modell, the team owner, that Paul Brown, the franchise’s founder and head coach, was too rigid in continuing with conservative offensive schemes that were being bypassed by other N.F.L. teams using wide-open offenses.Blanton Collier was named coach in 1963, and Brown had his greatest season, running for an N.F.L. record 1,863 yards. The Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts for the N.F.L. championship in 1964. Brown won his third M.V.P. award in 1965, when the Browns again played for the league championship, this time losing to the Green Bay Packers.Brown led the N.F.L. in rushing in eight of his nine seasons. He also set N.F.L. records for career yardage (12,312), total touchdowns (126), touchdowns by running (106), and average yards rushing per game (104) and per carry (5.22). He ran for more than 1,000 yards seven times when teams played only 12 and then 14 games a season (they now play 17), and at a time when the rule book favored the passing game over running plays. He caught 20 touchdown passes, and he returned kickoffs.Brown credited his offensive linemen with springing him into the secondary, and then, as he told Alex Haley in a 1968 interview with Playboy, “I was on my own.”“Then I had a man-to-man situation going me against them; that’s when I’d go into my bag of stuff,” he said. “They’re in trouble now; I’m in their territory; 55 things are happening at once; I’m moving, evaluating their possible moves, trying to outthink and outmaneuver them, using my speed, quickness and balance.”Brown in the Browns’ dressing room at Yankee Stadium on Dec. 12, 1964, after Cleveland beat the Giants to win the Eastern Conference title for the first time since 1957.Associated Press“But sometimes it got down to out-and-out strength and brute force,” Brown said. “Some guys, if they were small enough, I’d just run over them.”Brown seemed perpetually battered, getting up slowly after running plays, but he said that was a psychological tactic. As he put it in his 1989 memoir “Out of Bounds,” written with Steve Delsohn, “By getting up with leisure every play, every game, every season, they never knew if I was hurt or if I wasn’t.”Most of Brown’s especially significant records have been eclipsed. But he was accorded tributes long after his football career ended.In 1994, he was named to the N.F.L.’s 75th anniversary all-time team. In 2015, Syracuse University unveiled statues of Brown and the star running backs who succeeded him, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little, all of whom wore No. 44, on a patio called Plaza 44. The second Browns franchise dedicated a statue of Brown outside its FirstEnergy Stadium in 2016.Seeking support for his Amer-I-Can Foundation’s efforts to curb gang violence, Brown and the former star N.F.L. linebacker Ray Lewis met with president-elect Donald J. Trump at his Trump Tower office in Manhattan in December 2016. Brown and the musician Kanye West had lunch with Mr. Trump at the White House in October 2018.“This is the president of the United States,” Brown said after the White House meeting. “He allowed me to be invited to his territory, he treated us beautifully, and he shared some thoughts, and he will be open to talking when I get back to him.”In 2013, Brown returned to Manhasset High School, on Long Island, where a plaque in his honor was unveiled.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesHe married Monique Gunthrop in 1997, and she survives him. Brown is also survived by their son, Aris, and their daughter, Morgan; a daughter, Kim, and a son, Kevin, who were twins, and another son, James Jr., from his marriage to Sue (Jones) Brown.At least one defensive player looked at the bright side in describing an encounter with Brown. Remembering the first time he faced him, the Dallas Cowboys’ Pro Bowl linebacker Chuck Howley told Life magazine: “I had one of my best days. I made almost as much yardage as he did — riding on his back.” More

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      Matthew Barney, Back in the Game

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      The hit, 45 years ago, shook up the world of football. Then, just as quickly, people moved on. But not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on charge by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Stingley was rendered quadriplegic. Tatum, a defender known as “The Assassin,” notoriously never apologized.The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho at the time and remembers the incident from constant slow-motion replays on television. He was just getting into the sport seriously himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, though shocking, didn’t stop him. Violence was inculcated in football training, he recalled. It was also addictive.