How Kobe Bryant Helped Religion of Sports Cofounder Gotham Chopra Discover His Passion
As a first-generation American born and raised in New England, Gotham Chopra was always obsessed with two things: storytelling and sports.
“For me, sports in Boston was just an obsession. It was a way of becoming American,” the Religion of Sports cofounder told TheWrap for this week’s Office With a View. “As I grew up, I was just one of those kids who loved stories, who got obsessed with cameras and I was a writer by background.” (It probably didn’t hurt that his father is noted author Deepak Chopra.)
Chopra’s first job out of college was a Channel One reporter covering international conflict, which allowed him to travel to Chechnya, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Iran and Iraq. But he yearned to have a career that had the ability to unite sports and storytelling.
After meeting Kobe Bryant, he realized he could launch his own business combining his two passions. The pair, who initially met through friends, collaborated on the 2015 Showtime documentary “Muse,” which explores the late basketball icon’s mentorships, allies and rivalries that shaped his career.
“I met Kobe Bryant probably now about a decade ago. And Kobe was a great, iconic, one of the best-ever basketball players but he was really a storyteller. That’s what he used to always say: ‘I’m an artist, the basketball court is just my canvas.’ And so despite the fact that I’m a huge Celtics fan and he was a Laker icon, we struck up a great friendship,” Chopra said.
Hearing that, he said, was the moment where he realized “these two things can live together.” With the ambition to build that idea into something bigger, he went on to start Religion of Sports, a TV production company, with Tom Brady and Michael Strahan a couple of years later.
Chopra said the company’s name came from his spirituality-infused upbringing.
“I grew up going to Fenway Park. The Red Sox were cursed at the time, Fenway was a cathedral in the middle of Boston,” he said. “So all of these things we talk about in spiritual traditions actually exist in sports.”
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What are some of the major lessons you’ve learned in your career?
I worked with tons of athletes. Tom [Brady], one of my cofounders, says “It’s not the seven Super Bowls that I won, it’s the three Super Bowls that I lost that I learned the most from.” Even the best players in the history of baseball strike out six out of 10 times, seven out of 10 times, right? But what do you learn? How do you come back? How can you be resilient? Sports is just full of these lessons.
You can be the greatest in the world but if you don’t surround yourself with great teammates, it doesn’t matter. Kobe Bryant was the one who [told me], “Put in the work. You can be gifted, you can be extremely talented. But if you’re not in the gym outworking everybody, practicing, figuring out your strengths and weaknesses, it doesn’t matter.”
The other thing I would say learning from sports is that you’ve got to be agile, you’ve got to adapt to the circumstances. Nobody can plan for a pandemic, nobody can plan for this media downturn — you certainly don’t plan for that when you’re building a business plan, and yet you have to adapt. It’s adapt or die, and I think we’re all going through that right now in this current marketplace.
What is your advice for young people looking to break into the industry?
As a storyteller, we’re always like, “What’s the bigger picture?” And so for me, the advice I give to people is to focus on that storytelling. It’s a craft and like any skill you have to learn and you have to study. The thing I love about sports is it’s mythic, it’s archetypal. At the end of the day, sports is about how I can be the best version of myself, but it’s also about conflict and heroes and villains and all the things that makes for great storytelling.
We live in a time when the tools are all accessible. We all carry cameras in our pockets and we all have access to social media platforms so we can get our content out there. But it goes back to putting in the actual hours to learn about great storytelling.
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What strikes you most about how the industry landscape has changed?
The ground beneath our feet is constantly changing and we’ve gone through from long-form to short-form to mid-form. There was, for a minute, the Quibis and Facebook Watches and stuff like that to, obviously, now the TikTok generation. So the platforms keep changing. The trends keep on changing. Consumer habits.
I’m wary of getting too caught up in what the data say. I think that’s all really important but you have to retreat back into what makes a great story, what am I really inspired by, what touches people at an archetypal level, at an intuitive level. And that’s where we spend a lot of time and that’s somewhat independent of the platform. Storytelling has been around since the beginning of time. It’ll be here for all eternity. Technology and data will change the way we think about it in some ways, but it’s never going away.
What is a common industry problem that you feel is unaddressed right now?
I do think we’ve become data-obsessive. The algorithm in some way dictates how we generate content. I think there’s danger in that. Going back to story boot camp is, to me, the solution: really understanding the basics of great storytelling.
Are there any trends you’re looking at?
Athletes are all forming their own production and media companies and that is something that we are figuring out and navigating. We’re not a Tom Brady or Michael Strahan production company, but we’re a media company with them as cofounders. There’s a nuance to that.
Building a business is problem-solving. It’s just a never-ending series of problems that you’re in the trench solving for. And I always say the most valuable asset of our company is our people, because you can build a business plan and at the end of the day, whatever is in your business plan is not going to come true the way you plan for it. Circumstances change and you have to adapt with it. So who’s doing that with you?
How is Religion of Sports preparing itself for the uncertainty associated with situations like the WGA strike?
Historically our business has primarily been unscripted. I’m not part of the writers’ or directors’ guild, but scripted is part of our future. We’ve been working on it for a while. So now it’s impacting us certainly in how we think about growth.
As I said before, I’m wary of getting too caught up in the trends. We just delivered “McGregor Forever.” It took us three and a half years to produce. Whatever trend was going on three and a half years ago, it’s different now. You just can’t plan for it.
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
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