BRENHAM, Tex. — Before Cam Newton won the Heisman Trophy, before he was drafted first over all, before he led the Carolina Panthers to Super Bowl 50, he woke up to mooing. The bovine alarm clocks grazed in a pasture, since built over, situated a deep spiral from his first-floor residence in Building 5 of the College Park Apartments here.
The cows’ stirring roused Newton for mandatory 7 a.m. sign-ins at the Blinn College football offices, before the 8 a.m. English composition and rhetoric course, for which he wrote narrative essays about football, and the practices so intense that games were the easiest part of his week.