Chasing Tim Tebow, idolizing Tom Brady, fighting fires: Making of Colts QB Anthony Richardson

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Anthony Richardson forced his way into a dark building with an ax, peeking around corners for someone to save.

Set off from a gravel road behind Loften High School in Gainesville, Fla., is a burn house where firefighters train. It's a Tetris fort of beige steel storage lockers – three across the bottom, three across the middle and two on top. With connective staircases on either side, they create the effect of a three-story, 1,500-square-foot house.

And the goal was to pretend it was on fire.

Years before he became the No. 4 pick in the NFL Draft and the starting quarterback who will lead the Colts into Sunday's opener against the Jaguars, Anthony used to spend some of his high school days in this place as part of a Fire and EMS program.

He’d spot a fridge, a stove, a mattress and a dresser surrounded by walls charred black by the burns the fire department had run in here as a practice location for several years. The smell of blackened steel mixed with the swelter of Florida humidity as he rose one floor to the next.

In the dark, he tried to picture the life those items suggested: A mother scared for her children. A young boy wondering if he’ll make it out alive.

But it’s also where he let loose, as his teacher and local firefighter Mark Smith recalls. Anthony would make goat chirps back and forth with his two friends on the football team. One day, they played hide and seek in this house. At the school across the road, they’d compete in a three-station obstacle course, where Anthony was decked head to toe in fire gear, pulling a 50-foot hose, running with supplies and dragging a 175-pound dummy across the simmering concrete.

“He always liked to say he got to be himself here,” Smith said, “without having to worry about the attention of being a superstar.”

This burn house was one of the first places where Anthony theorized on the concept of pressure. He discovered how it rises by the levels, how the hardest falls can come from the top. He also learned about what that fire can create, how it can spread and why it must be contained.

“Pressure,” he said through tears the night he was drafted No. 4 by the Colts, “doesn’t do anything but create a legend.”

That burn house was a crucible. In many ways, so was he.

This is where a kid first learned to tackle the fears of others, like he had to on the daily for his little brother.

And like he’d someday have to do for a Colts franchise in need of a spark.

The hope of East Gainesville

Before Anthony ever ran with a football in his arms, he dreamed of finding something to protect.

He was a 5-year-old, growing up as an only child in Miami. He and his mother, LaShawnda Cleare, bounced from house to house in order to find a safe place to sleep. They’d finish their days in prayer. Anthony was learning to say his on his own while kneeling at his bedside.

“God,” Cleare remembered hearing from his room one night, “Let my mamma have a baby.”

His mother froze for a moment. Then she nudged open his door to find him fast asleep.

Within the next year, Anthony got his wish. Cleare gave birth to a boy named Corey, and his older brother just wanted to hold him the day he came home from the hospital. They started to have relatives over, but Anthony would meet them at the door and yell, “Hanitize your hands!”

He was still learning to communicate. But the protector in him came out as naturally as those athletic gifts would.

“He would do everything for him,” Cleare said.

Anthony learned to love a little brother before football entered his life, though the signs of that calling were popping up more and more. He was 3 when he chucked a football in his grandmother’s front yard and it nearly broke a window. Cleare rushed outside worried while his uncle Jobbin “Tanka” Lane said, “Do it again.”

He was in fourth grade when his elementary school had a skills competition, which included seeing who could throw a football the farthest. As the other kids were warming up their arms, Anthony just sat around. Then he launched the ball so far they had to get a golf cart to fetch it.

A 10-year-old was beginning to feel what was possible for him in this life.

“To see him run farther than the other kids, never give up, broken bones,” Cleare said. “It was always, 'I need to go do this, Mama. I need to throw the football. I need to run. I can't stop.'”

Ever since he nearly broke the window, Uncle Tanka urged for Anthony to play football. This was a future star quarterback here, he believed. But joining such teams in Miami meant hanging around other boys and their fathers and uncles and whoever else might wander up to a game.

Cleare started researching cities in the northern part of the state that offered Section 8 housing.

The city of Gainesville sent a letter back saying she was denied. But the next week, the phone rang and an apartment manager was asking her when she’d come to pick up her keys.

So she did.

