Mr. Orange and Blue.

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If you have been to the Swamp to watch the University of Florida Gators play football over the past 26 seasons, you've seen Richard Johnston, a bankruptcy attorney from Ft. Myers.

But it is not his well-mannered, professional, board-certified legal skills that are on display. No, on football Saturdays, Johnston morphs into the madcap "Mr. Orange and Blue," leading the Gator faithful in cheers and working the crowd into a frenzy--all while running around the field wearing his trademark Crocs clogs, one orange and one blue.

"It is one of the biggest rushes I could ever imagine," said Johnston, a Fowler White Boggs lawyer who described his role as a ringmaster who gets to "flip the switch" on 90,000 people. "I'm with all the cheerleaders; I have a 300-piece band behind me spelling the letters out. It is overwhelming to be able to rev them up. I know what I do is not the centerpiece, but it is an element of the electricity of Gator football."

He sees it as his job to build excitement to a peak and help make Ben Hill Griffin Stadium a tough place for opponents to play football.

"I'm just a fan who escaped onto the field with a microphone," Johnston said. "I don't have any special training."

But he does have a history with UF, earning his undergraduate and law degrees from Florida and serving as a cheerleader in 1978 and 1980--his senior year as an undergrad and his second year of law school, respectively. It was during his second stint as a rah-rah that he got on the microphone.

"It was a good year to do it because we had just come off of 0-10-1, the first year of the Charlie Pell era. You could say 'boo' and they would scream," Johnston said. "It was a good year. We were winning. It is always easier to be a cheerleader when you are winning."

He must have made a good impression. Three years later, when Johnston was toiling as a young lawyer at the venerable Ervin firm in Tallahassee, the Gators came calling.

"I'm like, there is no way this conservative Tallahassee firm that is half full of Seminoles and half full of Gators is ever going to let me do this," Johnston said.

But the then-26-year-old summoned up the intestinal fortitude to approach senior partner Bob Ervin, a former Florida Bar president, about reprising his energetic role.

"I said, 'Bob, the university wants me to come in and get things revved up before the games on the football field. What do you think?'" Johnston said. "I'm wincing, waiting for the 'no.'

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