‘Man In The Arena’ Producer Reveals Backstory Behind Documentary Series

The night before Super Bowl LIII, Tom Brady surely was getting in some last-minute preparation for the New England Patriots’ championship clash with the Los Angeles Rams.

As it turns out, the star quarterback got the wheels turning on an off-the-field project that evening, too.

“Man in the Arena,” a nine-part documentary series on Brady’s prolific NFL career, is coming to ESPN some time next year. Gotham Chopra, the series’ producer, recently revealed to Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer that he was summoned to Atlanta by Brady the day before Patriots-Rams to kickstart the project. Chopra apparently was hesitant, as he spent a week in Minnesota the year prior to wrap up “Tom vs. Time” before Brady at the last minute decided to scrap filming ahead of Super Bowl LII.

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But Brady insisted, and Chopra sounds more than pleased with the results.

“He was just a very different person,” Chopra told Breer. “He had a perspective going into that game, 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 (Michael) Jordan, he’s incomparable. There’s no one else who has that story, has that perspective.”

So, what else can we expect from “Man in the Arena”? As Chopra explained to Breer, the origins of “The Patriot Way” will be covered in detail, while both the Spygate and Deflategate scandals will be addressed. We might even get an appearance from Bill Belichick, too.

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