“That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the head and what that feels like in your body,” Barney said in an interview in March while editing “Secondary,” his new five-channel video installation that takes that 1978 event as its point of departure. He relished practice drills where he and other boys were ordered to slam into each other at top speed, he said. “You’d walk away, and you’re seeing stars.”Barney became an elite high-school quarterback, but he changed course during his years at Yale University, emerging from there in 1989 into the New York art world, where he found near-instant success. Physical duress was immediately salient in his work, from the “Drawing Restraint” projects in which, for instance, he would harness himself and move along a gallery’s walls and ceiling, attempting to draw on the wall.Football served as a prompt in the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of the early works that established his distinctive approach to combining performance, video and sculpture. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders player whose numerous injuries led his body to be loaded with prosthetic materials. Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened performance and sculpture horizons.Ted Johnson, left, and Wally Cardona in “Secondary.”via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesBut the sport itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by countless other themes — sexual differentiation, reincarnation, cars, sewers and excrement, among many others — and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014) films. (Metrograph, a movie theater in Manhattan, is showing the “Cremaster” films this month and next.)With “Secondary,” which is open through June 25, Barney is tugging at a loose end that goes back to his childhood. From a place of physical and intellectual maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport — and a country, because football is quintessentially American — that may or may not have changed. Now 56, he is taking stock of himself and an uneasy nation.“There’s a way that the violence in our culture has become so exposed everywhere you look,” he said. “I think my relationship to that legacy is by way of my experience on the football field. I wanted to make a piece that looks at that, in more ways than one.”The new work is concise for Barney. It runs one hour, the clock time of a football game. Six performers, out of a principal cast of 11, enact the roles of players in the 1978 game, including Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, near the East River. And it is showing to the public now in that very venue — his final use of the space before he moves to a nearby facility.Last fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated football field, a movement lab and a film set. When I visited, the principal performers — including David Thomson, who plays Stingley and is the project’s movement director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum — were running through some of the episodes that tell the story abstractly, in an indirect sequence.“I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment,” said David Thomson, left, who plays the former Patriots receiver in “Secondary,” while Barney, right, plays Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThere were weird things going on, too. Additional performers around the sideline wore the all-black costumes of devoted Raiders fans, walking around like camp horror figures; some were actors, but others were members of the Raiders’ New York City fan club. Some were being filmed inside a trench that was dug into the studio floor, exposing pipes, dirt and water.An artist’s studio, Barney said, has traits of the stadium. “It’s kind of the organizing body for this story,” he said, adding: “I wanted my working space to be a character.”Digging the trench, he said, revealed decaying pipes and how the tide floods and recedes under the buildings. “I wanted that infrastructure to be exposed, both as a manifestation of the broken spine of Stingley, but also as crumbling infrastructure within my studio, within the city of New York,” he said.For all its allusions, “Secondary” — the title refers to the back line of defenders on the football field, cornerbacks and safeties whose job is to shadow the wide receivers and break up any passing play — holds to the Tatum-Stingley incident as its narrative and moral core.Stingley, right, was left paralyzed after Tatum hit him in a 1978 game.Ron Riesterer/Sporting News, via Getty ImagesIt is rich and also tragic material. Stingley died in 2007 at 55; Tatum, 61, died three years later. All his life after the hit, Stingley wanted an apology that never came. Tatum argued that the hit was just part of the job, even if he also boasted that his style of play pushed the line. Since then a flood of research has confirmed the sport’s toll. Stabler, whom Barney plays in “Secondary,” contributed to this knowledge posthumously when his brain was found to show advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.I asked if Barney, the former quarterback, had come to worry about his own health. “Honestly, yeah,” he said. He was glad, he added, that he stopped playing when he did.