Cam Newton explains infamous Super Bowl news conference

Let’s get this out of the way: In almost every instance, you don’t care how an athlete or coach treats the media in a news conference. And that’s fine.

Let’s also admit that the extended vitriol over Cam Newton’s post-Super Bowl news conference is just a good excuse to rip the Carolina Panthers quarterback. Nobody cared before or since if players were cooperative in a postgame interview, and nobody will care in the future if a player is rude to reporters. But all of a sudden on Super Bowl Sunday you cared deeply that Newton was short with his answers and left the news conference abruptly. Sure.

But it won’t die. A post I wrote last week about Newton stopping to play with seventh graders at a school generated plenty of comments about that infamous news conference. Sigh. So Newton felt the need to explain what happened in that nearly three-month-old interview, and offer a bit of an apology in an interview with Ebony magazine, although this is probably the first time someone has had to answer for being short in an interview.

“The truth is, I represent something way bigger than myself,” Newton told Ebony, via ESPN.com. “I’m doing it for [my fans and family] and I felt like I let them down.”

Newton, who dug in and made everyone angrier with his “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser” line a couple days after the Super Bowl, told Ebony he wasn’t ready to talk, and more time would have helped. Everyone since then has pointed out every athlete who has politely answered questions after a loss and compared it to Newton, whether it was the North Carolina basketball team after the NCAA championship or Jordan Spieth after unraveling at the final round of the Masters. While there is a bit of validity to that, there’s also validity in Newton saying that each situation is different.

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“Who is anyone to tell me, ‘Man, it’s just an interview,'” Newton told Ebony, according to ESPN.com. “You haven’t been in that situation. You didn’t have millions of people watching you. Your heart wasn’t pumping [with] the embarrassment or the anxiety of the stress of dealing with that type of game.”

This story won’t die here of course, not with people who like to criticize Newton needing something as meaningless as a postgame interview to use as ammunition against him. But Newton expressed some regret, which is a shift from what he has said before.

Never before has an athlete’s reaction to media questions been such a controversial issue. Savor it, because that will never happen again, unless it involves Newton and people decide that’s their new reason to rip him.

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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab