JAMES LOFTON’S TRYING TIMES : Behind Athletic Ability and Those Good Deeds Lurks the Awful Deed and a Question: Why?

Time hangs ominously in an upstairs room of the Brown County Courthouse, where the next word spoken can mean 10 years. Mini-cams are trained on the accused. Visitors squirm on hardwood benches.

James Lofton sits erect and waits.

This is a rape case. He’s the defendant.

Oh no, this just can’t be happening.

Maybe to some hard-shelled mercenary who’s been bribed, flattered, recruited, fought over, pandered to, paid off under the table and passed along in class until he can’t tell the Ten Commandments from a laundry list, but not to James Lofton.

This is the best and the brightest: B+ student in engineering at Stanford; Wisconsin chairman of the Mental Health Assn.; Packer United Way spokesman; volunteer worker for Special Olympics, the March of Dimes, the Boys Club of Milwaukee, the Urban League; member of the board of directors of the National Football League Players Assn., the Milwaukee Ballet.

This is also the second such accusation made against him in 27 months.

Behind him sit relatives, former Packer teammates and the little group from Iron Mountain, Mich., the family of the woman Lofton is accused of assaulting.

During recesses, the Packers walk 20 feet across the hall for the rape trial of another teammate, Mossy Cade. It is a singular week in the history of Green Bay, and if there is never another like it, no one will complain.

The verdict is handed to Judge Alexander Grant, a homey-looking man with a round face and a forelock that falls over his forehead the way a kid’s does. The mini-cams zoom in on Lofton. Whatever he’s feeling, it’s betrayed only by a single lick of his lips.

Behind him, his wife, Beverly, “is just about to lose it.

“I knew in my heart what the verdict should have been, but when you’re relying on 12 people you don’t know . . . “ she says later.

“He could have been convicted and taken away from me right at that minute. All I kept thinking was, ‘Gosh, I didn’t let him say goodby to our son, like a real goodby, this morning.’

“And, ‘If he’s convicted and they don’t let him out on bond, would I just be standing here in my shoes, wondering where to go?’ ”

Grant says he’ll announce the verdict and then ask the jury a question. Lofton’s lawyer, Stephen Glynn, confident until that moment, says his heart feels as if it has fallen into his stomach.

James Lofton sits erect, unflinching, waiting to hear how the rest of his life will come out.

THE RIDDLE

James had a beautiful personality. Let me put it this way, of all the young men I coached, if there’s anyone I would want my sons to pattern themselves after in terms of their attitude towards people, towards athletics, toward academics, toward life in general, it would be James Lofton. --RON FOWLKES, Lofton’s football coach at L.A. Washington High Me. Gary Hart. Jim Bakker. Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan. Hey, I’m in there with some good guys. --JAMES LOFTON Lofton was acquitted.

And in the previous case, resulting from an accusation by an exotic dancer in a Milwaukee bar that Lofton and teammate Eddie Lee Ivery had sexually assaulted her in her dressing room, the Milwaukee district attorney’s office refused to file sex-related charges.

Before the law, Lofton is clear.

He is now a Raider, having been traded to the Los Angeles team a month before the trial, and the world is spread before him anew.

But still, how could it have happened?

Putting the best face on it, why would this man--gifted, generous, admired, married, humiliated by a prior accusation--meet a woman in Green Bay’s busiest downtown night spot, engage in a public flirtation and wind up with her performing oral sex on him in a stairwell?

Lofton concedes all this. The only issue was whether the woman was forced, as she claimed, or consented, as he claimed.

Whether he was having a problem at being in Green Bay; or of having to grow up and settle down; or of realizing, where previously there was a sense of invincibility, that there are limits to the athlete, there does seem to have been some kind of rebellion going on in his life.

That’s the short answer. What follows is the long answer.

YOUNG JAMES

This is the bittersweet saga of the family of Emmanuel Michael Lofton Sr., a career Army man turned bank operations manager, industrious and personable, blessed and burdened.