“Secondary” has a staccato format, amplified by its staging: A jumbotron-like overhead device shows one video channel on three screens, while four other channels run on monitors around the studio. The hit is evoked early, but much of the subsequent action returns to buildup — players warming up, fans getting hyped. The play sequences make up roughly the final third.“Secondary” was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, and it is now on view to the public there.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThe point was never a literal treatment, said Thomson, the movement director and Barney’s close collaborator on the project. “This isn’t a docudrama,” he said. “I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment.”Still, Thomson said, from studying the real-life athletes, he distilled traits that informed how he worked with the actors who portray them. Stingley, he said, was earnest. Tatum, angry. Grogan, technical. Each trait, he said, became “a touchstone one goes back to without too many flourishes, and see what resonates from that place.”In their research, Barney and Thomson read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football highlights and practice reels. Video of the hit — which came in a preseason game, with no competitive stakes — is grainy and sparse. The camera follows the ball past Stingley’s outstretched arms, so that the hit takes place at the edge of the frame. There were not dozens of camera angles available like today.David Thomson holds Ted Johnson aloft in a scene from “Secondary.” Play sequences make up roughly the final third of the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesIn their research, Barney and David Thomson, the project’s movement director, read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football footage.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesThis opened space for improvisation, and for Barney to introduce sculptural props that the players negotiate. (Barney has always stated he is a sculptor first and plans for these works to be shown in future exhibitions.)Xavier, the dancer who plays Tatum, had to contend with a pile of wet clay dumbbells that distended and broke as he carried them. “I’ve worked with props before, but they were solid,” he said. “But the clay was alive.” It forced him, he said, to locate vulnerability, even tenderness, inside a character that he remembered from his own childhood as an aggressive, even mean, football player.Indeed, the core players in “Secondary” are middle-aged men negotiating the memory of the culture they grew up in — and of their own bodies. Even stylized, the football movements involved in the piece are not instinctive or easy ones for men in their 50s and 60s.Barney “particularly wanted older bodies, which I appreciated,” Thomson said. “What are the limitations that those bodies hold that may have a different resonance, a different visual narrative?”But “Secondary” enfolds other perspectives as it gestures toward a broader, contemporary American social landscape. The referees are a mixed-gender crew. Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a composer, experimental vocalist and member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, delivers an extremely deconstructed version of the national anthem.Jacquelyn Deshchidn, center, is featured in “Secondary,” flanked by, from left, Jeffrey Gavett, Kyoko Kitamura and Isabel Crespo Pardo, who play referees in the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta Cervantes“As an Indigenous person, it was something that I was excited to take on,” Deshchidn said. They became drawn, too, to the work’s environmental aspect, spending breaks on set staring into the damp trench. “It brought up imagery of bones and burial, and repatriation work — the way there are institutions truly built on top of our bones.”Barney is an art-world celebrity (whose fame only grew during his more than decade-long relationship with the Icelandic pop artist Björk), but he prefers a low profile. On set, he cut a workaday presence with his close-shaven look under a cap. Performers in “Secondary” said his work ethic was intense but his manner open. While some people on the project are his longtime collaborators, like the composer Jonathan Bepler, many are new to his world.There is a sense with “Secondary” that Barney is turning a page — certainly with the studio move, after some 15 years at that site, but in some private way, too. When I asked if he was feeling his age — our age, as we are contemporaries — he said yes.