HEISMAN TROPHY WINNER HOLDS MEDIA BLITZ
BY MICHAEL RAWSON
SPORTS EDITOR
The circus came to town on Thursday morning, but not to the Convention Center, not to Qualcomm Stadium, not even to an empty parking lot. This time the circus came to the artificial turf of a football field, on the campus of a local high school.
Several dozen media members and guests from around the country converged on Cathedral Catholic High School in Del Mar, gathering to watch Cam Newton throw a football. Newton, this year’s NCAA football Heisman Trophy winner—the best player in college football—came to San Diego in January to work with local quarterback coach George Whitfield, Jr.
Whitfield prepares young quarterbacks for the college game, traveling with them to major colleges around the country making connections with coaches and scouts. This fall, when NFL quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was suspended for the first four games of the season, he chose Whitfield to help him stay in game shape. Newton needed Whitfield to help him transition from the college “spread” offense to the style of the National Football League.
Warren Moon, hall of fame quarterback and mentor to Newton, said on Thursday that he had directed Cam’s father Cecil Newton to Whitfield. Before college, Cecil had supposedly peddled Cam to play for Mississippi State University in exchange for $200,000. The NCAA decided Cam had not known about it. The son went unpunished, and Cecil agreed not to attend the national championship game. After Cam led his Auburn Tigers to victory, Cecil was photographed embracing his son. A representative of the family said he had watched the game outside the stadium.
Fast forward to Thursday morning: the event was meant to mimic Whitfield’s normal workouts with Cam, meant to prove that the kid could play professionally. After over a hundred of us toting cameras, notebooks and voice recorders filed onto the field, Newton played parts of a pretend game of football with twelve young men his age, all from Southwestern College in Chula Vista. Whitfield calmly directed Cam as he tossed them passes, avoided their half-hearted rushes, fired footballs between them as they posed as defenders and jokingly offered them Icy-Hot.
Meanwhile, as NFL legend Moon watched from the sidelines, Cecil Newton went unseen. Though made from the mold of omnipresent, caring sports fathers like those of Tiger Woods and Venus and Serena Williams, scandal had turned Cecil into a shadow figure. Surely enough, shadows loomed behind the windows of the press box overlooking the hoards of spectators.
“We had over 300 media requests, and we had to deny 250 of them,” James Woo, Whitfield’s Director of Operations and Cal State San Marcos student, said. “We’re talking about a lot of powerful people that made the time to come see Cam Newton throw a football.”
The list included Trent Dilfer, former NFL quarterback and current ESPN commentator. Dilfer, known as one of the sports media’s harshest critics, seemed skeptical about Cam Newton before the event. After Cam showed off, Dilfer couldn’t stop gushing. “That was phenomenal…if scouts saw this, they’d have been slobbering,” he said.
According to Whitfield, the idea for the event had been jointly created by father and son, wishing to build momentum entering the pre-draft combine: workouts in front of team scouts. “Mr. Newton is still a human being and a dad,” Woo said. “Wouldn’t you do the same thing for your son?”
No one could blame Cecil Newton for shying away from the field on Thursday. For perhaps the event had a second purpose: guiding the family’s wish to move on from scandal and focus on Cam Newton’s future. If so, at least temporarily, it succeeded.