“It was me following God,” she said.

They moved to a cul-de-sac off University Avenue, less than four miles from the University of Florida’s campus, to a neighborhood of one-floor, red-brick duplexes. Anthony and Corey shared bunk beds in a home with no air conditioning or laundry. As the days sweltered and their mother was at one of her jobs serving Taco Bell or doing hair or driving city buses, two boys were left to their own devices.

They always had footballs around, and they’d hop the four-foot black steel fence behind their house to find a park. A patchy field sat in the middle of a red track, with a sand pit in the back. Black picnic tables sat beneath palm trees nearby, where Anthony would teach himself how to do a backflip.

This was the combine of their youth.

But soon, it became time for Anthony to start acting like a man. He was in the sixth grade when his mother told him Uncle Tanka died.

Anthony cried for three hours that day. And then he realized who was the last male figure left in Corey’s life.

His younger brother would keep his eyes glued during Anthony’s middle school games, where he flashed that future 4.43-second 40-yard dash speed and 40.5-inch vertical jump that would shatter NFL Combine records for quarterbacks.

“A freak of nature," Cameo Towns, a former youth coach, said.

Anthony was walking to class in middle school one day when he came across a kid on the ground. He’d broken his ankle, and so Anthony hoisted him up on those growing shoulders and carried him to the clinic.

He told his mother that day that he wanted to help people. She started looking for an educational match. They applied to Loften’s Fire and EMS program.

Because Loften is a magnet school with no sports teams, students can choose to play elsewhere in the area, either through their zoned school or an application for exemption. Word spread across town that a dual-threat quarterback was going there, and adults jostled for position.

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“When I took the job,” said former Eastside football coach Cedderick Daniels, “Priority No. 1 was to make sure that kid came to Eastside.”

Daniels was working at the Martin Luther King Multipurpose Center when he heard Cleare’s voice ringing through the entrance. Someone had accused Anthony of stealing a basketball, and she wasn’t going to stand for that.

Daniels asked who her son was, and she said Anthony Richardson. And that’s when he made his pitch.

Anthony joined Eastside in one of the biggest rebuilds imaginable. The team went 1-9 his freshman year. He started practices at the age of 13, and Daniels had to decide whether to expose a skinny kid to the pounding that would come behind his undersized and undeveloped line. He chose instead to start him at wide receiver.

They played their home games at Citizen Park, right outside of the MLK Center. It’s where the kids living in the cul-de-sacs off University Avenue saw bigger versions of themselves and built dreams on the soil of men who were never given the chance.

A blue sign with gold lettering in front of the building tells the stories of four Black men in the community who were lynched by white mobs. One was captured out of jail. Another handed over by the sheriff. A third shot in front of his wife.

At Citizen Park, Anthony began his rise. He became the quarterback his sophomore year, and that’s when the stories start, like of the time he was wrapped up by seven kids and escaped to run for a 60-yard touchdown; or when he fumbled a handoff late in a blowout, scooped it up and sprinted up the sideline for his ninth touchdown, prompting the opposing coach to accuse them of running up the score.

It was hard to steal his joy. Daniels took him out of one blowout and took away his helmet, only to see him run onto the field with a teammate’s helmet to play safety and swat away a deep pass.

“If you’re a defensive back and that kid is looking across the line of scrimmage and he has a smile on his face...” Daniels started.

Another former assistant, Chris Houston, finished:

“You’re not going to stop him. Period.”

Joining this football team with friends from the cul-de-sac was about more than making a name for himself. It was also about survival. The ballooning cost of sports and two boys who outgrew their clothes had Cleare working two and three jobs at a time. The bills never slowed, threatening the lights or the heat or the water. She sometimes chose utilities over groceries.

Eastside had a “snack room” in the football coaches’ office, filled with donations from a local food bank. Anthony and his teammates would duck down there during the day to grab the breakfast they didn’t eat or to build a buffet of the dinner they had to find. Anthony stuffed his bag full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and roasted hens to bring home.

His mother worked so hard she had to have surgery once. And that’s when Anthony started to feel the pressure, too. After all, he was the one who prayed for this second child.