“Letting go of being a young person is a big relief,” Barney said.Camila Falquez for The New York Times“In a good way,” he added. “Letting go of being a young person is a big relief.”Compared with his earlier work, “Secondary” strikes a more concise and collaborative note. “It’s more connected to the world,” he said. “It’s a piece that’s thinking through the environment within which it was made. In my 20s, I was trying to figure out ways of assigning a material language for what was inside me. This piece is different that way.”“Secondary” may take its cue from 1978 and invite its players into a kind of memory work through their bodies — but the work’s structure, with its emphasis on the buildup to the bad thing everyone knows is coming, energizes it with premonition.It ends in an elegiac vein, the final shots widening to the city. “It felt crucial to pan away from the specific to the general,” Barney said. “As much as the studio is a kind of micro frame, there’s a larger one that is the city and country that we live in. I want there to be some kind of legibility to read those different scales — for them all to be in there.” More

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      Rihanna Rep Confirms the Singer is Pregnant

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      Widespread speculation on social media during Rihanna’s halftime performance turned out to have merit: The singer, who starred in the Super Bowl halftime show, is pregnant, her representative, Amanda Silverman, confirmed on Sunday night.Rihanna, 34, performed for the first time in nearly four years, running through a quick medley of her hits. But, just as soon as fans applauded her return to the stage, Rihanna began to hint at her growing stomach in a ruby red Loewe jumpsuit and matching bustier, while singing fan favorites like “We Found Love,” “Diamonds” and “Only Girl (in the World),” occasionally rubbing and gesturing to her belly.the whole timeline afraid to ask if Rihanna is pregnant pic.twitter.com/KGQEhItzqx— Ira (@iramadisonthree) February 13, 2023
      This is not the first time Rihanna decided to make a splashy baby announcement: In January 2022, Rihanna and her partner, ASAP Rocky, announced they were pregnant through a series of photos taken by “fashion’s favorite paparazzi,” Miles Diggs, according to Vogue. Rihanna gave birth to a son in May.Fans have been waiting for a new Rihanna album since 2016 and pinned the start of a comeback with her halftime performance. Would she bring out a special guest? Release a new song? Announce a new tour? Instead, new rumors swirled.Once her publicist confirmed the news, reaction from fans was equal parts supportive and concerned. They expressed their admiration, but also some trepidation about how much longer they would need to wait for the next album.Caryn Ganz More

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      Lil Uzi Vert Gave the Eagles the Soundtrack to Their Season

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      Eagles players ran out onto the field to the Philadelphia rapper’s “Just Wanna Rock,” and they regularly celebrate with the song’s viral dance.PHOENIX — Like all N.F.L. teams, the Eagles employ many exceptionally large men. But as they left their locker room ahead of the N.F.C. championship game against the San Francisco 49ers, they were led by a musician who stands just 5-foot-4.The artist, clad in a midnight-green No. 16 Eagles jersey and diamond chains, was the rapper Lil Uzi Vert, who ran out with the group as “Just Wanna Rock” blared through the stadium. Uzi’s song, which has a viral hip-shaking dance to go with it, has become the soundtrack for the Eagles’ season.“That song got the city and the world buzzing,” Eagles linebacker Kyzir White said. “That feel like our anthem right now.”Uzi, who uses they/they pronouns, said in a recent interview that the response to the track “was like a dream come true.”The rapper, a native of Philadelphia, noted that it was gratifying to discover their fan base is “actually bigger than what I think,” adding, “I didn’t think that they really listened to me.”Dive Deeper Into Super Bowl LVIIThe God of Sod: George Toma, 94, has been a groundskeeper for all 57 Super Bowls. On Sunday, his perfectionism will be on display for millions of people who will have no idea who he is or how he suffers for his work.Philadelphia Swagger: After surviving a disastrous introductory news conference, an ill-chosen flower analogy and his “Beat Dallas” motivational shirt, Nick Sirianni has transformed the Eagles, and maybe himself.Inside a Kansas City Oasis: Big Charlie’s Saloon is a South Philadelphia bar with a bit of a conundrum: how to celebrate Kansas City’s Super Bowl berth without drawing the ire of locals.Halftime Show: The nearly four-year gap between Rihanna’s live performances will close when she takes the stage at the Super Bowl. During her hiatus, the stakes for her return have only grown.The up-tempo “Just Wanna Rock,” inspired by Jersey club music, doesn’t feature many lyrics. But its dance exploded on TikTok, and has evolved to include different variations. At its core, dancers shake their hips and move their arms while looking at a camera with a stoic facial expression.When running back Miles Sanders scored the Eagles’ first touchdown in the N.F.C. championship game, he celebrated with the dance; he was joined by center Jason Kelce, who looked more like he was trying to shake an insect off his back. “They still got some learning to do,” Uzi said, laughing.