FINALLY!
I actually got two, not one, but two techs at Sprint who were able to help me with this. The first one just got an Intercept and between he and I we figured out that all of my contacts were in the "Google" group. His were in the "unassigned" group and he had both the "groups" and the "ringtone" options.
From there, I went to 2nd level tech who figured out that because my contacts were imported from my gmail for some reason that was preventing me from editing both the groups and ringtone categories (because they were not listed when editing) for all contacts.
First, we exported my contacts to the SD card on the phone. Then we deleted all contacts on my phone (remember, they were still saved on the SD card). Then we unchecked auto-sync on the Intercept and then went to gmail on the PC & exported my contacts to my desktop then erased all contacts in my gmail account. Then we did the sync on the phone and obviously there were no contacts to sync from gmail. Lastly, we imported contacts from the SD card and viola! They were all in the "unassigned" group and all can be individually personalized with whatever ringtones I want to use. Oh - and back on the gmail on the PC - we just imported the contacts back into gmail and nothing was lost.
One last thing - if you put contact(s) in a group, the entire group will have the same ringtone - you will lose the individual ringtone per contact capability.
Whew! I really think this will be an important tip as people get the Intercept and wonder why the heck the option for "groups" and "ringtones" isn't there for imported gmail contacts. Hopefully this will help somebody down the road . . .