Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on Yahoo Sports on October 21, 2016.

MIAMI – This is A.B. He’s opening a large suitcase by his locker after a game. It’s covered in painted flames. He slowly lays out a three-piece suit. It’s shiny white, with red flowers on the jacket and the pants, with slippers bejeweled in crowns. He turns around to face the reporters surrounding him, and he sparkles from earrings to slippers.

This is Tony. His eyes are dark and his face is drawn. He says little, and it’s hard to hear him. “I don’t call the plays,” he says. “I just run the plays.” He’ll take some heat in the Pittsburgh papers for this comment. He’ll be labeled the next day as “the ostensible MVP candidate and the supposed best receiver on the globe.” When you dress like a wedding crasher and turn around ceremonially like a performer, then offer little to explain a four-catch performance in a lethargic loss to Miami, the claws come out. But after the cameras turn off, Tony speaks of his extra workouts at L.A. Fitness (“Three times a week”) and the little notebook he keeps, in which he writes down all of his feelings on football, good and bad. He admits he turns to it often. “Whenever I need to,” he says.

This is Antonio Brown. He grew up in the harsh surroundings of Liberty City, then played high school quarterback two miles from Hard Rock Stadium, then ended up in a football wilderness: frigid Central Michigan without a scholarship or a winter hat. Now, a little over a decade after he left this Miami neighborhood for an uncertain future, his No. 84 Steelers jersey is everywhere – as popular as any Dolphins jersey on this particular South Florida game day. There are people wearing 84 who went on a Steelers Eastern Caribbean cruise with him last offseason, keeping photos of volleyball games and even the ID tag needed to board the boat.

Brown’s locker was next to that of Darrius Heyward-Bey, and the contrast is obvious: Heyward-Bey is the first-round pick, 6-foot-2, thick and extremely fast. Brown is 5-10, slighter and slower. A sixth-rounder. Yet it’s Brown who is the fantasy strongman, the household name. His number, 84, represents the 8 x 4 or 32 teams that passed him up repeatedly.

Brown makes the most difficult catches, yet he’s known as much for his gyrating in the end zone and his turn on “Dancing With the Stars.” He is a high-wattage celebrity and a methodical toiler. He is A.B. and he is Tony, and you can’t understand one without the other.

*****

Down the street, he was sometimes known as “Mr. Brown.” These are the hallways of Miami Norland Senior High School, where the spires of Hard Rock Stadium are visible outside if you walk a couple of city blocks. “Mr. Brown” was heard from time to time over the teacher’s walkie-talkies during the school day, and it often meant young Antonio was not where he was supposed to be.

“He had great ambitions,” says Lasharne Figgins, who has worked at the school for 22 years. “He knew what he wanted to do, he knew where he wanted to go. But sometimes he got sidetracked.”

He already had that A.B. flair, though, flashing that sweet smile at every turn. He was polite even when he was out of line. When family members asked teachers how he was doing, they would often hear more about how handsome and charming he was before they heard about any discipline concerns. “He got away with murder,” another teacher remembers.

“He was all over the place,” Figgins says. “Sometimes we’d say, ‘Mr. Brown! Come on now, what you doing around that corner!’

“Girls used to fight over him.”

A lot of A.B. came from “Touchdown” Eddie Brown, Antonio’s father who was one of the greatest Arena Football players of all time. The elder Brown had charisma aplenty, and just like his son, he was eager to celebrate. Asked if he danced like Antonio, Eddie shot back, “Did he dance like me? Because I danced first.”

“You will see exact movements I did,” Eddie says. “The thing you got to realize, when I used to score a touchdown, I used to shake. People asked me why I would do that. When I scored a touchdown, it felt like I just got struck by lightning and I wanted to shake off the lightning.”

There was more than lightning for Antonio to shake off.

Before there was Antonio Brown, there was Doris King. She immigrated to Florida from the Bahamas in the 1950s and settled in Liberty City, which was then a middle class area in northern Miami. She ran a dry cleaning business and worked long hours and raised a family. The neighborhood around her three-bedroom house lost its identity as the drug wars escalated in the 1960s and ’70s, but Doris did not. Her work ethic cascaded down to her great-grandson, who everyone called Tony. And he would need it.

“I gotta be honest, and I hope I’m not being disrespectful, but it’s more or less like every day, I hope and pray [my son] can go to school and make it home and not get shot and killed,” says Eddie, who married into the King family. “There are quite a few kids that didn’t make it home.”

So there were a lot of people looking after Tony, whether it was Doris or his mom, Adrianne, or his uncle, Keyiones King, who helped teach him the game. For every sign of danger there was another reminder of the need to work. He got that from his dad, too, and Tony even spent time in Albany (N.Y) while his father was playing. But his parents’ relationship didn’t survive, and life is never stable in a place like Liberty City. There have been reports that Tony was homeless for a time in his teens, but one family member insists it never came to that. There was just a lack of discipline and a lot of difficulty.

Big colleges were interested in A.B., but his grades weren’t good enough. He tried Alcorn State, and found out he wasn’t eligible there either. He took a bus to a prep school in North Carolina, then tried Florida International for a year. But even before his first season, an argument on campus led to the loss of his scholarship. His entire football story could have ended right there.