When his first offer came from Southern Mississippi his freshman year, he cried. Someone was offering to send him to school and pay for it, and all he had to do was perfect the games he played on that park behind the house, back when they didn’t have money for anything else.

And he got to bring the kids he grew up with along. Eastside planned a seven-school college tour in the summer, heading to places like Clemson and South Carolina. These were team visits for Anthony and, for many of his teammates, their first vacation out of state. One kid asked if they were staying in an indoor or outdoor hotel. Another showed up with a laundry basket full of clothes because his family didn’t own a suitcase.

Eastside had gone long stretches struggling to attract college coaches to the games, which Daniels believes was because of rumors that all the school does is fight. By Anthony’s junior season, more than 40 different schools showed up. They saw him come alive on the field for 1,567 passing yards, 924 rushing yards and 33 total touchdowns as Eastside went 7-4.

By then, he’d committed to Florida, becoming the rare Gainesville product to land a quarterback spot for the hometown program. And then he heard from Netflix. The company was ready to film a new season of “QB1: Beyond the Lights,” and it wanted Richardson in it along with Bryce Young and future Kentucky quarterback Deuce Hogan.

In one moment, the documentary shows him comparing Instagram followers with his girlfriend, Jada Richardson, an Eastside cheerleader. (She shares his last name by coincidence.)

“So you’re more famous than me,” Jada Richardson says with a laugh.

Anthony responds, “Are you sad?”

Over time, Jada would see where that affection was really rooted. She posted on Twitter in June 2021 about a time he drove her to work as it was pouring outside. Once she was inside, she noticed he had parked the car, grabbed an umbrella from the trunk and began escorting her coworkers one by one to the entrance so none of them had to walk through the rain.

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On the football field in high school, he lived to light up a crowd.

He played one road game where the opposing student section began chanting, “Overrated!” at him. From across the field, Cleare began screaming back, “Underrated!”

“They just did the ‘overrated’ chant for me!” he said to his teammates. “I feel good now. … I’m gonna hurdle somebody. I’m gonna fly.”

He was running on that juice when Eastside had a game against rival Buchholz and thousands packed the stands.

“Too many people came out here, bro,” he said to a teammate. “Everybody came out to see us lose. We can’t lose.”

He played the final drive with that fire. Down seven points with less than 1:30 remaining and the ball just past midfield, Anthony dropped back and scrambled right as far as he could before launching a pass back across his body. It soared to the back corner of the end zone, right into a receiver’s hands.

The crowd erupted, but he was in a zone now, so he sprinted up to the line, took the ball and powered through for a two-point conversion. He glided to the sideline to celebrate with the roar of the crowd, and that’s when he saw the flag for an illegal shift.

The extra-point team came on, and the kick was blocked. Eastside lost by one point.

“We won the game!” Anthony screamed, the rasp capturing the hurt in his voice as he slammed a fist on a white folding table. Then he pulled his jersey up to cover his eyes.

This was his first time experiencing that cascade from the top. Anthony had built this season up in his mind before it became a special on Netflix, and winning just two games and later tearing his shoulder joint were never meant to be part of the script.

Any action creates an equal reaction, so if performing unheard-of acts on a football field can bring joy and relief to a community watching, then wielding that power and failing to perform could only bring the opposite.

Anthony shoved his jersey down and stared up to lights blurred by tears. It can feel like this game can give him everything, but when he can feel that world in his fingertips and it slips…

“Sometimes it’s a curse,” he’d say later.

The ghost of West Gainesville

Perhaps a curse is just the negative side effect of the magic it takes to keep a dream alive. Can a kid really run that fast or throw that far? Can he rise above the squalor of the life he was born into, creating advantages where he once saw none?

These are the thoughts that tugged at his heart each time he pulled on a yellow firefighter suit or an orange football jersey. He was ready to stare fear in the face. At least that’s how it felt when he showed up to the University of Florida as a freshman quarterback and asked to wear No. 15.

He knew plenty about Tim Tebow, the Heisman Trophy winning quarterback who could truck defenders, throw jump-pass touchdowns and squeeze every ounce of athletic potential out of himself on the way to two national championships. But Richardson wanted No. 15.