Violet, Emmanuel’s wife and James’ mother, left the family when James was 8 and he didn’t see her again until he was 19.

James’ big brother, Michael, drifted through life and last year, at 38, was bludgeoned to death while sleeping overnight in a park in southwest Los Angeles. James says the reason that Michael drifted was “probably drugs.”

Emmanuel was born in Texas and attended Prairie View State College where he played football, basketball and track. Like James, he was a long jumper. Emmanuel fought in World War II, stayed in the Army until 1964, then retired from the service and moved his four children to Los Angeles. Violet didn’t accompany them. Emmanuel doesn’t like talking about it.

He borrowed enough for a down payment on a pleasant house in a middle-class neighborhood a few minutes east of the Forum and still lives there. Now retired, he does volunteer work for the active blind, the Urban League and the NAACP.

One of James’ sisters is at San Francisco State, doing graduate work in sociology. The other is a writer living in New York. He isn’t in close touch with either.

“I think it was a relatively close family,” James says. “I don’t think it was as close as ‘Father Knows Best,’ or ‘Family Ties’ or ‘The Cosby Show.’ I think we were probably the average American family, where some of the kids talk to the other kids more than some others, and things that you had in common brought you closer together.

“Me and my brother had sports in common and probably our sisters rebelled. If you’re in a house and they’re watching sports all weekend long, I think you might get tired of that.

“Being the youngest, I was catered to by my brother and sisters. They probably fought over me like a toy. So when we moved to California, I really didn’t miss my mother. I remember realizing a few months later, when my brother and sisters were talking to her on the phone, that she wasn’t going to come. And I didn’t understand that. I didn’t understand the concept of divorce.”

Was it hard on his father?

“For some reason, I really don’t think so. The older kids were at the age when they’re pretty self-sufficient.”

James loved Los Angeles. At Washington High, he wasn’t so much admired as revered. His coaches loved his intelligence, his industry, his easy sense of humor, his independence, his leadership. They marveled at his overwhelming self-confidence.

It wasn’t because James was a superstar, either. Anyone who has seen him bounding past NFL defenders like an elk among tree stumps, or remembers his days as a one-man track team at Stanford, would be surprised to learn that he made himself into an athlete.

As a high school sophomore, he played B-team football. Ken Stumpf, his track coach and a football assistant who is now at Banning High, said that at a big program--say, Banning’s--James might have had trouble getting a uniform. He was state long jump champion as a senior, but only a pretty good quarterback. Not good enough to interest USC or UCLA.

“He had no real tools going for him but he had a goal down the line,” Stumpf said. “He lifted weights on his own. At that time, lifting at the high school level wasn’t a real big thing.”

Lofton today has a huge upper body. Asked by Sport magazine why he still lifts so much, he said, laughing, “Because it makes me look good.”

You might also think that being one of four kids raised by a single parent, James would have been out there alone. You’d be wrong.

“I have four sons and I just don’t know how the father could be so dedicated,” Fowlkes said. “He was at every football game, every track meet, I don’t care where it was. Anything James was involved in, the father was there, always in a suit and tie, smiling, a very personable man. There was a unique closeness between father and son.”

It was late in his college career that James really happened. He didn’t start in football until his senior year, when he exploded under new Coach Bill Walsh. He long-jumped 27-0 that spring, best in the world in 1978.

He was the sixth player chosen in the National Football League draft. A fraternity brother of Lofton at Theta Delta Chi said that when they heard where he was going--Green Bay--the whole house let out a collective groan.

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES,

It may have been a small fiefdom but it was his.

Lofton was the most outrageous talent the franchise had seen in the post-Vince Lombardi era. He made the Pro Bowl as a rookie, ruled the locker room almost from the day he walked in and dazzled the fans. The press thought him cocky--this is the first stage in his life where you begin to hear this characterization--but usually charming.

The Packers went 8-7-1 in 1978, their first winning season in six years. There was fun, fun and more fun.

