WR amon-ra st. brown announcement that he is leaving Detroit lions now another significant issue for team…..

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, the last 67 years.

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 blue.

In most ways, he’s not like them at all. His father, John Brown, was Mr. Universe—yes, that Mr. Universe (and Mr. World and 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.