Super Bowl won’t define Newton, nor should it
Cam Newton stood at the podium after the Carolina Panthers’ preseason win against the Tennessee Titans on Saturday night, dressed in a smart gray blazer and navy blue fedora.
The regular season is a few weeks away. The playoffs won’t happen until the leaves fall and the snow starts.
The first question Newton faced?
Will the Panthers win the Super Bowl?
“That’s not what I’m worried about right now,” a relaxed, confident Newton replied. “I would hope to, but as a team, as a player, as a person who is trying to get better and master my craft, I don’t think I can answer that question right now. I want to, and I wish I could have a genie right in front of you and just shake it — that would make everybody’s lives easier, right? But that’s not how it works.”
It’s a lesson Newton learned in the most difficult of ways last season, one that too many have used to define him as a player and a person. Newton’s Panthers were unstoppable for most of the season, finishing 15-1 and roaring into Super Bowl 50 — only to come up short against Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos.
And it’s a lesson that ignores the important context with which everyone ought to view Cam Newton, a football player whose very existence acts as a bulwark against the league’s dark side of tragic medical stories.
Newton is 27. He’s at a point in his career when quarterbacks historically are still developing. Brett Favre reached his first NFC Championship Game at 26. Randall Cunningham didn’t get his first playoff win until he was 29.
And to take what Newton does as purely a binary pursuit of a championship, nothing more and nothing less, is to miss the pleasure of the Cam Newton Experience, the finest combination of running and throwing since Cunningham, really. He is what football should hope to become in the 21st century, and he is somehow judged instead on everything he said and did leading up to one game, everything he was and wasn’t in a brief postgame news conference that ended abruptly with him walking out of the room after a few answers.
But before he takes another run at it all, let’s remember what his 2015 season was: 35 touchdown passes, 10 rushing touchdowns, 10 interceptions, a fantastic 7.8 yards per attempt.
And then there was everything else: Newton as cultural touch point, Newton as subject of complaint letters to the editor, a demonstrative quarterback somehow blamed for being more than just a quarterback. And then when he lost in the Super Bowl, everything he’d said and done to upset everyone seemed to become the very reason he’d lost.
At that postgame news media session, with Newton understandably upset, he, according to many, failed to lose the right way.
It reminded me of the criticisms thrown at LeBron James for leaving Cleveland for Miami. James took less money to go win. Doing so was somehow revealing of his character flaws, though playing for the most money regardless of title chances would have been just as problematic to his preordained critics.
So it was with Newton, after hearing fans and media members and scouts talk about how comfortable he was, that he’d never really care about winning as much as everything else, that his public persona was all a front, Newton somehow got blamed for, yes, caring so much about losing the Super Bowl that he couldn’t put up a brave front.
For his part, Newton rejects the notion that the criticism hurled at him is in any way racially based, though teammates and many others disagree.
“I’ll let you be the judge,” Newton told GQ this month. “I don’t look at it like that. I look at it like some people have certain beliefs, and I have my own belief, and we can agree to disagree on certain things. But this is what makes sports so amazing, that we can start a discussion around a table, in the newspaper, in the magazines, that will get people’s attention. And that’s what sports does.”
It’s also a diversion from reality, though. It’s an ability to relax, sit back in a chair and watch someone do things we’ve never seen before, to astound and amuse us. It is entertainment, something Newton recognized before he ever played a down in the NFL, and something his critics seem entirely unwilling to acknowledge.
For his part, Newton isn’t focused on that Super Bowl moment. Doing so won’t do him any good, and there are smaller, shorter-term goals ahead.
“It’s a lot of Super Bowl questions, geeze,” Newton told Sports Illustrated. “Long story short, I really couldn’t care less about the Super Bowl. There’s nothing I can do about it.
“I have learned from it, but my main focus now and up until the season starts is trying to become a better me. I can’t change what’s done in the past. It’s already done.”
Those Super Bowl questions won’t go away. But what Newton really seems to be saying here is that he’s going to spend more time focused on enjoying the journey. And it would be a shame if America made a different choice.
I mentioned James, and I wonder how many people who deconstructed every last facial expression during Cleveland Cavaliers playoff games from the last decade ever take a step back and realize that they missed simply enjoying one of the transcendent athletes of our time.
That’s what Newton is in the NFL.
So he’s watched it. He’s seen the game, looked at what went wrong in Super Bowl 50. But he’s smart enough not to let it define him.
“I don’t want to get to the point where I am preparing from the Super Bowl,” Newton told SI. “The Super Bowl has came and gone. I am looking past that. Just trying to find ways to become a better me. Yeah, we had a great season last year, but that’s last year. There are still things we have to improve at, nor are we going to be able to be at the point we were at last year without starting from scratch. That’s where we are right now.”
That’s where the Panthers are, where Cam Newton is. That’s where America should be, too.