His dancing still raising eyebrows, Cam Newton is winning over Charlotte

July 11, 2024

CHARLOTTE — The family gathered each Sunday at Hattie Lou Newton's house, and it never did take much to get her going.

Watching Hattie Lou get revved up in the hours after church was a kind of parlor game: Which picture in the album would bring out that thundering laugh? Whose side dish or Christmas gift, the cornbread or the new scarf, would make Hattie burst from her chair and wrap someone in her arms?

“You don’t have to wonder when she’s happy,” one of Hattie Lou’s sons, Cecil Newton, said. “She’s going to jump up and down, and that’s kind of what was bred into us: to appreciate and celebrate.”

Sometimes when the circumstances were right at the little house in southwest Atlanta — 20 sons, daughters, aunts and cousins together, family and joy mixing inside Hattie Lou like jet fuel — she wouldn’t be able to help herself. Among all the grandchildren, Cecil’s middle son, Cam, was perhaps closest with Hattie Lou.

When her exuberance overflowed, the photo or song or anecdote hitting just the right nerve, the big 9-year-old was the one she would corral. Together in a room packed with life, Cam and Hattie Lou would stand at the center and dance.

Being himself

A day after the Carolina Panthers defeated the Tennessee Titans, 27-10, in Nashville, a Panthers fan posted his disapproval of quarterback Cam Newton on the team’s official message board.

Newton had led the Panthers to their 13th consecutive regular season win dating from the latter part of the 2014 season. He had done so with 217 passing yards and his sixth rushing touchdown of the season — more, by far, than any other NFL quarterback.

But Newton had followed that touchdown with an elaborate end-zone celebration, punctuating his dance with a popular move called “the dab,” which originated in Newton’s native Atlanta. A few Titans players hadn’t cared for it. At least one Panthers fan, who posted under the nickname romainecalm, hadn’t either.

“I think it is okay to celebrate in an appropriate manner after scoring. To me, there is nothing better than a really good ball spike,” the fan wrote in a 284-word screed. “... Dancing and all that, that is just ‘look at me’ stuff.”

According to many in and around Charlotte and the Panthers organization, such reaction was typical of the complicated relationship Newton has with the city — even as Newton’s Panthers remain undefeated in what could be an MVP campaign. In his fifth NFL season, he is on pace to break a 60-year-old record for career rushing touchdowns among quarterbacks. He follows those end-zone celebrations by handing the game ball to a young fan in the stands, and before Thanksgiving, Newton and his foundation fed nearly 900 children — and, in the process, held a dabbing competition.

“This is an icon in front of their eyes,” said Tony DiGiacomo, who as executive producer for WFNZ-AM’s “Primetime” sports talk show, hears the most unfiltered opinions as the show’s call screener. “It’s not that they don’t know it. They’re trying to embrace it, but they’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Former NBA player and longtime Charlotte resident Dell Curry believes Newton is “transcending” the city and perhaps a region where change often comes slowly.

“He’s just being himself,” Curry said. “If you win, you can be yourself.”

The Panthers aren’t just winning. They are the NFL’s last team this season without a loss, and only recently has talk of an undefeated season or the franchise’s first Super Bowl championship overpowered questions about whether the 6-foot-5, 245-pound Newton is the team’s long-term answer at quarterback.

DiGiacomo estimated that, even as recently as last month, about a third of even hard-core Panthers fans expressed doubt in Newton’s ability to lead Carolina deep into the playoffs. No one questions the skills of the former Heisman Trophy winner, national champion at Auburn and No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 NFL draft. But in a city that, perhaps more than any other, is a cultural crossroads of the new and old South, many simply cannot get past how Newton carries himself.

“We have gotten to a point in the development in this country that people are more apt to just be themselves to reflect their culture, to reflect their upbringing,” said Harvey Gantt, who in 1983 became Charlotte’s first African-American mayor. “I think you can move around in Charlotte today and see a lot of that self-expression going on and people not being ashamed of it.”

Newton doesn’t seem ashamed of who he is, where he’s from or the unfettered expressions of joy he learned throughout his youth. Others, though, aren’t so sure his behavior is befitting that of an NFL quarterback or the unquestioned face of the Panthers franchise.

A few days after that win against the Titans, the Charlotte Observer published a letter to the editor from a Nashville woman who called Newton’s dancing offensive, deeming it inappropriate for the woman’s 9-year-old daughter.

Other NFL players, including quarterbacks, have celebrated first downs and scores for years. But Newton is breaking new ground, and that ground is being disturbed by a 27-year-old African American in the Bible Belt.

“Tell me: What is the difference between when Cam scores a touchdown and he dances; what’s the difference between Rob Gronkowski spiking the ball?” Carolina fullback Mike Tolbert said. “It’s just people’s perception. It’s just the way the world is, and unfortunately we’ve got to live in it.”

Josh Norman, a Panthers cornerback in the midst of a breakout season, was more direct: “I’m going to be precise when I say it,” he said. “It’s hate.”

Sure enough, a North Carolina man’s Facebook post went viral last month when he referred to Newton as “ghetto” after Newton tore down a Green Bay Packers banner at the Panthers’ home stadium. After one of Newton’s Instagram posts showed him and a few friends wearing bandanas, several commenters called the quarterback a “thug,” to which Newton responded by posting another photograph of himself and several friends in immaculate suits.