“That was the first time releasing that,” Kelce said with a smile. “I just felt it in the moment.”The song plays regularly in the Eagles’ locker room, White said. Often at the center of the dance circle is defensive lineman Jordan Davis, who stands at an imposing 6-foot-6 and 335 pounds. His moves always surprise his teammates because of his size.“He wants to dance all day,” White said. “Weight room, locker room, it don’t matter, he always hitting that.”Even Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, known for his love for old-school R&B tunes, has gotten behind “Just Wanna Rock.” When Uzi met Hurts in the locker room ahead of the N.F.C. championship game, the rapper remembers Hurts saying that the song was “crazy” — in a good way. Uzi said Hurts’s stamp of approval meant that much more because the song is so different from the player’s standard playlist. (After the Eagles ran out with Uzi before their game against the 49ers, Hurts’s favorite artist, Anita Baker, sang the national anthem.)Lil Uzi Vert performing last month in New York.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images For SiriusXMDuring the Eagles’ 2017 Super Bowl-winning season, the team leaned on the song “Dreams and Nightmares” by the rapper Meek Mill. Eagles players danced and rapped the song word for word before blowing out the Vikings in the N.F.C. championship game. Players said that track is still in heavy rotation, and Mill performed it ahead of the Eagles’ game against the Cowboys in Week 6.“Dreams and Nightmares” has long been considered something of a city anthem, but the popularity of “Just Wanna Rock” has sparked a debate within the Eagles’ locker room.“I like the ‘Just Wanna Rock’ dance, but I like ‘Dreams and Nightmares’ more,” Eagles cornerback Darius Slay said. “I like both of ’em, but the new generation now moved from jumping around. Now they want to dance.”Uzi is hoping the Eagles can help the song lead to change in their city, which has dealt with a recent increase in violent crime. While the dancing is all for fun, Uzi suggested that perhaps people in Philadelphia watching popular Eagles players busting out moves will inspire them to seek positive outlets for their energy.“We from a rough area, and the only thing that gets praised is negative things, and this is a positive thing,” Uzi said, adding: “You would rather be in the house perfecting the dance and doing videos instead of going outside doing something that’s not positive. Why not just keep doing it to make sure that everyone’s safe?”The Eagles haven’t yet asked Uzi to run out with them on Sunday, the musician said. But the rapper will be at the game, and it’s almost certain that players will be shaking their hips in celebrations. More

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      Football Gave Us a Carrie Underwood-Based Solution to Existential Dread

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      Carrie Underwood’s musical intro to “Sunday Night Football” offers a dazzling gift — even if you’re not a fan of the game.To an astronomer, the longest night of the year occurs once in each hemisphere, as the earth makes its ponderous revolution around the sun. For regular people — people with everyday problems, who don’t live in a fancy observatory surrounded by brass astrolabes — the winter solstice is a weekly event happening every Sunday. Sunday evenings are black holes from which no hope escapes; a time of rumination on the failures of the past seven days, and pre-emptive haunting by fiascos to come. Yet the universe has been known to attenuate misery with fleeting comforts: the sensation of incredible warmth that overtakes a body dying of hypothermia, for instance. And to those souls mired in Sunday-night gloom, it offers a dazzling gift: Carrie Underwood doing the “Sunday Night Football” song on NBC.If unshackled from the bonds of terrestrial experience, what might Carrie Underwood experience?This song is not one song but many songs. Since the show’s debut in 2006, its intro has been updated every year, and, within a given season, the song mutates constantly: Each week incorporates a different rhyming line tailored to the current matchup. A schedule may announce a contest between the Colts and the Cowboys; only Carrie Underwood reveals if this promises to be a “righteous showdown” or a “nasty showdown,” or that the teams are “about to throw down” or are “breaking new ground,” and so on. According to representatives from NBC Sports, Underwood annually records 85 permutations of this line back to back in a single session.The “Sunday Night Football” song extols not