Cam Newton Gets Fined for Giving Children Footballs-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton gets fined $5,512 each time he gives a football to a child in the stands and has paid $253,552 in fines to date for doing it.
The Truth:
Cam Newton has never been fined for giving footballs to children in the stands after scoring touchdowns.
There’s a $5,787 NFL fine for sending a ball into the stands on purpose, but it doesn’t apply to touchdown celebrations. That means Cam Newton doesn’t get fined every time that he gives a kid a football after a touchdown.
The NFL releases a list of all the fines it levies, and just two players had been fined for sending a football into the stands in 2015: A.J. Green and Jordand Matthews. Considering that Cam Newton hands a ball off to a kid in the stands after every rushing touchdown, he would have appeared on that list multiple times if this rumor had been true.
Cam Newton has been known for giving footballs to kids after touchdowns ever since his rookie season in 2011. Newton told the Charlotte Observer that he started the tradition after it was suggested to him by the team’s quarterback coach:
When Newton scored against Washington in a home game Oct. 23, 2011, he still had the ball he scored with in his hand as he began the “Superman” routine. Shula’s voice, as usual, was being piped directly into Newton’s helmet headset – that is a standard NFL routine to allow play calls to get to the quarterback more easily.
Recounted Newton shortly after the game: Shula “says when you celebrate, it’s not a celebration unless you give back. He says, ‘You do all that riffraff, whatever you do, but at the end you give that football to a little kid. You find a little kid.
“So after I did whatever I did,” Newton continued, “I heard somebody (Shula) in my headset saying, ‘Give it to a little kid! Give it to a little kid!’ I looked and there was this kid just gleaming from ear to ear, so I gave it to him.”
Cam Newton has scored many times since then, and he has never been fined for giving a ball to a child afterwards.