The Super Bowl Antihero

A y

ear ago in the buckhead section of Atlanta, in the early hours of Monday, a long-running post-Super Bowl party was breaking up at the posh Cobalt Lounge. A scuffle between two groups turned into a fight; a Champagne bottle was broken over someone's head; two men fell. Jacinth Baker, 21, and Richard Lollar, 24, had been knifed and were dying. A big man who had tried to break up the fight jumped into a limo, which wheeled away as shots rang out. The man's name was Ray Lewis, and he was heading into a year that would see him reach the depths--shackled, in solitary, roused in the dead of night to make sure he hadn't killed himself--and then climb to the heights. On Sunday, Lewis, 25, star linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, will play in the game he watched a year ago, and the only trouble he'll cause will be between the sidelines.

He was at the time of the crime a multi-millionaire who had grown up poor in the roughest of Florida Panhandle neighborhoods. He had, earlier in the evening, been strutting in a white mink, having been chauffeured from the game to the club in that stretch Lincoln Navigator limo. His company included Joseph Sweeting, who had befriended Lewis when he was a college star with the Miami Hurricanes; and Reginald Oakley, a newer friend, from Baltimore, Md., the one who took the Champagne bottle on the head. "They were guys who would come over to Ray's during the season, and they'd ride together in the limo to a game," says Donald Samuel, an attorney who represented Lewis after the athlete, along with Sweeting and Oakley, had been indicted for double murder. "Ray had some wrong friends." Several were among the 10 who piled into the Lincoln when it became an escape car.

When police picked up Lewis at a friend's house outside Atlanta, he was uncooperative. "He lied about everything," says Samuel. Lewis says there was no reason, at that juncture in his life, for him to trust cops more than his friends. He had been cited four previous times for participating in brawls, batteries or assaults and had never been tried. This time he was cuffed, booked and put in jail for two weeks. He likens the days to "hell." He didn't call his five-year-old son Ray-Ray, because he did not want to have to explain what the boy had seen on television: his dad in leg irons, being led from court.

Lewis' legal team knew from the get-go that things were not as they might have seemed in the hazy dawn of that awful Monday. "It was a weak prosecution," says Samuel. "I'm not blaming the police. A guy departs the scene and then doesn't cooperate--it looks bad. But witness after witness said Ray did nothing, and the prosecution wouldn't let it go."

Throughout the ordeal, Lewis' focus on football became more intense. "He would squeeze tennis balls in his hands, crush them to strengthen his arms," remembers Samuel. "The entire trial, day after day, his hands were under the table exercising. He'd leave court and go work out."

Lewis had not killed the men, and finally the prosecution had to buckle. In June, in exchange for his testimony against Oakley and Sweeting (who were subsequently acquitted), Lewis pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.

Though the NFL fined him $250,000--a fine that infuriates him and that he is appealing--he agreed in the preseason to tell NFL rookies about his ordeal. He says he will be evangelical in trying to keep others out of trouble and that he knows what he's talking about--wrong attitudes, wrong friends, wrong places at the wrong times. Says Samuel: "When you've signed a contract for $26 million for four years, you don't suddenly start hanging out with Ted Turner. You hang with who you know. Then others come along."

But that was Lewis' past. His present and future, once he was sprung, were the Ravens. Having done his good deed in counseling, he went back to work. With a vengeance. He says he worked harder than ever to prove he was the best, because if he were anything less, people would say the ordeal had weakened him. What he told his mother on the courthouse steps after being freed--"You have a changed man"--would extend to all aspects of his life.

And on Sunday, Ray-Ray will be watching. He'll be rooting for a man who was, a year ago, in chains.