the thrill of football, nor the value of sport, but the highly specific ouroboric pleasure of turning on NBC to watch “Sunday Night Football” on NBC on Sunday night. The most frequently recurring version of the song, “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night,” is set to the tune of Joan Jett’s 1988 single “I Hate Myself For Loving You.” I do not enjoy football, or any sport other than Olympic women’s gymnastics finals when the United States is in first place. My comprehension of the rules is nil and my desire to learn them would have to be represented by a negative number. Nor am I a fan — or nonfan — of Carrie Underwood. Yet, when I hear the first word of the song explode from her confident lungs — “Oh,” pronounced “Hohawhunhohhuhawnhohn” — my consciousness abruptly recedes. Mechanically, I sprint to the living room and stare, bewitched, until the segment’s conclusion.The “Sunday Night Football” music video is beautiful to behold, each incarnation a novel response to the question: If unshackled from the bonds of terrestrial physics, what might Carrie Underwood experience? Answers include: strutting in a dress of rhinestone chain mail through a liminal space filled with floating videos of football fans; calmly standing on a platform that shoots her skyward through hoops of light at a thousand miles a minute; the stage at the Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas, the site of her residency, “Reflection: The Las Vegas Residency,” magically opening up onto a football stadium where approximately seven million fans, packed with atomic density, are losing their everloving minds to a song about “Sunday Night Football.”The “Sunday Night Football” song is most likely the theme song familiar to more Americans than any other, because more Americans watch “Sunday Night Football” than anything else on weekly television. In fact, of the 30 most-watched U.S. television broadcasts of all time, 29 are football games. There might be a need to gin up excitement for “Sunday Night Football” if, somehow, every week, “Sunday Night Football” were scheduled to air directly opposite the original 1983 broadcast of the series finale of “M*A*S*H” — the only nonfootball program to appear in the all-time Top 30 most watched. Under normal conditions, however, highlighting the fact that a football game is about to be televised for the American TV audience is an act equivalent to reciting the daily specials to a starving man.It is this unnecessity — the fact that it exists merely for its own sake — that makes the segment so moving. I don’t mean to imply that the opening sequence could compare favorably to, say, a sunset, which is likewise “beautiful” and “capable of reproducing itself in infinite variations”; I mean to say that outright. The tremble-inducing allure of the “Sunday Night Football” song surpasses nature’s awesome generative capacity. It is a spectacle that could only be conjured from a colossal amount of money.Tripp Dixon, the NBC Sports “VP of Creative” tasked with supervising this visual triumph, likens the sequence to an “airlock” designed to safely transition viewers from the grim reality of everyday existence to the high-octane fantasia of “Sunday Night Football.” In exchange for submission to the spectacular, “Sunday Night Football” promises a respite from all concerns.The sly genius of American football is that its accouterments — Super Bowl ads with feature-film budgets, stupefyingly cutting-edge bumper graphics — replicate, even or especially for those with no interest in football, the draw of football itself: a celebration of human aptitude and a diversion of attention away from anything more important. Through judicious application of Carrie Underwood and C.G.I. technology, the “Sunday Night Football” song offers a brief yet total respite from the horror of Sunday night.Caity Weaver is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. More

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      Gregory Allen Howard, Screenwriter of ‘Remember the Titans,’ Dies at 70

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      After the success of the movie, he established a brand for writing Hollywood movies about inspiring episodes in Black history.Gregory Allen Howard, who wrote the scripts of several Hollywood movies about inspiring episodes in Black history, most famously “Remember the Titans,” died on Friday in Miami. He was a day shy of his 71st birthday.His death, at a hospital, was caused by heart failure, his spokesman, Jeff Sanderson, said.