A year later, they went 5-11. Lofton hurled his pads into his locker during the postgame prayer and had words with Coach Bart Starr after one loss.

During another, he was booed and made an obscene gesture to the crowd. Packer publicist Chuck Lane subsequently called him “a prima donna” during a speech to a group of fans.

Lofton would often marvel that he had only gestured for an instant and that the photographers happened to catch it, suggesting he’d been victimized by some fast-draw photog. Then, as later, he had trouble accepting consequences.

At a New Year’s Eve party in Los Angeles on the last day of 1979, he met Beverly. She was a singer, a born-again Christian who had been second runner-up in the Miss Arkansas contest. They married a year later. James became a born-again Christian.

Beverly once told Sports Illustrated: “(He) had a real desire to change. He was unhappy and he knew he had to get down off his high horse and stop thinking he was better than everybody else.”

Says Beverly now: “He’d had a lot of girlfriends. There were a lot of women up here who wanted him. He was the big do in Green Bay. He had a lot of women in California. He knew beautiful women, but he just didn’t seem like he was at a pleasant place in his life.”

Overnight, it seemed, James was happy again. He laughed once more. He joined community organizations throughout Wisconsin. He went back to the Pro Bowl. Beverly was said to have “matured” James, as if maturity was something one person could hand another.

But they were as engaging as a couple could be. Before the ’81 season, newly married and living near the Stanford campus, they were interviewed by Mike Littwin, then a Times writer, who found them a delight.

“He picked me up at the airport,” said Littwin, now a columnist with the Baltimore Sun. “He had a Porsche. We kidded about it.

“We went back to his condo, where I met Beverly. She was just a knockout. She’s so smart. I really enjoyed the day and you know me, there aren’t that many of these guys I want to talk to.

“His whole thing, he didn’t want to play in Green Bay. The quote I used, I asked him how long he stayed there after the season. He said, ‘Only as long as the first flight out.’

“He said once he had stayed overnight because there wasn’t a flight till the next morning. Green Bay was too white, not hip enough. He was hip. He was handsome, well dressed. He was a Yuppie before they had the word.”

Lofton says now he didn’t really want out of Green Bay. He was renegotiating his contract and his agent had told him to say that.

It’s a point on which there has been some confusion, aggravated in no small part by Lofton’s favorite practical joke, telling one writer, “Yeah, I can’t stand it here,” then five minutes later telling another writer, “Oh no, I’m perfectly happy.”

Maybe he wasn’t sure, himself.

In fact, he never asked to be traded, or refused to report. He signed a long-term contract worth $935,000 a year. In 1983, he was one of five finalists for NFL Man of the Year, an award for players with exemplary off-field lives. He and Beverly had their own weekly TV show. They had a beautiful house set in the woods of the Green Bay suburb of Ashwaubenon and another in Milwaukee, where they spent the off-season.

Then came the incident in the Milwaukee bar in October, 1984. The D.A.’s office brought no sex-related charges but stated, ‘We believe the conduct of the two men to be reprehensible, shameful and depraved.’ ”

Lofton and Ivery were found guilty of trespassing in the dancer’s dressing room and ordered to pay $500 each to the owner of the nightclub. Lofton’s image had been tarnished. The TV show was not renewed. His demeanor changed again.

“As dramatic a change in a good way as there was after he married Beverly, there was a change for the bad after Milwaukee,” says Rob Schultz of the Madison (Wis.) Capital Times, who was close to Lofton. “As accessible as he’d been up to that point, suddenly he was that inaccessible.”

Even at that, the situation stabilized. There were several other court challenges relating to the Milwaukee case, and Lofton won them all. He made the Pro Bowl in ’84 and ’85. His picture was on milk cartons throughout Wisconsin. The Loftons enlarged the Ashwaubenon house, figuring they were there for the duration.

But there was one more disaster left on the horizon.