“I am who I am,” he told reporters last month.

More than a quarterback

When Hattie Lou heard the announcement, she climbed onto a chair.

Moments earlier, Newton had been unveiled by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell as the top pick in that 2011 draft. The family, used to gathering in College Park, Ga., on Sundays, spent the Thursday evening at an Atlanta restaurant. Televisions showed Newton holding up a Panthers jersey. The song “Celebration” blared over the speakers, and Hattie Lou climbed up, refused to get down and raised the roof.

“It just means happiness,” she then told a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Newton’s father remembers it as an important checkpoint on a long road. In many ways, Cecil Newton saw the same young man who learned the two-step from his grandmother, who slept on his family’s hardwood floor as self-punishment after losing high school games, who learned from his father that, no matter the criticism, Newton should always be himself.

“I have watched the evolution of a person,” Cecil Newton said.

After Newton moved to Charlotte, though, he and his new home town began an occasionally uncomfortable partnership. Throughout the 2010 college season, Panthers fans had set their hopes on Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck. Then Luck decided to return to Palo Alto for his redshirt junior season, and many Carolina fans felt encumbered by an arranged marriage to Newton, whose college career had been decorated by accolades but also stained by controversies.

Newton was named rookie of the year in 2011, but he clashed sometimes with teammates who had strong personalities. He seemed robotic and moody to media and, at times, distant to fans. He claimed to want to be more than a successful quarterback for a team and fan base starved for championships; Newton had said before the draft that he saw himself as an “entertainer and icon.”

He mostly kept to himself and shielded details from his personal life. If he was shown on the video scoreboard at a Charlotte Bobcats game, Newton sat straight-faced and waved away the camera. He sulked after interceptions and missed opportunities, covering his head with a towel and refusing sometimes to watch his team’s defense. Carolina lost 19 games in Newton’s first two seasons.

“It’s been standoffish,” Tremaine Sloan, a WFNZ producer and host and lifelong Charlotte resident, said of the relationship between Newton and the Carolinas. “He didn’t sit well with a lot of people.”

Some fans, assuming Newton would leave or be pushed aside by the Panthers following the expiration of his rookie deal after the 2014 season, emotionally distanced themselves from him. Others simply hadn’t liked him from the start. He wasn’t Luck, and he wasn’t traditional, and he wasn’t what many football fans expected in a franchise quarterback.

Then in May 2014, the Panthers startled the region by releasing Steve Smith, the hard-nosed and popular wide receiver who occasionally butted heads with Newton. It became clear that one of them had to go, and the franchise chose to retain — and empower — its quarterback.

Coach Ron Rivera and General Manager Dave Gettleman surrounded Newton not with stars but with egoless players who would allow Newton to be himself without judgment. If he wanted to be moody or selfish or joyful or silly, at least in the Panthers’ locker room, that became increasingly okay.

“Cam is a big personality,” Rivera said, adding that the organization values team chemistry on par with talent. “He is a big, fun-loving guy, and I think the guys understand that. They accept that for who he is. Don’t give me the 11 best. Give me the best 11.”

For various reasons, out went Smith, running back DeAngelo Williams and wide receiver Brandon LaFell; in came receiver Jerricho Cotchery, a hurry-up offense that complemented Newton’s ability to read defenses and improvise, and a reinvented Newton, signed in June to a five-year extension worth more than $103 million.

Suddenly, Newton seemed transformed.

Said Cecil Newton: “Players in today’s generation only want you to accept them.”

Working on the relationship

In the months since Newton’s contract extension, people in Charlotte have noticed a change. He might be seen riding a hover board through uptown or strolling through a park near his apartment building. Involved in a car accident last year, Newton prefers now to walk to the stadium rather than drive.

He attends sporting events and concerts, often wearing Charlotte apparel. It seems clear Newton wants the marriage to work, even if a few doubtful souls remain tentative. The calls critical of Newton, DiGiacomo said, have mostly disappeared the past three weeks. The relationship isn’t perfect, but lately there is progress — and, the producer said, a growing feeling of protectiveness of the quarterback.

“We can push him around,” DiGiacomo said, “but you can’t.”

Newton wore Curry’s No. 30 Hornets jersey Wednesday as he traveled the short distance to Time Warner Cable Arena, sitting courtside while the Golden State Warriors played the Hornets. Newton, six days earlier, had punctuated his seventh rushing touchdown and a beating of Dallas by performing the twist in the end zone — finishing it, of course, with the dab — and sending a Thanksgiving shout-out to Hattie Lou. The Panthers, almost inexplicably to anyone outside the organization, improved to 11-0.

“I just reminisce sometimes when I first came into this franchise, how different it was, the mentality,” Newton said recently. “People would look at me like I was wrong for having the type of attitude, having the type of expectations for this team. And now that we’re actually living through it right now, it’s not a surprise.”

Now he sat on the front row and watched as the video board showed youngsters and old-timers, many of them performing — or at least attempting — the dab. Newton laughed as he watched. A moment later a camera focused on him, and he looked into the lens, shaking his head and lifting his arm to shoo the photographer away like he used to.

Then Newton smiled, just kidding, and in an arena packed with life, he tipped his head toward his arm and danced.

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