This freshman with a cannon of an arm had a brand to build on the field. He’d call it AR-15. He’d hire a marketing manager to handle the Name, Image and Likeness deals, which brought money and meals to his family across town. (Following a mass shooting, Anthony released a video denouncing the AR-15 brand, and he has since switched his number to 5.)

He redshirted as a freshman, as Kyle Trask had a grip on the job and Emory Jones was his backup. With no role on the field and the Netflix cameras gone with the season of QB1 suspended, he slid into the shadows. He felt stifled. He called Daniels on the bus ride to the first game and told him, “I’m not doing this anymore.”

The trappings of home that welcomed Anthony to Florida could feel like an anchor at times. As Florida’s recruiting dipped in 2021, then-coach Dan Mullen, whom ESPN did not make available for this story, played Jones over the hometown kid with the brother to take care of.

“He follows Ant, mirrors whatever Ant does,” Daniels said of Corey. “Ant knew that if he left him, his world would be broken.”

Anthony didn't live in the dorms like the rest of his freshman teammates. He lived with his mother and with Corey. He made the four-mile drive back and forth down University Ave., measuring the distance between Section 8 and Southeastern Conference hysteria.

Over time, he shrunk the miles between East Gainesville and dreams of a brighter future.

“To actually see a Black quarterback playing at the highest level and to succeed and have the whole Gator Nation behind it," said Tavares Williams, one of his youth and high school coaches, "it was a sight unlike any other.”

No matter if he'd run for an 80-yard touchdown like he would against LSU or complete 9 of 27 passes like he would against Florida State, Anthony always had a fan in Corey, who was just starting his middle school football career. On Sundays, the two would go to their small yellow-brick Baptist church, where Anthony would sit with an arm around Corey with a handkerchief to wipe the tears.

On the field, Anthony suffered through some setbacks his sophomore year, including a brain injury and a torn meniscus, but those close to him say that the injuries were never as severe as Mullen led on. It felt to some like Mullen was reaching for reasons to explain why Anthony couldn’t play more.

“He drops back. He misses a protection check. Then misses the hot throw. Then misses the primary read,” Mullen told reporters about Anthony. “And then scrambles around and runs, and everyone thinks, ‘What a spectacular play.’”

Anthony finally did get a chance to start, against No. 1 Georgia and one of the best defenses college football has seen in recent seasons. He finished 12 of 20 for 82 yards and two interceptions as the Gators lost 34-7. He didn’t get the chance again the next week due to a knee injury.

The clock was ticking on legacy. Tebow made his name known as a freshman, subbing in for select packages for a national championship team, including a jump-pass against Ohio State in the title game. Through his first two seasons, Anthony had attempted all of 66 passes.

But Mullen was fired, and in came Billy Napier, who promised to bring a cultural overhaul. He named Anthony the starter before the season.

The first game arrived with a major test. No. 7 Utah was in town, and it’d be Anthony’s first career start in The Swamp. For two years, and many before that, he dreamed of doing the Gator Chomp after touchdowns and sending 90,000 fans into euphoria.

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The smile broke out and Anthony became unleashed. He completed 17 of 24 passes with no interceptions. And he ran 11 times for 106 yards and three touchdowns, including a pump fake where nobody was open and he scrambled for 45 yards.

Florida took a 20-19 lead in the fourth quarter and went for two. Anthony faked a handoff and was immediately swarmed, so he jumped and loaded his arm as the defender launched, but he kept his grip on the ball, spun off the contact and landed on his feet. He spun around the second defender, escaped to the right and fired a toss to a wide-open receiver for the score.

After Utah answered to take the lead, Anthony drove Florida down inside the 2, where he faked a handoff and barreled in for the game-winning score.

Suddenly 90,000 people were on their feet, screaming and clapping their hands, and a Gainesville kid was leaping into his teammates' arms.

It felt like the beginning of something real.

Florida jolted in the polls, up to No. 12. More importantly, it looked like it found a quarterback, and the NFL started taking notice. With Will Levis and No. 20 Kentucky coming to The Swamp, more than 20 scouts lined the seats behind the end zone where he threw that fake jump pass touchdown.

