Breaking Cam Article

[War Eagle!!!]

Not really...but it's a pretty good read.

http://www.wsbtv.com/sports/25800599/detail.html

ATLANTA -- Maybe it meant as much as any pass he threw all day.

Somebody signaled Auburn signal caller Cam Newton likely wouldn’t wade into the post-game press of people packed into a press room under the stands in Jordan Hare Stadium. Others would be available for interview, but I showed up for one story, the Newton story. So I got out of the way of sports reporters doing their work. I walked out toward the field over which relative quiet and a damp chill settled. The stands were all but empty.

I glimpsed a little guy, maybe 10 or 12-years-old, on the receiving end of a football. Facing him, in what looked through the murk like long gym shorts, a wind shirt, an Auburn hat and maybe flip flops, towered a guy who looked like he might have thrown some passes already, say, 15 (completing 12) in the preceding hours. Before I could get a better look, he turned toward a tunnel in the end-zone stands and disappeared.

Jeffrey Lee, publisher of AuburnSports.com, checked it out for me Sunday. Turns out it was Cam Newton, he said, playing catch with his little brother, a Field of Dreams moment on the field where he helped sustain Auburn’s dreams of a national championship, a sublime scene of innocence set against a backdrop of raging national controversy.

Welcome to the Cam Newton story, where what you hear and what you see don’t always add up.

It used to add up. The yards add up, passing and rushing numbers gaudier than a 70’s necktie. The wins add up for the Auburn Tigers. And the grace and humility Newton evinces in his public statements, the exuberant fan-love he races about Jordan-Hare dishing out after victories -- it all burnished his redemptive story, his comeback from a bad experience in his first attempt at major college football, at the University of Florida.

Then, of course, controversy erupted early this month about his recruitment at Mississippi State University. Click For ESPN Link.

Friday night, we confirmed information about it which seemed to break new ground.

We broke the story on wsbtv.com, and within an hour or so broadcast a story about it on the Channel 2 Action News Nightbeat. I’m on the news side. Murder, governmental abuse, terrorism-my job is to go after those stories. Our superb sports department headed by Sports Director Zach Klein generally handles pigskin particulars.

Yet I wound up Saturday night on the sidelines near the student section amid postgame pandemonium as Cam Newton bolted into view. What we witnessed didn’t seem like bask-in-the-adulation-in-the-arena kind of stuff so much as surging into the stands, among-my- fellow students, my people, a sharing-the-love kind of thing. Earlier, at least a couple of times in the game, a close-up look at the megawatt smile behind the face mask suggested the same sense of unbridled joy.

I remember I was similarly struck by his tone, much calmer, in a sound bite several days ago.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the quarterback reportedly said. "It's been all right. I've had worse days, but God continues to bless me throughout this process, me and my family and most importantly the team.”

I’ve looked into the eyes of accused killers and con artists, and sometimes I’ve been lied to and didn’t know it right off. But I have trouble seeing this as a kid who talks about God and lies in the same breath.

I talked to a detective I know who works homicides and is an Auburn fan. He looks like a person who is troubled, he said of Cam Newton, but he doesn’t look like a person who has taken anything.

Of course we have not questioned him face to face about all this, so our guesswork is probably about two steps above tea leaves. Maybe Cam Newton deserves an Oscar along with the Heisman. Maybe I misread him.

After all, it’s the Cam Newton story, where what you hear and what you see don’t always add up. But that scene on the field in the still of an east Alabama evening... seems like it ought to speak for itself.