THE TRIAL

Last Dec. 17, three days before the end of the season, the Packer receivers had a dinner. Afterward, Lofton and teammates Mike Moffitt and Walter Stanley went to the Top Shelf Lounge where they got acquainted with three women who were down from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for two days of Christmas shopping.

The six spent some time together in the bar, although who was with whom and for how long was disputed.

Defense witnesses said they saw the complainant, a 30-year-old housewife, standing between Lofton’s legs as he straddled a bar stool. One of her companions, 26-year-old Paris Stanchina, said it was she who had stood between Lofton’s legs.

A waitress, testifying for the defense, said that Lofton had asked her what she was doing when she finished work.

Lofton and the complainant later took an elevator downstairs and entered the stairwell, where the woman performed oral sex on him. The woman said that Lofton forced her to do it, holding her by her hair.

She didn’t report it, however, for several hours, after telling one of her friends back at their hotel. The friend mentioned it, in passing, to a hotel security man who called the police. No physical evidence--e.g. bruises, torn out hair--was found.

The jury, chosen in Janesville, about 170 miles south of here near the Illinois border, deliberated for less than two hours. A few days later, several of the jurors talked to a reporter from the Beloit Daily News.

Edith Fiebig, one of two women on the jury, said: “It was an easy decision.”

John Denninger said: “We agreed right from the beginning he wasn’t guilty.”

Robert Glenn said: “I don’t think it’s a case that should have been brought to court because they didn’t have enough evidence to convict the guy.”

JAMES

Just for starters, what was he doing there in the first place?

“Oh, c’mon,” Lofton says, reclining on a sofa in the Ashwaubenon house. “Anybody could be in that bar. And anybody could sit around and let women flirt with them.

“And how many men turn down sex? I think that really is the question.”

How many are married public figures who have been accused of sexual assault?

“At some point, you think to yourself, ‘Now c’mon, relax, be at least a normal football player,’ ” Lofton says. “ ‘Be like everybody else. Don’t be so guarded.’ ”

But a public flirtation in Green Bay’s hottest night spot?

“OK, you look at that and you say, ‘Well . . . ‘

“At some point the brain just cuts off and he said, ‘Well, I’m having a good time, what the heck.’

“Think if you were sitting here with Gary Hart. Here’s a man who probably would have been the next President. Look at what he was risking and look what I was risking. That somebody would tell my wife? And the next day, I’d say, ‘No, I wasn’t.’ Really, that’s all I was risking in my mind.

“That is the answer. The question is: ‘Weren’t you aware that there might be evil forces out there, that people are after you?’ At some point, you don’t want people to be after you. You want to relax. You want to let your guard down. . . . It’s just a denial that something bad is going to happen to you. And that’s all I did.

“People say, ‘Didn’t you think?’ No, you don’t think. Do you think when you’re changing lanes and you forget to use your turn signal?”

Put another way, if you’ve had it both ways long enough, you begin to think that having it both ways is an inalienable right. Chalk up another one to experience: It isn’t.

Lofton is wearing shorts, a T-shirt from his “Superstars” competition days and a Rolex. He’s friendly, soft-spoken, shows a good sense of humor and entertains all questions.

He’s also hard to read. He talks about what you’d imagine to be painful memories--the death of his brother, the absence of his mother--matter of factly, briefly, and without changing the tone of his voice.

He argues with most characterizations made of him. Do his high school coaches say he always had a plan? He says he was just a kid who loved sports. Does the press think he was dying to get out of Green Bay? Not r-e-a-l-l-y.

Do they say he’s aloof and arrogant? No, it’s just there are so many times he has nothing to say.

Beverly says: “There were times when we were first together when that’s what I noticed the most. You could just tell, the tenderness--James had to fend for himself a lot. James spent a great deal of time alone.

“Usually it’s your mom who calls you after something like that (the obscene gesture to the crowd) and says (sweetly), ‘Now James, what are you doing?’