One coach took a chance on him: Zach Azzanni, who had met the teen when he was recruiting for Urban Meyer at Bowling Green. The two kept in touch as Brown tried to figure out a place to play and Azzanni moved to Central Michigan.

“Wherever you go,” Brown told Azzanni, “you gotta take me.” Another coach at CMU followed Brown too and came to Azzanni. “Remember AB?” he said. “He needs a place to go.” Azzanni wondered why he would come so far north. “He doesn’t need to stay in Florida,” the coach said. “He’ll get in trouble.”

Brown got on another bus, this time to the town of Mt. Pleasant, Mich., where he would walk on at CMU. Azzanni didn’t know what he was in for with A.B. “He was as raw a person as he was a player,” the coach says.

How raw? “I’ll need another five hours. What can I tell you that you can write?”

Azzanni’s wife, Julia, offered to help Brown look for an apartment and explained to him he would need to pay rent. “What are you talking about?” he said. She calmly said he would need to write a check. He didn’t understand. She explained a checking account. “Miss Julia,” he told her. “Do you honestly think my mom had enough to put into an account?”

That wasn’t the entirety of the problem, either. Antonio didn’t have a driver’s license.

It wasn’t much easier for Zach. “It’s like taking a wild horse,” he explains, “and entering him into the Kentucky Derby.” The walk-on hadn’t played receiver. He didn’t understand the route tree. He was late for meetings, late to class. He didn’t see the point in dressing in nice clothes, or removing his golden grill.

“He didn’t quite get it,” Azzanni says. “He didn’t trust a lot of people. He was always pushing the envelope. No one taught him how to respect people, how to be a man.”

It was a similar story to high school: Brown either disregarded the rules or didn’t understand the need for them. Still, he was saved by his unending likability, the charm and the work ethic that always made people want to invest in him. Oh, and the talent.

In 14 games in the 2007 season he had 102 catches for 1,003 yards. He won MAC Freshman of the Year. In three seasons, he had 22 touchdowns. And just like in high school, everyone loved him even when they couldn’t take his antics anymore. Azzanni calls it a “weird aura.”

“It was hard to be mad,” he says. “I wanted to rip his ass up and down. He’s infectious.”

Julia felt the same way. “Behind being mad,” she says, “there was this hurt little kid.”

*****

Central Michigan went to a bowl game, and Eddie decided to come. Father and son had been on poor terms. “There was a time when I was not present,” Eddie admits. His own father had died of cancer at 49, and Eddie wanted to make it right with Tony.

The two talked. There was honesty, there were tears, and there was a revelation: Tony had grown up. “I’m not talking to a kid anymore.” Eddie says. “I’m talking to a man. To be able to talk about the mistakes which were made. Just to be able to have that conversation was like 600 pounds off my back.

“He wants to be a better father than what his dad was to him.”

Personal growth, however, doesn’t really show up on draft boards. Brown was a small-school receiver without height or blazing speed. He also had a difficult past. As the rounds came and went in the 2010 NFL draft, he figured he knew why. “It’s because I played at Central,” he told Julia.

But he knew he’d end up somewhere, and the combination of charm and work would keep him there. He arrived in Pittsburgh when Mike Wallace was the star receiver, but soon Wallace was gone and Brown was writing in his little book, putting in extra time at L.A. Fitness, becoming Ben Roethlisberger’s No. 1 target and getting the new contract. Running backward for the last 20 yards of a punt return touchdown rankled some (and got him fined), but by this point there was enough Tony to compensate for all the A.B.

When he first came back to Mt. Pleasant from Pittsburgh, he did an autograph session and charged $10 per signing. It made the Azzannis chuckle, but it also made them relieved. Neither of them was sure he’d make it. It was only a couple of years since Brown got his first apartment, putting out patio furniture like it was an entryway to the Taj Mahal. That was home.

“Go ahead and twerk,” Azzanni says. “He could have very easily went the other way.”

On his way off the field last Sunday in Miami, after a miserable loss, he grinned as he held his daughters’ hands. Was it a sign that he didn’t care about the game? No.

“Today I was playing, but in the big picture I wanted to come back and feel the love,” he says. “I’ve got my health and there’s still more football left to play.”

Some of that football will be played without Roethlisberger, who is out with a torn meniscus. There might be less patience with Brown, at least from demanding fans and fantasy owners. The Steelers are supposed to be a Super Bowl contender, and only a Lombardi Trophy will put him in the class of another tough Steelers’ receiver with a winning grin: Hines Ward.

The morning after the famous end-zone dance, Azzanni woke up before dawn to put a receiver at Tennessee through a punishing workout. It’s the next Antonio Brown, maybe – a guy who doesn’t yet “get it.” Azzanni decided to send Brown a text with a photo of the receiver pushing a plate. It was 6:05 a.m.

The reply came immediately: “Coach, still disciplining, don’t ever stop that, it helped me.”

Azzanni was curious: What is he doing up?

“I text him, ‘What are you doing?’ He wrote back, ‘I gotta get up and work out.’ ”

The coach responded with encouragement: “That’s what people don’t see.”

“They never will, Coach.”

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