Rainbow Man, once ever-present, shows his dark side
CROWE'S NEST
Wig-wearing self-promoter who showed up at major athletic events through the 1970s and '80s is now serving time for hostage-taking, which he says was attempt to warn the world of coming Apocalypse.
IONE, Calif. -- For more than 10 years starting in the late 1970s, Rollen Stewart was the nation's most celebrated sports fan, a wig-wearing, wigged-out self-promoter who showed up at virtually every major athletic event worldwide and always managed to plant himself smack-dab in front of a television camera.
He was known as the Rainbow Man, for the multicolored Afro wigs he sported, or Rock 'n' Rollen, for the party vibe he exuded. Later, after finding religion, he morphed into the John 3:16 guy, for the Biblical messages he espoused.
He says he drove about 60,000 miles a year to attend events, and he got more TV face time than the network announcers who sometimes left him tickets.
He found fame, as planned, simply by showing up.
But the fanatic who was always there, Stewart says, really was no fan at all.
"I despised sports," he says.
Stewart is 63 now, no longer wears an Afro or any other type of hairpiece to mask his baldness and last attended a sporting event about 20 years ago.
Serving three life sentences for hostage-taking, he has been imprisoned since 1992. The punishment was the result of a bizarre incident in which an armed Stewart locked himself in a hotel room near LAX and kicked off an 8 1/2 -hour standoff with police, demanding a three-hour, televised news conference to air his views. Earlier, he had driven two day laborers to the hotel, both of whom escaped, and encountered a frightened housekeeper who locked herself in a bathroom.
Currently serving time at Mule Creek State Prison, about an hour southeast of Sacramento, he has been denied parole three times in the last six years, most recently in March, and does not believe he will ever be set free.
"Jesus will come back before I get out," Stewart tells a visitor from Los Angeles, his startlingly blue eyes revealing little emotion. "To justify their own unbelief, they use me as a scapegoat so they can sleep at night.
"But they've still got their Rolaids next to the bed."
Stewart says his "final presentation" in 1992 was mistimed -- the end of the world was nigh, he believed -- but otherwise does not regret his actions.
"It was a crime to prevent a greater harm," he says, explaining that it was his duty to warn the world of the coming Apocalypse. "If somebody's standing in the way of me going into a burning building, I'm going to knock them on their butt."
