They were a grade apart when they first met at Running Springs Elementary in Anaheim Hills, CA, the two best athletes in school.
They played basketball against each other every day − or football, or soccer, or whatever sport was popular on the playground. Always on opposing teams. Always guarding each other. Usually talking trash.
Amon-Ra St. Brown and Kyle Ford have been good friends for going on two decades. In middle school, they’d finish their work early so they could spend their tutorial period playing sports in the gym. In college, they were teammates for two seasons at USC, pushing each other toward one common goal.
They play video games together now and golf in the summer, which is how they ended up briefly on not-speaking terms one day
this offseason after they finished a round of 18 at Pelican Hill.
It was St. Brown and his Detroit Lions teammate, Isaac TeSlaa, against Ford and another of his and St. Brown’s mutual friends. And while the details of what happened on the par-5, 570-yard 17th hole vary slightly depending on who’s telling the story, everyone agrees St. Brown was able to walk away claiming the win.
Playing a two-man team scramble at $20 a hole with double payouts for birdies, St. Brown and TeSlaa were down two dots with two holes to play. They doubled the wager on 17, and when both hooked their tee shots out of bounds, virtually ensuring they’d lose the hole and the match, St. Brown begged for a mulligan and to double the bet again.
Ford and his teammate reluctantly agreed after he said St. Brown badgered them until they were holding up the group behind them.
The wager somehow quadrupled. Ford and his teammate chipped onto the green and were staring at a makeable putt for par when TeSlaa drained a 60-or-so-foot birdie to double the payout again.
St. Brown and TeSlaa claimed a separate birdie pot on top of the $320-or-so hole. And St. Brown, a 20-handicap who got into golf heavily for the first time this offseason, celebrated like he just won the Super Bowl.
He FaceTimed his brother. He danced around the green. He told Ford he never should have let him have the mulligan Ford didn’t want to give in the first place. And after Ford steamed his way through the 18th hole, he decided it was best if he didn’t join the rest of the group for dinner that night at Javier’s, an upscale Mexican restaurant in Newport Beach.
“The thing about Amon, I think the best part about him is he hates losing so much that he will bend the rules to make him win,” Ford said, recalling the day with a laugh. “And he won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you that.”
“I just hate losing,” St. Brown said. “If we’re keeping score, I got to win. If I’m not winning, it’s like, ‘Let’s go again.’”
'He had this vision'
Some of the best athletes in the history of sports are also some of the most legendary competitors, players like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady.
Everyone who knows St. Brown has a story about his competitiveness, too. More than his hands, footwork or route running, it’s the defining characteristic that makes him one of the NFL’s best receivers.
“I don’t know if I’ve met someone that wants to win or hates losing as much as he does,” TeSlaa said. “You can just see it in his eyes out on the field or just his demeanor, just the way he goes about and does everything. He’s just a true competitor.”
TeSlaa said St. Brown was hunched over sick nearly every play in the huddle during the Lions’ first scrimmage of training camp, enough so that quarterback Jared Goff had to ask if St. Brown was all right.
St. Brown reassured Goff he was fine, then repeatedly went out and dominated in practice.
“He wants to eviscerate whoever’s across from him, doesn’t care if they’re a good player, a bad player, a high school kid,” Goff said. “It doesn’t matter. He wants to embarrass them, and it’s every single rep.”
Growing up, St. Brown and his older brothers, Equanimeous and Osiris, famously trained under their father, John Brown, a two-time Mr. Universe bodybuilder.
St. Brown began lifting PVC pipes in the garage at age 6, and one video of a 9-year-old St. Brown bench-pressing weights with his dad still lives on the internet.
The workouts were fast-paced, phones weren’t allowed in the gym, and when one of the boys’ friends wanted to tag along and see if he could keep up, John Brown ratcheted up the intensity.
“My dad’s whole goal was when guys would come work out with us, we’re going to try to kill them,” St. Brown said. “Just know when someone else is working out with us, the workout’s going to be harder than it normally is because we want to try to kill this guy, we want to make him quit.”
Determined to outdo his brothers – Equanimeous, the oldest, played parts of eight seasons in the NFL, while Osiris played four years at Stanford before a foot injury derailed his career – St. Brown never quit, developing an insatiable work ethic current and former coaches and teammates still marvel at today.
