Tag: NFL

On Sundays this fall, Robert Bryant and 70-some other inmates at Lancaster Work Camp in Trenton, Florida, gathered in the facility’s dayroom around a 50-inch Samsung flatscreen television. They had to share. They shared everything. They slept in rows of bunk beds with no separation, and took turns using four showers and four toilets that had no stalls and no walls.

But on Sundays, Robert demanded the TV be tuned to whatever game the Denver Broncos were playing. And demanded nobody change the channel. This was his window into his best friend’s journey, some 1,750 miles away.

Pat Bryant and Robert Bryant first met playing youth football in the seventh grade in Duval County, Florida, and have called each other cousin ever since. They are not actually related. Or maybe they are. They’ve never traced the family tree far back enough. But they share the same surname and were raised upon an edict that snakes through the streets of Jacksonville.

“Loyalty,” Robert said on a call with The Denver Post in early November. “Loyalty comes first.”

Pat Bryant has never forgotten that, from Duval County to Illinois to the Broncos, through years fighting the gravitational pull that’s torn apart his inner circle. In March 2022, Robert was arrested for armed robbery and carrying a concealed firearm. Through the four-year sentence that followed, Bryant added money to an online Securus account so Robert could call him anytime. And Robert did.

“He kept me from going insane,” Robert said.

In mid-September, Bryant stood at his locker in Denver, gesturing at his phone. The rookie Broncos wide receiver pulled up his Securus app, and scrolled through several contacts at correctional facilities around Florida. ROBERT BRYANT. WALTER ROSAS. Bryant pointed to his notifications, where a voicemail from the Florida Department of Corrections awaited.

“See, them boys blowing me up right now,” he told The Post.

About eight or nine of his friends from Jacksonville are in jail, Bryant estimated. Sometimes he tries to help them or their families out.

“Every now and then, I’ll probably send about $1500,” he said. “But that (expletive) add up. With six, seven of them boys, that (expletive) add up.”

Bryant trailed off. He mumbled, looking back at his phone.

“That (expletive) add up.”

From the day that Robert met him in the seventh grade, Bryant wanted out of Duval County. Family was the foundation, and football was the vessel. It was easy to “fall into the street life” in Jacksonville, Robert reflected. But the street life had nothing for Bryant, his father, Patrick Sr., said. He tried to bring friends along with him. He begged them to stay straight. Not all of them heeded his words.

In Denver, Bryant has reached heights they all once saw for themselves on the fields of Jacksonville. He caught five passes for 82 yards in the Broncos’ 22-19 win over the Chiefs last Sunday, and he has established a foothold in head coach Sean Payton’s offense.

Bryant has left Duval County behind, but Robert and many others still live through his eyes. Bryant has not let them go, wherever he’s gone.

“This (expletive) like a dream come true,” he said in September. “… I see it as my livelihood. This is how I’m finna feed my family. I gotta do this for a minute. This don’t last forever. My main focus — trying to make some sort of mark, whether it’s on the field, off the field, whatever it is, just leave some sort of mark.

“So when I hang my jersey up, people gon’ remember who I am.”

•••

Patrick Bryant Sr. once served as the athletic director of the Police Athletic League of Jacksonville. He spent long days monitoring games on weekends, so his son rarely went straight home after Pop Warner.

The idle hours after Bryant Jr. actually touched a football were often the most fun — he and friends running their imagination across the grass in Duval County.

They invented their own game. The rules were simple. They found an empty Gatorade bottle and tossed it high in the air. Whoever caught it had to run to a nearby gate to score. If they got tackled, though, they had to fling the bottle back into the air.

They called it throw ’em up, bust ’em up.

“I used to throw it, get tackled, throw it up, just keep catching that (expletive),” Bryant remembered. “When I got tired, I’d throw it up. Let somebody catch it. Then, I was gon’ tackle their ass.”

When Bryant put on a helmet, his Pop Warner team often struggled with blocking. Young kids don’t love blocking. Bryant was the exception. He sometimes waddled up to his father and asked if he needed to play center or guard. Then he’d sneak up on someone, and — before it was rendered illegal — throw a mean blind-side block.

The hits always made crowds murmur, Bryant Sr. remembered.

His son was fearless, Bryant Sr. said. But he still needed protection. The Bryants moved into a gated, middle-class neighborhood in Duval County because Bryant Sr. knew his kids — three boys, one girl — knew plenty of other kids who were in gangs.

Bryant had love, stability and friends. His friends didn’t all have the same. So he brought them over to his house. He met Robert in the seventh grade, and Robert still remembers Bryant throwing him a block that sprung him for his first touchdown. Bryant met 6-foot-6, 340-pound tackle Walter Rosas and basketball star Alim Denson, too. The four went on to play football together at Atlantic Coast High in Jacksonville.

“They stayed at our house on the regular,” Bryant’s mother, Louanne Harris-Bryant, said. “They came to visit Pat. But they ended up being surrogate sons to us.”

Everyone was subject to the rules. No drugs. No alcohol. No going to anyone else’s place unless the Bryants knew who, what and where. Any girls who came over had to sit on the couch — with parents in the room.

“So,” Bryant Sr. recalled, “it was no funny business going around.”

Robert still clings to the memories. The four of them in the car after football practice one day, bumping a friend’s unreleased song before dropping Robert off at his house. Singing. Dancing.