And then something happened. Voices started swimming in his ear, some real and others imagined. The ability to light The Swamp up in a firework show became a tug to do it on every play, and he started firing the ball early, forcing throws, trying to be some tightly wound version of a kid who hadn’t had time to grow.

“Instead of him being Anthony, he tried to be (Tom) Brady,” Daniels said. “He tried to be perfect.”

That’s another one of the self-made comparisons Anthony has had to fight. The greatest quarterback in NFL history was playing just down the road in Tampa Bay. He led the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl during Anthony’s freshman season at Florida, and as he watched a 43-year-old hoist his seventh Lombardi Trophy, Anthony became struck at how someone can keep improving when he has nothing left to prove. He wanted whatever it was Brady had, even if he was unsure how it could fit his time and space.

“I told him, ‘Nobody’s recruiting you to be the next Tom Brady,'” Daniels said. “'They’re recruiting you to be the next Anthony Richardson.’”

Anthony completed 14 of 35 passes for just 143 yards, no touchdowns and two interceptions against Kentucky. He ran six times for four yards. Florida was shut out in the second half and lost 26-16. Like a blown-out candle, the oxygen disappeared from 90,000 in a stadium just as quickly as it arrived.

Inside, Anthony was ready to break. He knew what awaited him the next time he stopped in the grocery store or at the gas station and a Gator fan noticed a 6-foot-4 quarterback who was supposed to bring pride to the hometown. He wanted to hear their passion, but what he received weren't the echoes of joy he imagined on those afternoons with Corey at the park.

“It was like, OK, all of these people are watching me and I have to make them proud. I have to play good for them,” Anthony said. "I was just putting myself at the bottom of the list because I know every time I step on the field I’m happy, but I wasn’t making myself happy by playing the game.”

A Gainesville prodigy with generational abilities found a sudden inability to harness them into something real for his hometown school. He feared an epic turning into a tragedy. With all the comparisons of his athletic prowess to Greek gods, was he Zeus, looking down on the city he built? Or was he Icarus, flying too close to the sun?

Was he the hero of his story or the victim?

He’d spill out his anxieties for the first time in the coming days with Brett Ledbetter, a mental coach he hired at the suggestion of a family friend. Piece by piece, they’d interrogate the soul within that body to try to pierce its weaknesses, locate its strengths and save the kid who nearly broke his grandmother’s window trying to harness them all.

Before any of that, though, he needed to head home. He exited a door outside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium into a parking lot, where he spotted a group of young boys throwing a football. He walked up to them and asked if he could join.

These are the mementos Anthony carries from his brief time as a Gators quarterback. The history itself is light: He made 13 starts, winning six. He threw 24 touchdowns and ran for 12 more, putting him only 109 scores behind Tebow all-time. It was not enough to get his name on a gray stone in front of the stadium, where 74 other Gator legends are.

It’s easy to find a No. 15 jersey all over campus, including on a bronze statue in front of the stadium. But a close look into the eyes reveal which quarterback owns that legacy.

The university bookstore sells six books written by Tebow and distills him into mini helmets, fleeces, mugs, beer glasses, flags and lanyards. Meanwhile, the quarterback from East Gainesville is nowhere to be found.

A photo of Tebow hangs on the wall of The Swamp, ranked by Playboy in 2011 as the top college sports bar in the nation. The caption reads, “Not only can he make the sun rise and set, he walks on water.”

There is a hero of West Gainesville, but it’s not Anthony Richardson.

Not yet.

The future of the Colts

Everything that has built Anthony spilled out into tears the night Chris Ballard called his phone to make him the No. 4 pick of the draft.

He brought Cleare and Corey with him to Kansas City. Corey initially wanted to wear a green sports coat but changed to black to match his older brother.

On the inside left pocket of Anthony’s coat were the words, “I want to be a legend.”

In the same place on Corey’s suit were the words, “I want to be a legend, too.”

When the call came through to become a Colt, Anthony just let the tears flow. He didn’t pull up a shirt to hide them this time.

Here was a franchise with storied quarterbacks like Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck, offering him millions of dollars to become the next. They’re tugging at the purest form of those boyhood dreams that spilled out in a park in East Gainesville while asking him to grow up perhaps faster than any 20-year-old quarterback ever has.

