However today’s big scrap with the Packers turns out, the result is unlikely to shake up the Kingfisher, Okla., celebrity rankings.
Falcons middle linebacker Curtis Lofton could have the game of his young, tackle-rich life right there on national TV. He could actually catch, and bring down, Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, unlike the last time the two teams played. Wouldn’t matter.
Lofton’s not going to take over as the most famous person born in the tiny town (population 5,000) 30 minutes outside Oklahoma City. The late Sam Walton will own that title for as long as the land remains covered up in Walmarts.
Being wedged in there at the No. 2 spot of famous Kingfisherites is hardly a terrible fate.
Lofton is only 25 and so well regarded in his hometown that there already is a statue of him in the making. As part of a project called “Kingfisher Legacy,” statues of characters from the city’s past and present are being commissioned for every street corner. Twelve should just about cover up Main Street, said John Gooden, the Kingfisher artist in charge.
As the funding falls into place, those who will be committed to bronze include a man who walked from Mississippi to Kingfisher and became a local legend by singing at the train depot for troops as they left for WWI; a former territorial governor; a Native American newspaper columnist; a man who left Kingfisher to start the Iditarod sled race in Alaska; and the founder of the Coleman lantern company.
And another statue, not yet cast, of a football player who grew up in a small trailer by the railroad tracks, raised by his grandmother while spending more Sundays visiting his mother in prison rather than watching the NFL.
“Usually, statues are for people who died. I’m pretty stoked up about it,” Lofton said, happy with his status as both a noteworthy and still-breathing citizen.
Taking ownership
It’s not just Kingfisher residents taking note of Lofton.
“I’ve been really impressed with Curtis Lofton,” the Super Bowl champion QB Rodgers said, unprompted. “This is his [fourth] year, and he has jumped up another notch. He’s one of the most underrated players at his position. I’m hopeful, for his sake, that he starts getting the recognition that he deserves.”
That is a powerful endorsement, one of those that go right on the front of the book jacket of a player whose stock-in -trade is the solid more than the spectacular.
“It’s good that other top players recognize me,” Lofton said, careful not to be sweet-talked. “But [the game is] going to be a battle. He is the top quarterback in the league now, and we got to go out there and take care of business.”
The challenge of today is imposing.
The Packers came in here in January as a team that made the postseason last-minute, then rolled the top-seeded Falcons 48-21. Rodgers completed 86 percent of his passes for 366 yards and three touchdowns. He ran for one more and was more elusive than world peace.
Green Bay rode that wave through the Super Bowl and, at 4-0 this season, has betrayed no signs of running aground. Rodgers leads the NFL in quarterback rating and is second in touchdowns and fourth in yards. His team is scoring 37 a game, tops in the league.
Lesser quarterbacks have troubled the Falcons this season. Last week, Seattle’s Tarvaris Jackson threw for a career-high 319 yards in a Seahawks loss. The Falcons defense hasn’t recorded a sack in the past three games. A unit that in theory was upgraded this season is 24th in pass defense, 21st overall.
All this reflects on the middle linebacker, a position that demands personal ownership of every play.
He’s the one who wears the magic hat, the helmet with the radio receiver that relays the defensive coordinator’s orders. He’s the one who has to translate those barks into workable alignments, often on the fly.
He’s the one who, in the everlasting mold of Dick Butkus and Mike Singletary and Ray Nitschke, is in charge of delivering a message of violence. Like this season, Lofton led the team in tackles in 2009 and ’10. He hasn’t missed a game over that span, despite finishing last season with knees so grouchy that both required an offseason surgical tune-up.
Whatever this Falcons defense becomes this season, be it an improvement or an impediment, go ahead and pin it on Lofton. You have his permission.
“I feel like I am the face of this defense,” he said. “It’s a challenge. Each and every day, I got to bring a certain attitude, and that’s what I love doing.
“If something’s wrong, I feel I need to do something to get it fixed. Maybe I didn’t let ’em know what play was coming or I didn’t set ’em up to put them in the right position to make a play. It’s all about accountability to one another, and I’ve got to hold myself to that.”
This was not necessarily a role he was born to play. Arriving at Flowery Branch from Oklahoma in 2008 as the team’s second-round pick, Lofton wasn’t the automatically assertive type.
Having played the position for a half dozen years in Jacksonville, Mike Peterson came to the Falcons that same year and served as a guide to the demanding world of middle linebacking.
“When I first got here, he was in a shell, he didn’t want to be that [leadership] guy,” Peterson said. “Last year, you saw it a little bit more. This year, I’ve been pushing him a little more. I tell him, ‘[The players] hear me, but I’m not the guy in the middle. They want to hear you.’”
“It’s night and day in how far I’ve grown since getting here,” Lofton said. “When I first got here, I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. Now I look at it as my defense. I got to take charge.”
Tough childhood
The challenges of asserting one’s self in a huddle of willful men, as well as those that will come today as the Falcons face the Packers, are not the most daunting Lofton has faced.
“That’s the bottom of the list,” he said.
Above that, he’d place those Sundays spent loaded in a car with his grandmother and two older brothers, making an hour drive to visit his mother at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. LaDonna Terrell was in and out of the joint for much of Lofton’s youth, more in than out, he said, up to his junior year in high school. She has since beaten back her trouble with drugs and alcohol and the crimes that spun off that, he said.
He speaks of growing up without a father nearby, growing up in a cramped trailer, having to mature at double-time.
He also says he wouldn’t change a thing about his upbringing: “It made me what I am.”
The linebacker coach at Oklahoma noticed something different about the kid from Kingfisher when he told an Oklahoma newspaper years ago, “He has substance about him.”
Rather than distancing himself from his origins, Lofton embraces them, no matter how far the NFL life may tear him away.
When his grandmother’s small church was flooded out in 2007, Lofton helped relocate it to a storefront on higher ground. The size of his donation is a carefully guarded secret.
The last time Lofton was home, the past offseason, customers at the First Capital Bank were a bit stunned when an NFL linebacker playfully began greeting them at the drive-through teller window.
“He hasn’t changed a bit,” Jack Stuteville, Kingfishers’ mayor and the bank president, said.
After two years of pleading, Lofton finally convinced his grandmother to let him move her out of the trailer, to a new house in a better area. “She called me crying the day she moved in,” he said. “That’s probably my best experience ever.”
That’s the very least he could do, he said, for the woman who raised him and sparked all his best instincts. Work hard, she preached. Keep the faith. Treat others as you want to be treated.
And, still, she is intent upon uploading more.
Last week, smiling and raising his voice several octaves, Lofton did an impression of the woman who has a difficult time processing the altered personality her grandson must assume on the field:
“Baby, you don’t have to be so mean to those boys.”
But, of course, his job is the very embodiment of mean. And Falcons fans from here to Kingfisher are banking on that quality today.
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