“It wasn’t no care in the world,” Robert recalled.

The city’s temptations dragged them out of that car, away from innocence.

“Everybody know how Jacksonville is,” Robert said. “How, people talking crazy, this, that, this, that. You feel like you gotta prove a point. It pull you deeper into the streets.”

•••

When Bryant was 13, one of his friends died from gun violence.

Loss, of one kind or another, has piled up since.

Rosas once had FCS and Group of Five scholarship offers, Atlantic Coast football coach Mike Montemayor recalled. He was sentenced to a seven-year prison sentence in 2022, on two counts of robbery with a deadly weapon. Denson was the captain of Atlantic Coast’s basketball team, and grew so close with Bryant that they called each other “twin.” He was sentenced to five years in county jail in 2022, on multiple counts related to grand theft auto and attempting to flee the scene of a crash.

Robert, who’d lost his father at 12 years old, stopped caring about football.

Bryant used to tell Robert that he had to make it for his friends and his dad. They wouldn’t want you to do this, Bryant told him.

“It was a challenge,” Robert said. “Going in one ear, and out the other. I went the whole opposite way. When, I wish — I wish, I should’ve listened to him.”

Montemayor used to tell Bryant: The sooner you leave, the better. Jacksonville would always be Jacksonville, he said. Nothing would change. And Bryant knew football was the exit lane.

He didn’t run much track and field in high school. He didn’t have blazing speed. Eventually, his 4.61-second 40-yard dash at the NFL combine became one of the biggest knocks on him as a prospect. Instead, Bryant honed in on his strengths as a receiver. He started catching 50 balls before and after practices to cut down on drops, Harris-Bryant recalled.

“I surrounded myself around people, like, I shouldn’t have been around,” Bryant recalled. “But I had the courage and the heart to, like – ‘Nah, I’m gonna go a different route.’”

In January 2023, as Bryant was slowly finding his footing in his second year at Illinois, Bryant Sr. sent his son a news story.

Denson had died in prison.

“That really shook him up,” Bryant Sr. remembered. “That shook him up for a while.”

Bryant couldn’t save his friends. He still tried. But he realized how to save himself after he lost his first friend at 13.

“That’s when that hit,” Bryant said when asked about when he knew he wanted out. “Like … ‘Two ways to this (expletive). You’re either gonna be dead, or in jail.’”

•••

In February, Broncos receivers coach Keary Colbert took a seat with Bryant at a table at the draft combine in Indianapolis. Colbert had a standard list of football questions to get through in 10 minutes, the same he asked every player on their first meeting.

They began talking. And talking. They talked about Jacksonville, and Illinois, and life in general. Colbert realized, with 10 minutes almost up, that he hadn’t asked a single question about football. He resolved to schedule a follow-up Zoom with Bryant.

And then they went back to just talking.

“I knew, sitting across from him at that little informal table … I knew he was a dog,” Colbert told The Post. “Like, I can tell he was a dog. You know what I mean? At that point, I knew what he was as a person, as a player.”

The personality was infectious, Colbert recalled. The film was, too. The blocking, the toughness and the 6-foot-3 frame jumped out to the Broncos’ staff. All the characteristics of the Sean Payton receiver archetype.

“If they don’t bite when they’re puppies, they generally never do,” Payton said in October. “And so, you saw it.”

It was not easy at first. Payton barked at Bryant multiple times in one open camp practice. He yanked him from one team rep.

That did nothing to his confidence.

In one September practice, Bryant lined up opposite former Broncos receiver Trent Sherfield on special teams and told the 29-year-old veteran that he “wouldn’t get downfield,” as Sherfield remembered.

“Even just at the beginning of training camp, the one thing I realized about Pat,” Sherfield told The Post, “was that he’s not afraid of anything.”

Slowly, Bryant has carved out a role in Payton’s offense by doing the dirty work. He’s told running backs to “find 13” on a block if they want to score, he said with glee after an October game. Bryant has won matchups over the middle with physicality and footwork, despite not possessing breakaway speed, and has racked up 10 catches for 185 yards in his last four games.

It’s just throw ’em up, bust ’em up in Denver. Different time. Different place. Same kid.

“If you’re good at the sport, you gon’ thrive, man,” Bryant said when asked in September about compensating for speed. “If you get to worrying about, ‘What advantage I got’ – I mean, obviously, you watch film. That’s a different story.

“But when you think about advantages and all that, my mindset’s like, ‘Bruh, where we’re going, I’m better than you. I don’t give a (expletive) about no stats. None of that. I’m a better football player than you.’”

•••

On Sunday, Oct. 26, Robert Bryant and the members of Lancaster Work Camp sat in the dayroom watching Broncos-Cowboys on that Samsung. Late in the second quarter, Robert saw Bryant isolate to the left side of the formation. His excitement rose.

Robert watched Bryant burst off the line, beat his man, and haul in a 25-yard ball from Bo Nix for his first NFL touchdown. He watched his friend turn to the crowd at Empower Field and hit the Mile High Salute — a move that instantly made Bryant a fan favorite in Denver.

Across the country in Trenton, Robert started jumping up and down and cheering so fiercely that a correctional officer stepped in.

You’re yelling too loud, Robert recalled the officer saying.

Listen, man, Robert replied. That right there’s my brother. He just scored.

“I’m almost finna cry,” Robert said.