"I don't know when it's going to hit him that he's actually fulfilling his dream," Cleare said. "But as a mom, for me, I can say it is one of the best feelings in the world."

“Everything before that moment was worth it."

The highlights at Eastside, the Netflix cameras, the fake jump-pass, the comparisons to Cam Newton and Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen… the injuries, the time on the bench, the losing seasons, the completion percentage… they’ll all mix in the crucible.

What they form in Anthony is for him to find out.

What he has not become, he can still be. That’s why he’s always felt drawn to Brady, a quarterback who went in the sixth round after being temporarily benched at Michigan. Brady wasn’t a legend at his alma mater either, until one day he went out and told the world he wasn’t content with his story.

Anthony's expectations are completely different as the No. 4 pick in the draft. It means becoming the Colts' seventh different Week 1 starter in seven years, whether he feels ready or not. If he makes all of his starts this season, he'll have more as a rookie than he did in his Florida career.

The Colts can barely contain their excitement. Anthony is, despite his inexperience, the most athletic quarterback prospect in NFL history.

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"When I first saw him, I’m like this dude looks like a running back, quarterback. It looks like he could be an elite receiver. He looks like he can do it all,” wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. said. “His arm strength – he’ll just drop back and flick his wrist and the ball goes 80 yards. It’s insane.”

Said Ballard, “When he takes off and runs, you can feel him.”

Said tight end Drew Ogletree, “I’m playing Madden and I come out on the field and he’s doing the same things I just did on Madden."

Anthony still isn’t running from the pressure. He wore a Tebow T-shirt when he sat down to record a documentary called “The Swamp” about his own career at Florida. He watched the entire QB1 season for the first time on the bus to his first start in Buffalo, tearing up at the scenes with Corey.

He can appear as invested in his brother's football career as he is his own. Corey is a freshman quarterback at Westfield High School. Recently, Anthony tried to pick him up after he fumbled in a game by telling him to try to fumble better next time.

"Don't try to be like me," he told him in a video message after the draft. "Be better than me."

He’s returned to Gainesville a few times, to both sides of town. In West Gainesville, a Gators apparel shop called Alumni Hall has yet to start selling his jersey, but a clerk said that could change.

"Now that he's in the NFL..." she said.

On the East Side, he helped run a youth camp.

“Put the city on the map," he told them. "There’s too much talent around here for people to be overlooking Gainesville. ... Believe in yourself. Just keep working and keep grinding because you boys are too good to be overlooked.”

Many of the athletes who used to try out for wide receiver or running back or defensive back now want to play a different position.

“They want to play quarterback,” said Tavares Williams, one of the youth coaches, “because Anthony Richardson is the quarterback.”

In some eyes, he is already the miracle of East Gainesville.

“We catch such a bad rap on the East side of town. Once you cross over, there’s nothing over there,” said Daniels, the former Eastside head coach. “That kid at any time in his life could have gone south and sold drugs, been in the streets until 2 in the morning, had a baby.

"None of that."

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Anthony brought Corey and Cleare with him to Indianapolis along with his girlfriend, Jada; and four friends from the Eastside days. Therapy has taught him he can't please everyone. He has to hold tight to the people whose happiness is the most consistent reflection of his own.

He’s bringing them into every sphere he can. When he signs autographs after practice, there’s Corey wearing his white helmet with the horseshoe on, pretending they’ve traded places. When he opens a press conference by imitating Marshawn Lynch’s “I’m just here so I won’t get fined” bit, he flips his head back and laughs as he stares into the camera and says, “I told my mom I was gonna do that.”

When he goes to launch one of those 60-yard passes, the last image he sees is a tattoo on his forearm of a lion’s head with a rose, resembling the ones he placed on the grave for Tanka, the first man to believe in what his arm could do.

These are the people he’ll picture in the Lucas Oil Stadium tunnel before he takes the field. For a few seconds, the stadium will go dark, like the place has been burned. He'll stare out until he sees the 60,000 faces staring back at him.

And then it’ll be time to run through the smoke.

Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: Why -- and how -- Anthony Richardson wants to become a legend