BY SHAWN WINDSOR • FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER • June 22, 2008
The stranger shot Lem Barney a glance as soon as he walked through the front door. It was around dinnertime in the lobby of the Southfield Police station on a recent Wednesday night, and quiet.
Barney noticed the stare instantly.
The Hall of Famer was sitting in the station lobby waiting to head upstairs to the jail, where a dozen or so inmates would be gathering to hear him offer a chance at salvation.
"Sorry to stare so long when I came in," the stranger stammered, "but you looked familiar. I was trying to figure out who you were."
"Lem Barney," he announced emphatically.
"The football player?"
"YES, SIR!"
"Nice to meet you."
And they shook hands.
Within seconds, Barney welcomed the stranger into his embrace, introducing him to Rick Gibson, Barney's colleague from Hope United Methodist in Southfield who was at the jail to help Barney preach to the inmates, introducing him to the reporter tagging along, to his repertoire of high-wattage grins and sing-song cadence and his endless supply of aphorisms:
" 'It's nice to be important,' my momma always told me, 'but it's more important to be nice.' "
In Barney's world, everybody is a "brother, man" or a "sister, man." In Barney's world, everything is "beautiful, man" and everyone is "blessed, man." In Barney's world, loving dogs means you're adept at animal husbandry and watering plants means you're a horticulturist and enjoying a little weed doesn't mean "you were sitting and smoking all of Jamaica, man."
In Barney's world, his parents weren't cooks.
"They were culinary scientists," he says.
And they raised him to believe that Joy stands for "Jesus, oh, yes!" -- even if he lost sight of that for a while.
"I took right turns when I should have turned left, and I kept going straight when I should have turned around," he said. "But I thank God for saving an old wretch like me."
This is why he was at the Southfield Police station, and why a group of inmates were willing to listen to this impeccably dressed, 62-year-old former Lion and Hall of Fame player. A man who survived a plunge into the sins of the celebrity life before pulling himself from the muck. Were it not for the gray on the side of his head, you could easily imagine him taking the field again, blanketing the secondary and giving quarterbacks nightmares.
Still, despite his street cred and his charisma and the book he is carrying under his arm -- "God's Game Plan, The Athlete's Bible" -- the first question of the night is about something more pressing.
"So," an inmate asked as the prisoners were taking their seats in the mess hall, "are the Lions going to win this year?"
"I think they are going to win it all this year, man," Barney replied.
Then he paused.
"Nah, man, I'm kidding. I'm giving you hope."
Hope is Barney's business these days. And he spreads it wherever his days take him. To churches. To Coney Island restaurants. To better-dad conventions. To schools. And to prisons.
For those efforts, he recently was named a recipient of the Brown Bomber jacket -- given in Joe Louis' name to those who show commitment to community involvement and working with youth. He will be honored today at Cobo Center.
The honor comes 41 years after Barney arrived in Detroit, fresh from Mississippi. The city was smoldering then. "I moved here three days after the riots," he said.
In between, Barney turned himself into an icon, made choices that chipped away at that status, and eventually threw himself into the most challenging scrum he has ever faced: the battle to save souls.
His game plan is simple.
"I'm just being Lem Barney," he said.
Pray. Read the Bible. Work out.
Barney, Weger form unlikely duet
The Lions took Barney with their second-round draft choice in 1967. He'd played at Jackson State, the same small Mississippi school that later produced Walter Payton. Barney had come up in a poor but strict and religious home.
"But we never went hungry," he said.
He was fast and quick and possessed great balance, traits that allowed him to take great risks on the field as a cornerback.
On the field, he fit in immediately. In his first game, he intercepted the first pass Green Bay legend Bart Starr threw his way. He returned it 24 yards for a touchdown. In his last game of his rookie year, he had three picks in one quarter against the Minnesota Vikings. He was named defensive rookie of the year.
Off the field, his all-out mentality in practice irritated the veterans. And when it was time to go out with the boys to the bar, he usually ended up eating ice cream with fellow rookie Mike Weger.
Weger and Barney broke ranks in more substantial ways, too. Weger had grown up in Oklahoma before moving to Ohio. But one day in camp, he started singing an old blues song that stopped Barney in his tracks.