He started catching 202 balls a day off a Jugs machine in middle school as a way to one-up a young receiver he saw who caught 200 passes a day. He brought that practice with him to the NFL and added a three-ball juggling routine and other hand-eye coordination drills he does daily in the weight room.
“I can confidently say, bro, he has the hardest work ethic that I’ve seen,” running back Jacob Saylors said.
Osiris recalls being in French class one day in high school when Amon-Ra showed him a workout video of Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Jalen Ramsey, then at Florida State. Amon-Ra was enthralled with how hard Ramsey went in the video, and that day he reached a different speed with his own workouts, to the point Osiris remembers him grunting through receiver drills.
“He hit a different level,” Osiris said. “I swear, it was like visually different. I remember noticing, and ever since then, everything we did, whether it be routes on air, 100% effort every single time.”
Bruce Rollinson, St. Brown’s coach at California powerhouse Mater Dei High, once used St. Brown’s work ethic to explain to a young receiver why he wasn’t getting more playing time.
The receiver, who would go on to play at BYU, was waiting outside Rollinson’s office after practice one day St. Brown’s senior year. Rollinson listened to his player’s concerns, then took the receiver out to the balcony overlooking the practice field and pointed to one player still working by himself under the lights.
“I looked at the kid and I said, ‘Who’s that out there?’” Rollinson recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, that’s Amon-Ra.’ And I said, ‘What’s he doing?’ And the kid, without missing a beat, a dumb sophomore, he goes, ‘Well, he has this routine he goes through and he has 30 minutes of drills on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then he cuts it to 15 the day before the game on Thursday.’
“And I looked at the kid and I said, ‘OK.’ I go, ‘He has scholarship offers from every school in the nation right now.’ I said, ‘But he’s out there by himself.’ I go, ‘You’re all dressed and you got your aftershave on and you’re heading home.’ And I go, ‘Maybe you ought to ask him as a young one, could you join him?’ I said, ‘But my point is, son, you got to have a fire, you got to take him as an example if that’s what you want to do.’ And that’s the way Ra was. He competed in everything he did, but there was a reason why. He had this vision. He was going to play in the NFL, and he was going to be the greatest college receiver.”
'Wake the [bleep] up'
St. Brown never made the cut as the greatest college receiver, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.
He started five games as a true freshman at USC in 2018, had 77 catches for 1,042 yards as a sophomore and caught another 41 passes, including seven touchdowns, in his COVID-shortened junior year.
Before that season, St. Brown gave his college position coach, Keary Colbert, a list of goals he had for the year. He wanted to win the Biletnikoff Award as the nation’s top receiver, he wanted to have over 1,000 yards, and he wanted to be a top-10 pick in the NFL draft.
None of those goals materialized, and missing out on the last one – the Lions took St. Brown with the 112th overall pick in the fourth round – lit the eternal fire that burns in St. Brown today.
“When he had his draft party and it didn’t go the way that he thought it was going to go, or that any of us thought it was going to go, I was the one friend, I think I was – it sounds messed up, but I was excited,” Ford said. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This is great that he didn’t get his way right now because I just know.’ He was never going to be complacent anyway, but I think that I knew what that did. I could see it on his face that day.”
St. Brown has been the Lions’ best receiver and Goff’s most trusted weapon since midway through his rookie year. He has 557 catches in 84 career games, and entering Thursday night's game against the Buffalo Bills he needs 23 catches to break Justin Jefferson’s NFL record for most receptions in a player’s first six years.
Beyond his pass-catching prowess, St. Brown is known as one of the most relentless blockers in the NFL.
Former Steelers coach and current NBC analyst Mike Tomlin marveled at his fearlessness in a conference call earlier this month.
“He’s a football player first and a receiver second,” Tomlin said.
And Lions receivers coach Scottie Montgomery said St. Brown operates with that same tenacity off the field.
“It’s this intangible that you don't know, which is the dog that he is,” Montgomery said. “He is a pit bull. And a lot of people say pit bull, they think it's just on the field. But the pit bull mentality that I'm talking about is not only his physicality on the field, but he attacks the playbook the same way, he attacks the fundamental drills the same way. When have you seen a vet with back-to-back to back thousands of yards of seasons come out and execute in individual the way he does? If you watch our individual, he looks like a rookie trying to make the team. And I think that's why he is who he is.”