“Remember the Titans” (2000) has joined the list of American films that find social significance in sports triumphs. Denzel Washington stars as Herman Boone, a Black coach leading a high school football team during its first season after racial integration. With the help of a white assistant, played by Will Patton, along with Black and white high school players who become devoted to each other, Mr. Boone launches the team on a glorious season, culminating in the state championship.The movie was an immediate sensation, premiering at the Rose Bowl and the White House. President Bill Clinton led people involved with the production in a school chant. Just a year later, The New York Times was calling it “one of the most successful sports films of all time” and a leading exemplar of “a genre that could be called the macho weepie.”On Nov. 4, 2008, after Barack Obama ended his presidential victory speech in Chicago with the words “May God bless America,” he was answered by the swelling, uplifting horns of the “Remember the Titans” instrumental theme.Mr. Howard was the prime force behind the movie. After moving to Alexandria, Va., he found himself struck by a prevailing atmosphere of racial harmony there. When he asked around about its source, he was continually told about the football team of T.C. Williams High School, which became integrated in 1971 and went on that year to win the state championship. He began buying life rights, including those of the real Herman Boone, and working on a screenplay.Mr. Howard at the premiere of “Harriet” in 2019. He said he had spent 25 years fighting to make the movie.Leon Bennett/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn a review, the Times film critic A.O. Scott described “Remember the Titans” as “corny,” adding that it was “unabashedly, even generously so.” The movie is widely reported to have earned more than $100 million worldwide over its roughly $30 million budget.Mr. Howard continued working in the vein of inspirational Black history. He wrote the story for “Ali,” which had four other screenwriters. It premiered in 2001 and starred Will Smith as Muhammad Ali. In a review in The Times, Elvis Mitchell called “Ali” a “near great movie.” But despite hype, it lost money at the box office. Beginning in 1994, Mr. Howard tried to get a movie made out of a screenplay he wrote on the life of Harriet Tubman. In 2019, A.O. Scott described the final product, “Harriet,” as “accessible, emotionally direct and artfully simplified.”In an essay for The Los Angeles Times that year, Mr. Howard described the release of the film as the culmination of an “epic 25-year journey.” He said that he could not list “the number of doors slammed in my face, the number of passes, the number of unreturned phone calls, canceled meetings, abandonments, racist rejections, the number of producing partners who bailed.”But over time the movie industry became more interested in a Tubman biopic, he continued: “#OscarsSoWhite, DiversityHollywood and the other pushes and protests for inclusion and diverse storytelling had moved the needle: The climate had changed,” he wrote.Michael Bentt, left, and Will Smith in the movie “Ali.” Mr. Howard wrote the story for the film.Peter Brandt/Getty ImagesGregory Allen Howard was born on Jan. 28, 1952, in Norfolk, Va. He was raised by his mother, Narcissus (Cole) Henley, and his stepfather, Lenard Henley, a chief petty officer in the Navy. (His father was Lowry Howard.)From the time he was 5 to 15, his family moved 10 times, finally settling in Vallejo, Calif. In 1974, he graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in American history. In later years, he frequently referred to his studies in college as inspiring the historical subject matter of his screenplays.After briefly working on Wall Street, Mr. Howard moved to Los Angeles and tried to become a screenwriter. He did not have much success and moved to Alexandria, wondering if a change in scenery might help while also contemplating giving up and studying to become a teacher.“When you hear no that much, you just begin to think, ‘I guess they’re right,’” he told The Times in 2000.After being inspired by the story of T.C. Williams High School, he pitched “every financing entity in the movie business,” he told The Times, until the producer Jerry Bruckheimer finally took on the project.In the mid-2010s, Mr. Howard’s website reflected a sense that his career had stalled. “The sad truth is it’s almost impossible to get movies made,” he wrote. “It’s a miracle that I’ve been involved in two, ‘Ali’ and ‘Titans.’”But by 2020, things had changed, with “Harriet” released the previous year and Mr. Howard working on several new projects also related to African American history and culture, he told The Washington Post.Mr. Howard is survived by a half sister, Lynette Henley, and a half brother, Michael Henley. Herman Boone died in 2019.Mr. Howard, who was an offensive lineman on his own high school varsity football team, attributed the success of “Remember the Titans” to the popularity of the sport and the place it holds in the memories of American men.“You’re talking about millions of guys,” he told The Times in 2001. “It’s a bonding experience like you can’t believe, and for a lot of men it was the last time they were important or heroic. It touches a nerve of a time when I was last innocent.” More