What's hard to fathom is that, less than two years ago, all of this was in doubt. In the weeks leading up to the 2011 draft, serious, professional football prognosticators took to the airwaves, warning against taking Newton with the first pick. The Auburn offensive system, they said, was too simple, dumbed down to take advantage of Newton's physical gifts without taxing his—it was implied—dim mental ones. They rehashed the incidents that marred his college career: forced to leave the University of Florida after being found with a stolen laptop (he claimed to have bought it from a fellow student, and charges were eventually dropped); reported to be the subject of an academic cheating investigation; most recently, and seriously, plagued by a cloud of suspicion about how he wound up at Auburn after a year of exile in junior college.

The quarterback showed up at IMG Academy straight from the draft, a copy of the Panthers playbook in his hand and a chip on his shoulder. He spent hours in the classroom under the tutelage of Chris Weinke, himself a onetime Panthers quarterback and now head of the Academy's football program. Weinke claims to have never seen a better work ethic as, day after day, they picked their way through the byzantine language of an NFL offense.

"You've got to understand, it's like trying to teach a guy French," he says. "Not only teaching him French but asking him to speak fluently. And then asking him to speak fluently while a 300-pound man is trying to kill him."

In his first professional game, on the road against the Arizona Cardinals, Newton threw for 422 yards, breaking Peyton Manning's record for a rookie debut. Mission, it was fair to say, _accomplie. _

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How he got here** **is both as simple and as complicated as anybody's passage to age 23. By 8, Newton was four feet eight and almost 100 pounds, a winner at whatever he did. Aware of his middle son's trajectory, Cecil Newton drove him hard.

"I was all about preparation for my son," says Cecil, himself an ex-football player, now a minister, with hawkish eyes and the same severe cheekbones that, in his son, soften into something approaching prettiness. "Not just how far you can throw the football, how athletic you are, but 'Who are you when the lights in the stadium are off? When the band is no longer playing? Who are you, Cam?' "

"He was like my superhero," Newton says. "If something was broke, he could fix it. If I was lost somewhere, he would find me. If I was crying, he could cure it. I knew that if I had my father with me, everything was going to be all right."

For all that, it's easy to understand a young man's exhilaration at being on his own for the first time. "Elated isn't even the right word," Newton says. "It was the first time I could say, 'This is mine.' I'm out here by myself. I've got money from the scholarship. There are females everywhere...." And it's easy, too, to understand the shock a freakishly talented kid might feel upon -finding himself, for the first time, not the best player on the field. The Gators, it happened, already had a quarterback—by the name of Tim Tebow. It was a unique opportunity that, by his own admission, Newton failed to understand.

"If I had said to Tim, 'Man, can we spend some extra time to study the playbook?' he would have done it. I didn't take advantage of what was right in front of me. If I had, maybe his mentality would have hit me sooner," he says. Instead, he whined to friends and coaches. He thought constantly of leaving. "Basically, I was immature and unfocused. I would never, ever make that mistake again."