St. Brown endeared himself to Montgomery one day a few years ago in an otherwise mundane training camp practice. The offense was listless at the start of a scrimmage until St. Brown caught a pass that jolted everyone to life.
“He got up off the ground, spiked the ball, started yelling at all his teammates, ‘Wake the [bleep] up. Wake the [bleep] up,’” Montgomery said. “And then he yelled at [then Lions offensive coordinator] Ben [Johnson], ‘You, too, Ben. You, too. Give me the [bleeping] ball.’
“And immediately, he's apologizing, ‘Oh, my God, Scottie, I blacked out. What did I say? I got to apologize to Ben.’ So he calls, apologizes to Ben. That's what he does. But Ben's like, ‘Man, do it again. Do it again. I need that.’”
This year, Jahmyr Gibbs said St. Brown had a similar moment that turned funny on the field. He was imploring teammates to bring more energy to one training camp practice when he started naming names, including offensive lineman Juice Scruggs.
“He was like, ‘We ain’t got no juice. Nobody in here got no juice. Juice, you ain’t go no juice,’” Gibbs said.
Sore loser, big winner
Goff was explaining what makes St. Brown such a unique weapon one day after practice earlier this month when talk turned to St. Brown’s competitiveness off the field.
Goff said St. Brown tried to run the score up on him in the video game FIFA a few years ago, then a few minutes later doubled back with a reporter in the locker room.
“Hey, I thought of a much better story,” he said.
For years, St. Brown has hosted get-togethers at his house for teammates and their girlfriends or wives. Some nights, they sing karaoke – St. Brown is usually first up, and if someone doesn’t know the words to a song, he’s quick to grab the mic. Others, they play board games, Taboo, Uno or popular social deduction games like Mafia or Imposter.
In Mafia, one player is designated the mafia and tries to kill others in the group. Everyone’s identity is disguised, and players try and guess who the mafia is before they get killed off.
St. Brown is one of the more animated players of the game, standing, pointing, yelling and trying to convince others he’s not the mafia or whoever he deems to be it.
“He gets very, very into it,” Goff said. "And depending on who you believe, he’s either very, very good or very, very bad at the game."
“He’s easy [to read],” Gibbs said. “He’s like a Dr. Seuss book, he’s like Cat in the Hat. Green Eggs and Ham.”
“He cheats so he can win, let’s start there,” safety Avonte Maddox said. “It must hurt that bad to lose if you got to cheat to win.”
St. Brown admits to being a sore loser. But he can’t turn off his competitive gene.
“My fiancée’s always like, ‘Relax, why you going so hard?’” St. Brown said. “But I don’t want to lose. If we’re playing a game, let’s win.”
In football, that ravenous need for victory is why St. Brown is on a Hall of Fame trajectory six years into his career. He’s a two-time first-team All-Pro, earned second-team honors last year and is trying this fall to join Antonio Brown, Marvin Harrison and Davante Adams as the only players in NFL history with four straight years of 100 catches, 1,000 yards and 10 touchdowns.
In last week’s win over the New Orleans Saints, St. Brown caught 10 passes for 67 yards and two touchdowns, including a 4-yarder in overtime when he collided with cornerback Quincy Riley on the catch and celebrated by spiking the ball emphatically in the end zone.
“The ball's in the air, it's his ball,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said. “And there's a competitiveness and a willpower that comes with that, and he's going to make that play.”
St. Brown said in training camp he relished being the Lions’ go-to receiver, the guy who has to deliver when the game is on the line.
“I felt like always since I was a kid growing up, I had a knack for just rising to the occasion,” he said. “I feel like that is something that you can't really teach. It's something that's innate, it's something that you have inside of you, that clutch factor, and I feel like that's something that I always wanted to be.”
Goff has seen it firsthand for six years now, so nothing St. Brown does surprises him anymore. He said St. Brown “just wants to be the best because he wants to be the best.”
And he usually is.
“He’s better than everyone at everything it seems,” Goff said. “Besides golf. He’s not very good yet.”
But even there, St. Brown usually finds a way to win.
Dave Birkett covers the Lions for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Bluesky, X and Instagram at @davebirkett.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Lions WR Amon-Ra St. Brown and the insatiable drive to be great: 'I got to win'