“James grew up with his father and men are tougher in that way. James’ father is the type who would tell him but he’d tell him quickly and then he’s done. His father was a military man so he dealt with things in a military style: ‘You’re a man and this is what you’re supposed to do.’

“A lot of people have criticized James the past few months when they’ve been doing all these psychoanalytic things. But when you have a wife like Chatty Cathy and you’ve spent your life being silent, there really is no reason for him to open up.

“For the people close to him, he’s open enough. There are people who are close friends who will still say, ‘Gosh, I don’t know when he’s kidding or when he’s teasing, or angry.’ That’s a part of his nature.

“At the same time, he’s very, very sensitive to other people’s feelings. And very non-judgmental. That’s one of the things I liked most about him. He doesn’t have great expectations of people. Except athletes. He doesn’t like it when players don’t have discipline, when players don’t have heart.

“He doesn’t drag his problems home. When the Packers were having problems last year--they changed the system on him--he struggled but I could barely see it. (The Packers went to a short-pass game, Lofton’s per-catch average dropped and he missed the Pro Bowl for the second time). I knew by my seeing it a little, he was struggling a lot.

“His quarterback of eight years (Lynn Dickey) was gone. His roommate of eight years (Mike Douglass) was gone. His receivers coach of eight years (Lew Carpenter) was gone. Greg Koch from the offense line, (tight end) Paul Coffman.

“The day Lynn Dickey was waived, he said, ‘I still had to go out to the second practice and I practiced all out. I couldn’t go, “Oh gosh, I’m so depressed, my best friends are gone.” ’ I know how he dealt with that. He just totally avoided it. He thought the only way he could survive was to continue to go on as if it hadn’t happened.”

Similarly, after the ’84 incident in the Milwaukee bar, Lofton turned to the game.

“Maybe I felt like I had something to prove and that was the only way I could prove it,” he says.

“If that changed me, maybe this incident and being vindicated has taken me back to before that all happened. Maybe I have more knowledge.

“I’ve gotten a chance to look at myself and look at possibly what God is doing to me. And perhaps He just wanted to say, ‘James, I want you to be a little more compassionate.’

“Maybe, being an athlete who does nothing but train as hard as you do, who thinks it should hurt when things don’t go right on the field, that other players should be able to disregard their problems and get out there and do what they have to do, that could have caused my attitude.

“And God might have just said, ‘Unh-uh. Because I’ve given you so much that you’re unable to see other peoples’ hurt, I’m going to let you experience a little hurt. So that maybe you can help somebody else down the road.’

“I think Jesus hit it on the head--’Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ And that’s not to make me sound self-righteous. I made mistakes. I’ve asked for forgiveness. And I’ve just got to go on.

“Most people live in fear that somebody will find out something horrible about them. People know more than the worst about me. It’s better this way. Now, if people like me, it’s because they like me. I don’t have to think, ‘I hope Mark doesn’t turn this up when he goes back to the hotel.’ I mean, what more can you write?

“This is the first time in a couple of years that I’ve felt good. The cases are over. For a while it was like the worst soap opera ever written: ‘What’s going to happen to me now? Woe is me.’

“Now it’s been taken care of. All I have to worry about now is getting in the starting lineup.”

BEVERLY

Does Beverly Lofton remember the night of Dec. 17?

Try minute by minute.

“It was a weird thing,” she says. “That night I kept feeling strange. I just didn’t feel right. I almost got in the car and went down there.

“What would have happened if I’d gone down there? We wouldn’t have been in all this mess, but hindsight is 20-20. But I had this gut feeling that was what I wanted to do. The only reason I didn’t, I was making an angel costume for our child’s Christmas program the next day and I had to finish it.

“I had a sense there was some hanky-panky going on. When he got home, there was a guilty look on his face. I was still up, pretending I was cleaning. It was 2 in the morning.

“Once he had disclosed everything (the next day, after being arrested), I asked him, ‘Is there any way, that by any little inkling you could be considered to have forced anything to happen?’ And he said absolutely not.

