Super Bowl 50 is a mere two days away and it’s shaping up to be a battle between the NFL’s past vs. the league’s future.
Future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning will be taking on presumptive MVP and youngster Cam Newton. But long before Newton was the NFL’s darling or the NCAA’s Heisman Trophy winner, he was a lost 20-year-old quarterback that had been dismissed from Florida University because of an arrest for stealing a laptop and rumors of potential academic issues involving cheating.
After he left Florida, he came to Texas. More specifically: Brenham, Texas, to a little East Texas school called Blinn College. He came here to get his life together and to concentrate on becoming the football star he knew he could be.
Amy Winningham was Newton’s English professor at the time. She says in the beginning, she had no idea she would be instructing the star athlete.
“We were never told beforehand to expect this really high-profile individual,” Winningham says. “When he came to Blinn, he was just a student who was on my roster in my class. And I’ve always found that very commendable.”
Even throughout the semester, Winningham says Newton never let on that he was different from any other student in her class.
“He was very low-profile,” she says. “He was just very kind, polite, did his work, there was never anything that made me think, ‘Who is this guy? Something’s a little different or he’s special in any way.'”
Listen to the full interview in the audio player above.