SPARTANBURG, S.C. _ Cam Newton looks healthy. He feels healthy. And he sounds like he's not yet quite sure how much he can trust that feeling.
During the most telling part of Newton's first press conference with the local media since December, the Carolina Panthers quarterback said Thursday that "a lot of times, you've just got to get out of your own head."
Newton was speaking about his own injuries. He had surgery on his throwing shoulder in March 2017 and again in January of this year. For much of the past three years, the question "How's Cam doing?" has been the primary topic of conversation for everyone in black and blue.
Newton's pain tolerance is not in question. Sometimes he's played well past the point of when he was doing anybody any good, including himself, as in that excruciating Monday night game against New Orleans last December. Newton has long been able to take one hit, or 10, or 100, and get up one more time.
But there are so many questions about an NFL quarterback entering his ninth season, at age 30, on a team that hasn't won the NFC South since 2015.
"When you're hurt for so long you tell yourself, 'Just do it. Just do it!'" Newton said. "And as football players, our mantra is just big macho men, going down the field, never show signs of weakness, never show that you're hurt. And you're doing it, but you're not necessarily making things better.
"We do hurt. We do have pain. And pain for me may be different than pain for somebody else. But where I'm at now, I may feel certain things and my (brain) may say, 'You're hurt.' But you're really not hurt. Because you've been hurt for so long, you don't know what 100% feels like."
You don't know what 100% feels like.
You know that feeling, right? Maybe you were sick for a long time, and then finally you get well. But you wonder: Is this real? What's going to happen to me next?
This is where I think Newton is at the moment.
He said he feels no limitations on his shoulder, and he has uncorked enough throws of 45-50 yards in Spartanburg that it's obvious the deep ball is again a part of his game. The first one of those came in the Panthers' first training camp practice on July 25th. Everyone who was watching that ball land in the arms of Curtis Samuel smiled.
In our first episode, we break down Panthers Quarterback Cam Newton's shoulder, his timeline through injury and how he came to throw bombs during his first day of training camp in Wofford. By Matt Walsh
"I think it was a sigh of relief for a lot of people because I wasn't right at the end of the (2018) season," Newton said of that pass. "And it was even a sigh of relief for myself as well, being able to throw like that again."
And yet Newton kept using the words "process" and "work in progress" Thursday. He doesn't want anyone to think he's hurt anymore, but he also understands that he's not a 22-year-old, devil-may-care rookie anymore, either. He won't know how all of this will go until the real games start Sept. 8, and he is being chased around by Aaron Donald and the L.A. Rams.