“It wasn’t like he was saying this because this is what the wife wanted to hear. When you’ve gone through as much as we’ve gone through, there are no more secrets, there are no more games.

“So I was convinced he was innocent. We knew what he had done wrong but it had nothing to do with the criminal system. It had to do with us.

“Honestly, I think he knows my feelings. If he’d assaulted someone, I’d have wanted him to be prosecuted.

“It’s ironic. I used to work with female victims here in Green Bay. I was on the board of directors of the Family Abuse Center. When I first came up here, it was one of the first organizations I became involved with. My sister was a victim of domestic abuse. She was murdered by her estranged husband.

“What I think could have happened--James had his pick of women here. I mean, I’ve had women come up to me and ask me what it’s like to wake up next to this man, with this body. Women would come up to him and want to kiss him--young and old. Women will say the darndest things to me. I can’t imagine--I can imagine--what it’s like when he’s not with me.

“There were girls at training camp hanging around from 15 up. It was really scary. I knew some of the girls. They were friends of my baby sitter.

“Of course, he knew he was being watched, but he hates that kind of scrutiny. He hated not having anonymity. It’s not like it’s a death wish but it’s the same sort of thing as Gary Hart. James knew he was being accused of having an extra life. But what is it in a person that says, ‘I’m going to do this. I’m just going to do this because it feels good right now.’

“There are some things I feel bad for him. I don’t want him to get a reputation as a womanizer. I’ve heard stuff like that: ‘Oh gosh, she’s known he was like that for years.’ No, I have not known he was like that. If so, that’s going to be a great surprise for me. I didn’t marry somebody to put up with that kind of stuff.

“People have said things about my own sexuality: ‘Is she frigid? Doesn’t she like oral sex?’

“People asked me all sorts of things: ‘Did you spend too much time with your child? Was James jealous?’ I said to James, ‘People don’t look at it like there was a flaw in you but that there’s a flaw in me.’

“I think he’s OK about knowing his life will change. He’s had incredibly bad fortune. But for us, there are blessings in everything. Either this man is going to be totally committed and . . . faithful and committed to this marriage. Or he’s going to blow the whole thing apart.

“A lot of people don’t get to test their commitment. Mine has definitely been tested. I’ve never questioned that James loved me--no, I shouldn’t say that. Let’s just say, I’ve always known he loved me and I’ve never thought he was unhappy in marriage.

“He bottomed. Don’t let James fool you. We bottomed in hurt and everything else. It just turned us over and allowed us to look at everything in our lives, football, our friends.

“I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh, their marriage won’t come out of this.’ (Laughing) If you’d asked me ahead of time if I could have withstood something like this, I’d have probably said, ‘No. I’ll feed him poison, make him impotent and then I’ll leave him.”

Beverly is expecting the couple’s second child in July, about two weeks before Raider camp opens. Life begins again.

She tries to think if there’s anything she’s left unsaid.

“Just don’t forget,” she says, “to say that I love the man.”

EPILOGUE: FAME IN A SMALL CITY

It seems there are some people in this world who want to take from others, who are never satisfied with what they have accomplished and therefore feel a need to take what someone else has gotten through hard work and perseverance. I’m sick and tired of people not knowing and understanding what it takes to become a successful athlete. If professional athletes get some sort of special treatment, it is because they have earned it. No one knows what a person has to give up to be a professional. It takes more than ability. He has to have a certain drive that will place him above others. --FORREST GREGG, Packer coach

Two days after Lofton was found innocent, one day after Mossy Cade was found guilty, Gregg really said that to a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter, referring to the Cade jury that had prayed for five minutes before beginning deliberations.

Does it have to be said? Many other people work hard and make sacrifices for less glory and profit, while providing more enduring contributions to society. Gregg, who administers what amounts to a state religion, must have forgotten for the moment.

Celebrity tends to warp perspective on the part of the celebrated and the celebrant, alike. And it isn’t just a problem in Green Bay.