‘Worst nightmare’
Newton opens up on COVID-19 experience
Patriots quarterback Cam Newton sheds light on his recovery from the coronavirus
Cam Newton admitted that the last two weeks since testing positive for COVID-19 has “without a doubt” been the strangest stretch of his career, and he still doesn’t know how he contracted the virus.
The Patriots quarterback, who returned in Sunday’s loss to the Broncos, opened up about his experience with COVID-19 during his weekly radio appearance on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” on Monday morning. Newton was the first Patriot to test positive on Oct. 2, forcing the NFL to postpone their game against the Chiefs, which he missed. Through it all, he hoped for the best.
“Here I am, I get prepared for something and then find out the day before that I’m not gonna go, and then I was thinking as optimistic as could be,” Newton said of learning he tested positive. “I was like man, it’s a false positive, then it ended up being true and then you go through it and games get rescheduled and you just sit there wondering, you can’t work out, you can’t do anything, and obviously me being who I am, it’s not like you can just take this time to go vacation somewhere.
“So through it all, it has been weird, it has been an adjustment to your routine, but yet, people don’t pay attention to all that stuff. They just want production and so do I.”
Newton admitted he was fearful that he spread the virus to the rest of the team, especially after cornerback Stephon Gilmore tested positive on Oct. 7. There was a reported dinner between Newton and Gilmore — which Gilmore’s wife has refuted to have happened — but the quarterback was certainly concerned for his teammates.
“I think the biggest scare here for everybody was just my daily routine of how many hours I put in the facility,” Newton said. “If I contracted it, if anybody would have had a red flag, I think it would have been me. … Who was he around? What did he touch? Things like that. I was more concerned about it because I didn’t want to put anyone else on the team in jeopardy.
“The fact that Steph contracted it was my worst nightmare of being like, I would never want to sabotage anything to the slightest degree, because I know what the capability we have of becoming and through it all, we see it, we saw it and got better understanding of it.”
Newton said he used some of his time away from the team to binge on some TV shows — specifically “Vikings” and “Yellowstone” — and it was tough for him to watch the Chiefs loss from home, knowing he couldn’t help. But he’s taken the whole situation in stride as yet another hurdle he’s had to overcome recently in his life between career-altering injuries and being released by the Panthers.
“My life here in the last two years have in essence been like that, and my faith in the God I serve never wavers,” Newton said. “… There’s been a lot of unfortunate events that have transpired for me and this is not the only one, but yet I will not complain. I will look dead in His eyeball and not blink and I think that’s what any person would want to do and things that I’ve been faced with, it’s on the world’s display and I have to accept the challenge and be better from it.”
Newton continued to be accountable for Sunday’s loss, where he threw for 157 yards and two interceptions and looked rusty, and he took responsibility for the last play of the game, when he missed a fourth-and-10 pass to N’Keal Harry that ended the Patriots’ comeback bid.
But the quarterback emitted optimism, even after the Patriots fell to under .500, the first time they’ve done so in October or later since 2002.
“I heard a person say once, ‘I don’t point fingers. I point thumbs,’ and with that being said, I take full responsibility with where we are as an offense and knowing moving forward, it starts with No. 1 and I will be better,” Newton said. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to do more and press the issue, it’s just doing the small (things) better and I think I can do a better job of that. …
“There’s no need to press the panic button. There is no need to start reinventing the wheel. We have the answers, and I say again, we have the answers in that locker room. And we get guys back hopefully and some guys need to mend and heal up, but yet through it all, it’s our job as players to produce and I know looking at eyeballs in that locker room and the competitors who just seize the moment and make the most of every opportunity, we will get that job done.”