"Where did you hear that?" he demanded.
"On the radio," Weger replied, sheepishly.
"No white guys know that music!"
From that moment, they began singing together. In the locker room. On the bus. On the sideline during practice. They became one of the most formidable left sides in the defensive backfield in football -- Weger was a safety. They even joined the Navy Reserve together.
The two asked the Lions if they could room together on the road.
"And that just wasn't done in those days," Weger said. "I can remember stories of teams cutting black players just because a team had an odd number of black guys on the road. They would rather cut him than put him with a white guy."
Said Barney: "We broke a barrier. We were the first black and white roommates in the NFL."
Still, the arrangement lasted only two years. As Barney's fame rose, so did the pressure on him from black activists, some of whom didn't appreciate his rooming with a white guy.
"It was tough on Lem," Weger said. "He was just a fun-loving guy."
Around the same time, Barney started hanging out with the Motown guys. In 1970, he introduced himself to Marvin Gaye by knocking on his front door in Palmer Park.
The next year, the two were traveling the country in a Winnebago, and Barney was singing backup on Gaye's classic, "What's Going On."
"Those were the days, man," Barney said.
He'd smoked his first joint with Gaye. It opened an enticing but daunting world.
"It was the times," said Mel Farr, the running back who roomed with Barney after Weger. "A lot of 'Let's make love, not war.' Get a little high, etc. Some guys took it further than others.' "
Barney went on to appear in "Paper Lion," the movie version of George Plimpton's book about the team. He also made "The Black Six," a motorcycle flick about returning veterans from Vietnam.
The script had a plot that called for trouble. In some ways, it foreshadowed his own life.
From Lions to MichCon to pulpit
Barney retired in 1977, after 11 seasons, seven Pro Bowls, 56 interceptions and 11 touchdowns. He went to work for MichCon. His job was community relations, or, in other words, to be Lem Barney.
During this time, Weger lost touch with him.
"I'd heard through the grapevine that Lem was struggling with drugs and women and money," Weger said.
In March 1993, Barney hit bottom. In a MichCon company car heading south on I-75, he smashed into a ramp. The cops found four roaches (marijuana butts) and cocaine. Barney blamed hitchhikers. He told the court they had left the paraphernalia in his car while he'd run inside a gas station.
A year later, he beat the case. But it came with a price. MichCon fired him. Maybe worse, he'd broken the one rule his father had laid down all those years ago.
"Whatever you do," Lemuel Barney told his son, "don't taint the family name."
Only a year before, he'd been elected to the Hall of Fame after being eligible for seven years. (Many, including Weger, thought he wasn't voted in earlier because of questions about his lifestyle in the 1970s and '80s.)
The public embarrassment that followed cost him his job and his name. Farr stepped in and gave him a job at one of his auto dealerships. That lasted until 2002, when Farr was forced to sell his dealerships because of predatory lending practices. Barney distanced himself from his friend.
"He didn't want his name tainted again," Weger said. "It was too bad. By then, Lem couldn't tolerate it. He was so far along in his change of character that he walked away."
After the bust, Barney had reached out to Weger.
"He called me out of the blue and said, 'I (screwed) up.' I told him I never stopped believing he was a good person. And he went about changing his life around."
After leaving Farr, Barney became a lay minister at his church, Hope United. He was preaching.
"He was so proud," Weger said.
These days, preaching fills his calendar, either the gospel of Jesus, or the gospel of Lem.
Sinai Grace Hospital hired him to work in community relations, to be himself, to shake hands and smile just as he used to do with MichCon.
He has reconnected with old friends -- Farr was slated to present Barney with his Brown Bomber jacket. He has remarried -- he divorced his first wife in 1999. He has reconnected with the Lions.
"He's our go-to guy," said Tim Pendell, the team's director of community relations. "Yeah, he's had his ups and downs. But he's one of the finest, warmest, most genuine people I've ever met."
And he's singing with his former roommate again. On any given day, Barney might get a call from Weger.
"And I will start singing," he said.
"And I will jump right in," Barney added.
And the voices ride a telephonic wave around metro Detroit, a couple of guys making music as if it were 1967 all over again.
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