The receiver strolls onto his team’s empty turf practice field, where banners hanging on the far wall unfurl like oversized, ancient scrolls. Each features the same two words: NFL CHAMPIONS. But look closer, lower, at the dates: 1935, ’52, ’53 and ’57, followed by a final poster that announces a division title in … 2023.
The story of the Detroit Lions is laid out in those five billboard-sized squares: their success in professional football is vintage and archaic; their misery endless and established; but their present (finally! mercifully!) more fruitful than at any other point in, oh, say, .
His head provides the most colorful kind of proof. Amon-Ra St. Brown made a promise before this season started, vowing to dye his dome if the Lions made the playoffs. When they did, he called a salon in nearby Birmingham where many wives of Detroit players get their hair done. The process took three hours, morphing from black to bleach blonde to blue—bright, blinding, Smurfs-approved .
In fact, on this Friday in mid-January, with kickoff for a divisional round home playoff game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers less than 48 hours away, St. Brown has just completed a FaceTime call with a Lions fan who’s in hospice care. The fan took the same, ahem, as Detroit’s catalyst, deciding to go full Marge Simpson or Cardi B. A signed jersey was in the mail, after two strangers with little in common fast became brothers in blue.
St. Brown makes that kind of impact—on his teammates, his franchise and a city of long-suffering NFL fans who can watch him catch passes and score touchdowns and see, in him, a little bit of themselves. Overlooked. Underappreciated. But ready, regardless, to keep rising, keep trying; a resilience sure to be rewarded.
In most ways, he’s not like them at all. His father, John Brown, was Mr. Universe—yes, Mr. Universe (and Mr. World Mr. Olympia)—not long after Arnold Schwarzenegger. His mother, Miriam, enrolled Amon-Ra in French grammar school and only speaks to him in German, even now. They named the youngest of their three boys after Amun, the chief god of ancient Thebes, the single most important deity in the Egyptian pantheon. Amid a few centuries spent god-ing in obscurity, Amun first meant “The Hidden One.” But then he merged with an ancient and prestigious sun god, one Re of Heliopolis. Together, they became Amun-Re, master of monikers, whether “King of the Gods,” “Lord of Heaven” or “Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands.”
This composite god of multiple nicknames, obscure no longer, assumed two humanlike forms. In both, his skin was sometimes depicted as red and sometimes shown as black. But most typically, as Amun-Re led Egypt into what’s called the New Kingdom period, his other, more typical skin color symbolized abundant fertility borne from an abundance of rich soil nearby. Stretch that ancient history far enough—the universe, the hidden one, rich soil, the new kingdom—and that’s the Lions, this season, behind a wideout who doubles as the soul of a franchise that’s amid a remarkable transformation. Just like him.
Amun-Re’s more typically depicted skin color? Blue, naturally.
The singular play that now defines this most special of Lions seasons had happened five days earlier, late in the fourth quarter of a wild-card playoff game, with Detroit clinging to a one-point lead over the surging Los Angeles Rams. Quarterback Jared Goff, a former Ram dumped unceremoniously on Detroit three years earlier, took the snap in shotgun, saw St. Brown in single coverage on a 10-yard curl route and fired a pass between defenders. St. Brown caught it for an 11-yard gain.
Inside the field house, St. Brown is trying to describe the play as just like any other, a workmanlike grab for a blue-collar wideout who earned every inch of his scenic route to stardom. The catch meant another game with at least 100 receiving yards, his 10th in the 2023 season alone. But he also knows there wasn’t anything typical about it. It marked the precise moment where 32 years of pro football misery ended, after three decades worth of seasons that all featured the same ending, not a single postseason victory among them, despite Matthew Stafford and Megatron and Barry freaking Sanders.
Detroit’s new Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands (or whatever) had delivered, once more, registering his team’s highest grade (90.7), per Pro Football Focus, in the franchise’s most important game . His 315 career receptions rank as the third-most in NFL history by any player in their first three seasons, behind only Justin Jefferson and Michael Thomas (and not by much).
St. Brown might be the most serious player in the NFL, a superstar engineered in a parenting laboratory of sorts; so serious, even as a child, that his parents say he never played with toys. St. Brown knew what he wanted, where he was headed. They ensured he would become more than an athlete, but football fields were where he emoted, prancing and dancing, picking fights. Gridirons were where he came , his truest form of self-expression.
Every coach who ever scribbled on a white board will drone on endlessly about culture—creating, imprinting, solidifying, broadening. But only coaches with rare players like St. Brown, the elite among the elite, naturally gifted and intrinsically motivated, can imprint each stage through no more than clocking in for work.
Speaking of, the first time St. Brown practiced with the Lions, he beckoned the player he believed was the “baddest dude” on defense, his father says. St. Brown promptly started a fight with Jeff Okuda, a top five NFL draft pick. The quality of the skirmish didn’t matter; the message starting it sent did. As St. Brown stalked away from the scrum, he shouted, “Let’s do that again!”
The youngest of three St. Brown brothers always approached his craft this way. As an eighth grader, he attended a skills camp for elite college prospects in Los Angeles. Jim Harbaugh was in attendance. So was Urban Meyer. Same thing. Amon-Ra kept barking at the defense, beckoning the cornerback who might declare himself the best among them for a showdown. The kid who raised his hand couldn’t cover St. Brown and, instead, grabbed onto his shorts as he came out of his break. This sent St. Brown into a rage. He yelled and stomped and screamed, wanting to succeed that badly, that daringly and that publicly, until Meyer placed a hand on his chest to calm him.
St. Brown took exactly one play off. Then he sauntered back to the front of the line, cutting the other prospects, signaling for the same cornerback. This time, St. Brown wiggled open; this time, same as most times, St. Brown won. “The boy threw the ball at him,” his father says. “[Amon-Ra] just went crazy. The boy had no fear. No fear whatsoever.”
Consider this season just the latest example of that ethos his parents laid out over breakfast on Friday at a café in Birmingham on another frigid, snow-blanketed morning in suburban Michigan. Yes, their youngest was grossly snubbed in Pro Bowl voting. But he earned the honor that matters more; his peers voted him first-team All Pro. In some ways, the parents Brown find the last 12 months surreal. In most others, they view it more as, well, what everyone in the family expected all along.
“I’ve gone all night, laying in my bed, looking at the picture [of the first-team All-Pros],” John Brown says. “His face is . That’s my little baby.” The boy he prepped for this, all of this, exactly this. How does a franchise upend three decades of football futility? Start with finding that guy, that dude, King of the Gods, .
