It would be a little easier to admire Cam Newton if he wasn’t so relentlessly admiring of his admirable self. The Carolina Panthers quarterback has been introduced fully to the global audience on the Super Bowl stage this week, and this is the impression he has left: He is brilliant and beautiful, and anyone who doesn’t like his bold dancing is a joyless prude, and he may even be the new super-species he claims to be. He also appears to own a new size of ego.

He strolls around with a languid yet self-studied air, uttering pronouncements such as, “Every time I put on an attire, every single morning of my life, it’s a must-win attire.”

Then he shuffles away from the podium in socks and slippers, as if it’s too much trouble to dress properly for something as paltry as a news conference.

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The more Newton talks, the more it becomes evident that he’s not so much a complicated figure as he is a 26-year-old leaping clumsily into celebrity. The thread of his personality seems actually pretty simple: He has yearned to be a football star since he was 7, and everything else is beside the point to him, including all the torturous discussions he has engendered about racial double standards.

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It’s a more than fair point that black quarterbacks have been held to a worn-out trope of white prototype quarterbacks. Why should Newton curb his end zone dabbing and have to be phonily self-deprecating for the sake of comforting old boy standards? “I’m an African American quarterback that scares people because they haven’t seen nothing that they can compare me to,” Newton has said. But in fact, Newton doesn’t seem especially concerned by such thorny issues, what bothers him is being limited by any label at all. “It’s bigger than race,” he says. Apparently his supreme specialness transcends race, and we littles will get that about him in time.

“The truth of the matter is when they see more of me, [I’ll] need not to have to explain myself,” he said. “So I feel as if the more people see and, what am I trying to say, the more that they get me, it becomes easier to digest.”

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Newton has been labeled arrogant not just because of a double standard, but because he actually, well, can be. Up to this point, his supersized projections of his own value have seemed obnoxiously premature. Some of the criticism directed at him has been legitimate and leveled by his peers, who saw him as ambitious and entitled to a fault. His declaration straight out of the draft that he was “an entertainer and an icon,” was followed by a report that his elders at the Pro Bowl found him a diva. He didn’t always play at an especially high level his first couple of seasons, a young quarterback cavorting over mere first downs, when his team trailed by two touchdowns.

“You have to earn the right to be arrogant, or confident,” former quarterback turned NFL Network analyst Kurt Warner says. “ You’re getting a first down and your team is down by 17, and everybody is kind of like, ‘Why is he bringing attention himself in a situation when their team is not doing well?’ And it was just Cam being Cam. But now he’s had great success and played at an extremely high level, and he’s earned the right. Whereas before I don’t know if people felt he had earned that right. A young guy does that, and you go where’s his maturity level? You earn the right to do certain things at this level.”

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But with a 17-1 record and MVP caliber numbers, scoring 45 touchdowns in directing the No. 1 scoring offense in the league, the 6-foot-5 Newton has earned the right to dance the foxtrot with Kleenex boxes on his feet, if that’s what gives him joy. By marrying some polish and hard-practiced accuracy to all that size and dragonfly speed, he has morphed from a pretender into a player of monstrous substance and superiority: He accounted for 76 percent of his team’s yardage.

The NFL celebrates all the children that were possibly results of a hometown's Super Bowl victory in an extended version of the ad that will air during the big game. (NFL)

“He’s got that ‘It’ factor,” Warner says. “He’s got that leadership, big moments aren’t too big for him. . . . When Cam steps into that locker room and that huddle everybody’s chest get a little more puffed out, everybody believes a little bit more that we can get something done. That’s what the great ones have.”

To Newton, all of this is apparently the long-awaited fulfillment of the inevitable. He clearly believes that winning a Super Bowl title is a predictable next step for him: First he won a Heisman Trophy, then a national championship at Auburn and became a No. 1 draft pick. He envisioned this when he was 8.

“I would always write down on a career days, I want to be a football player,” he said in one news conference. “But yet my teacher used to always say, ‘Yeah but you can’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ I remember coming to tears telling her, ‘No, I really want to be a football player.’ ”

[That time Von Miller nearly quit his team]

He was in 10th grade when he went to an all-star youth camp held by Boomer Esiason, who took one look at that physique and the way he could wing the ball 60 yards downfield, and said to him, “Well, in 10 years I’ll see you at the Super Bowl.”

Now that he’s here, Newton speaks with an almost evangelical sense that he represents some nameless, faceless constituency of similar-minded vision-questers. He invokes poets and preachers, and talks about “opening up the door for guys that don’t want to be labeled, that have bigger views.”

What’s most interesting about Newton is that he’s so unafraid to succeed or fail. He talks unapologetically about trying to join the ranks of all-time greats, invoking Michael Jordans and LeBron Jameses, men who got their names by “performing great when their greatness was required, playing in the biggest game,” he says, absolutely nailing the definition of a champion. If there is something really worth admiring about him, it’s that he puts himself so squarely on the spot. His ego would be offensive if it wasn’t accompanied by such a sure sense of responsibility to all that talent.In time, as the success he views as inevitable becomes real, hopefully some of that ego will burn off.

For more by Sally Jenkins, visit washingtonpost.com/jenkins.