Three days before the Super Bowl, Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman, former linebacker Willie McGinest, and filmmaker Gotham Chopra sat on the bright stage of a dark theater in Minneapolis. ESPN reporter Jeff Darlington was interviewing the panel members about their friend, colleague, and film subject, Tom Brady, before an advance screening of the fifth episode of Tom vs. Time. The Facebook Watch-funded series is the brainchild of Chopra, who embedded with Brady for a year to direct and produce six 15-minute installments marketed as a behind-the-scenes look at the quarterback’s highly scrutinized life.
Tom Brady does not need the media
From the series ‘Tom vs. Time’ to his new media company, Brady isn’t trusting anyone but himself with his story.
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Brady himself wasn’t in the room, but he loomed large: The four men sat underneath a huge, Facebook blue-tinted projection of his face. Brady’s eyes — stern, narrowed — and his chin — held up high — seemed to dare the audience to defy the man.
Edelman was telling a story from 2009, the first year he and Brady played together. It was a Stars, They’re Just Like Us! moment, an anecdote meant to show that the big brother-like figure hanging above Edelman’s head was *wink* one of the guys.
“I’m a millennial,” Edelman said. “So I’d be on Facebook, this, that, and every time [Brady] walked by, he’d be like ‘Get off your phone! Get in your playbook!’ And now? Now? He’s Mr. Social Media. I’m just saying, where’d it come from? Where’d it come from?”
Since joining Facebook in August of 2011 — and Instagram merely a year ago — Brady has amassed one of the largest followings of any athlete alive. According to Facebook’s director of sports programming, Dan Reed, Brady has an online command larger than that of 26 NFL teams.
“You’re building a community, and you are controlling your narrative, and you’re engaging with your fans,” Reed told me after the screening. “He’s grown a media distribution channel for himself.”
He has. And he’s made it official: Two weeks after I spoke to Reed and Chopra in the basement of that Minneapolis theater, Brady, Chopra, and Michael Strahan announced that they’re starting their own media company called The Religion of Sports. Brady has gone from having a fake newspaper called the TB Times to being a partner in a real content business.
Athletes no longer need the media to get their messages out. In fact, reporters and networks are often positioned as the enemy. In Tom vs. Time, Chopra relies heavily on audio pulled from various Boston radio stations that he’s placed over shots of Brady getting out of his car or undergoing vigorous leg-rubbing treatment with his controversial trainer Alex Guerrero.
“In classic storytelling you need, you know, an antagonist,” Chopra said when I asked him about the artistic choice to overlay scenes with audio from media outlets. “With Tom, it’s like, that’s his noise. There’s constantly noise and there’s doubters. I don’t think it’s particularly personal; it’s just sort of what fuels the sports industry in some way. Talk radio, sports radio.”
Talk radio in Boston is particularly vicious, but Brady has done a great job of controlling his narrative in his local market. Radio hosts in the area defend him constantly and go after reporters who dare question his invincibility or that of the Patriots. They occasionally slip up internally, such as when a WEEI commentator called Brady’s daughter a “pissant” before Super Bowl LII. Brady canceled his interviews with the station after that. He doesn’t need them nearly as much as they — Brady’s staunchest defenders — need him.
Tom vs. Time gives the fans what they want to watch. This isn’t a documentary, and Chopra isn’t a documentarian. He calls himself Brady’s friend, and he wears the label proudly.
“I don’t look at myself as a reporter,” he said. “I look at myself as a partner. This was never about decoding him. This was sitting with him and understanding what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it, why he wanted to do it now, and what parts of himself he wanted to share. And that’s what I do. I feel more like a collaborator than someone who’s coming from the outside in.”
The “why now?” isn’t hard to figure out. On top of controlling what fans see of him, Brady is setting himself up for a post-playing career, one in which his wellness company, TB12, features prominently. Facebook even has a nifty algorithm that populates TB12 ads in your feed after you watch episodes of Tom vs. Time.
As a piece of art, the series is fine. It’s a beautifully shot, well-edited, somewhat engaging piece of propaganda that Patriots fans will want to inject into their veins. Brady reveals just enough — he kept his Deflategate suspension letter! — to be interesting, but nothing actually new or particularly illuminating. His image of being a competitor first, a family man second, and anything else third is reinforced throughout.
The more telling moments come when his wife, Gisele Bundchen, is on screen, and we get hints of the friction in their relationship that are related to football vs. family. But even that is calculated: Brady repeats, over and over, that football is his first love. That’s what he wants you to know. Chopra relays the message. The most controversial thing to come out of the film is a scene in which Brady kisses his son in a way that some on social media found creepy.
The one thing Brady can’t always control about his football story is what happens in it. The Patriots weren’t supposed to lose the Super Bowl. But he can take the reins on how his tale is told. It’s unlikely that the final episode of Tom vs. Time will reveal much more besides how disappointed Brady is and how determined he is to prove himself, once again, next season. Read the message Chopra posted on Facebook after he finished interviewing Brady for Episode 6:
For curious minds, Tom was both reflective and upbeat, very present and disappointed in last Sunday’s loss, while also gracious toward the Eagles for their impressive victory and already unpacking everything to find the lesson in it. As a fan, I can say I got some great closure and I hope Tom did too in just talking about it. I can tell he’s burning up still on the inside. But I am also reminded why the guy is the GOAT and it’s all gonna be OK. So, Chapter 6 — ‘Coming Soon!’”
As Chopra said, the series doesn’t exist to decode or reveal. For what it is — a Tom Brady infomercial — it’s perfect. Brady is smart to harness the channels he can. Who wouldn’t in his position? The thing about a good reporter is that she is not your friend. A reporter can observe. She can quote you saying you’re fine, only to tell the reader that you grimaced right after you said that. A friend or a social media manager can cut that expression out of the shot.
Both the downside and the upside of being the subject of an objective piece is vulnerability. When you tell your own story, you’re in charge of the information and you can oversee its flow. But you lose the moments of surprise that actually let readers or viewers see who you are without your own filter. Those glimpses can bring out a dose of honesty and rawness that a glossy story you’ve told about yourself usually won’t.
This is not to say that what athletes divulge about themselves is not who they are. I have no doubt that the version of Brady we see in Tom vs. Time is authentic in its own way. The films do humanize him to a certain extent. He is driven, he is impressive, and he can be funny. But that’s all we’re going to get. He’s still the star reporter, subject, and editor-in-chief of The TB Times. And it’s the only paper he needs.
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