Details Emerge On What Tom Brady's Nine-Part Documentary Will Include
BOSTON (CBS) -- When the announcement was made last week that Tom Brady will be featured in a nine-part documentary titled "Man In The Arena," the instant and obvious reaction from the sports world was that the project was created as a copy of Michael Jordan's "The Last Dance." The producer of Brady's project would like to clear that up.
Speaking to Sports Illustrated's Albert Breer, producer Gotham Chopra said that Brady's ESPN documentary will be about chronicling the most successful career of all time by a player still active and involved in the game, unlike with Jordan and his two decades of separation.
"It's not Tom Brady's Last Dance," Chopra told Breer. "It's not that. That may or may not exist 20 years from now, I don't know. There's this sort of immediacy to this. ... The premise [of The Last Dance] was telling stories about the seasons, whereas [Brady's], it does feel a little bit more real time. Tom continues to be an active player. So the idea is, 'O.K., let's talk about these nine seasons, this incredible body of work across 20 years, and how it's still sort of affecting him.' ... Tom's kind of, just when you're talking to him, it's still very fresh, because he's still processing a lot of things that may have happened across a season."
Chopra told Breer that some of the less celebratory matters of Brady's career -- Spygate, Deflategate, his depature from New England, etc. -- will be covered.
"I've never found with Tom where he says, 'Dude, I'm not talking about that.' He's very candid and willing to speak about stuff," Chopra told Breer.
Perhaps most interesting to Patriots fans, the interviews will seek to get inside the mind of Brady during his final three years as a Patriot, going from the low of losing Super Bowl LII, to the high of winning Super Bowl LIII, to the uncertainty in 2019 that ultimately led to the end of his career in New England.
"He was just a very different person. He had a perspective going into [Super Bowl LIII vs. the Rams]. He was reminiscing about the prior season and everything he'd learned across that season, across that Super Bowl, in losing that game. He was like, Trust me, tomorrow, I'll be ready. He'd managed to really almost encode himself with the failure of the prior year, and it had given him some perspective going into this game. And again, it was very different.
"What he told me about that Eagles loss, it was dealing with it as a father, dealing with it as a husband. He was a very different person than with the Giants losses, he had a different perspective that I think poised him for that game. I thought, 'Wow, it's really interesting how a guy who's still at it is learning like that.' Because he's like Jordan, he's incomparable. There's no one else who has that story, has that perspective."