This is part three of the three part series with Jake Newton and his struggles he has faced over his career and we appreciate him sending us the article for posting.

This version of Newton was strong, hardworking, disciplined and an open book who was at peace discussing all the problems he’d overcome.

“I’ve honestly never met a guy that has faced more adversity than this guy,” Miner Barron said. “It’s mind-blowing season after season after season. Sometimes I just want to ask him, ‘Jake, are you OK? Are you sure you’re good? Dude, I’ll fly out there, and then we’ll hang out and just talk about it.’ But he’s like, ‘No, Alex, I’m good.’ It’s the internal changes that he’s making. The best way to put it is, he’s becoming a veteran in life.”

Miner Barron describes Newton as an amazing and dedicated dad who becomes a little kid when he’s around his son and daughter.

He’s constantly hilarious, Miner Barron adds, a sunny ball of energy, a guy who “never wears a shirt for some reason” and will call in the middle of the night just to catch up.

“He just operates on a whole other level,” Miner Barron said. “I think he wakes up at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. I’m on the West Coast, so it’s like 1:00 in the morning. He’ll call me and say, ‘What are you doing, buddy?’ ‘I’m sleeping, man. What about you?’ He goes, ‘You know, just getting the day started. Meditated for about two hours already.’ ”

Newton taught Miner Barron a key lesson he still carries with him: a metaphor describing the catastrophic events in one’s life as cars on a train.

It goes: if you try to involve yourself, or hop onto the moving train, you’re going to get hurt. So you’re better off being a stoic bystander, watching the cars fly by, waiting to react when the time is right.

Miner Barron used lesson that to get through a tough year in the German DEL’s second tier in which he didn’t feel like he was meshing with his team.

Having learned to love himself and process everything in his life differently, Newton has been able to revisit his nightmarish childhood. 

He still has pause whenever he has to leave his kids with a babysitter, but he’s working on building up more trust in other people. He speaks about his former tormentor with a degree of forgiveness.

There was “some interaction” years back, Newton explains, a negative encounter after his ex-wife reached out to the cousin, but Newton has changed so much since then that he’d be open to a do-over.

“I’ve got images in my mind, I’ve got sights, I’ve got sounds, I’ve got taste, all right here,” he said. “But I can think about all those things. I can have all of them right here in my mind, and there’s no emotional trigger that follows. There’s no pain. 

There’s no sadness. There’s no anger.

“All I think about when I think about him is, I’d love to meet him today. Give him a hug, shake his hand and have a conversation with him. Not from a place of resentment whatsoever, but from pure curiosity of wanting to know how he’s doing, because it also happened to him. He was sexually abused himself. And so, through that, I know he was in pain as well. Even though he may have known what he was doing to me was wrong, he probably viewed it as normal behavior, because it was something that was done to him, and most likely the person who did it to him had it done to them.”

Newton endured a hell few people can ever imagine. Now he’s reached a level of enlightenment and forgiveness few people could ever achieve. 

He spent a life feeling like the weakest person every time he stepped on the ice. Now Newton is the strongest person, inside and out, wherever he goes.

Thanks to Jake for sending this over to us for reprint letting us know that life throws many hurdles at us that we have to overcome to achieve success.

This is an edited version of a story that appeared in The Hockey News 2020 Inspiration Issue.