A lost Reggie White interview comes to light in a new ‘30 for 30′ documentary

“On Sundays, you could hear what was happening — hear a roar, and then run back in, see the TV, and see what just happened.”

Growing up in Woodbury, N.J., filmmaker Ken Rodgers says he could hear the sounds of Veterans Stadium on game days from his house, which was about 10 miles away.

Years later, near the start of his long career with Mount Laurel, N.J.-based NFL Films, Rodgers found himself working on a project that concerned one of the men most responsible for those roars.

In October 2004, famed Philadelphia football writer (at the Daily News, among other publications) Ray Didinger sat down for an interview with Eagles legend Reggie White for a planned NFL Films special about the relationship between football and religious faith. White had retired four years earlier and had largely been out of the public eye since.

White, who became an ordained minister when he was a teenager, had long been outspoken about his Christian faith — from the pulpit to media interviews — and had often courted controversy. But in the interview with Didinger, the footballer revealed that he had undergone something of a religious rethinking. He had been studying Hebrew and had begun to question some of the things he had been taught previously.

In December 2004, Reggie White died of arrhythmia, at the age of 43, a day after Christmas and two months after the Didinger interview. Like two other Philadelphia sports legends, Kobe Bryant and Roy Halladay, White did not live to see his own Hall of Fame induction, which took place in 2006.

Didinger’s interview with White never aired. But Rodgers often thought back to that interview with the man who arrived in Philadelphia as an Eagle when Rodgers was 11, going on to become part of the legendary defense under coach Buddy Ryan. White, considered one of the greatest defensive players in the history of the league, was the leader of that defense and remains the Eagles’ all-time leader in sacks. His #92 is among only nine numbers retired by the team.

Now, the interview is finally seeing the light of day, as part of a new documentary called Minister of Defense, which debuts tonight on ESPN, as part of the 30 for 30 series. The film was produced in conjunction with NFL Films.

Minister of Defense was directed by Rodgers and Courtland Bragg, who is a South Jersey native, having grown up in Sicklerville. The documentary follows White’s life and career, including a lengthy section on his time with the Eagles in the 1980s. After a record-breaking career in Philadelphia, White left the team as a free agent in 1993 — a right that NFL players gained for the first time as a result of a lawsuit in which White was a plaintiff.

“Philly fans, they love my father — they are adamant that he is forever an Eagle,” White’s son, Jeremy White, says in the film. “I appreciate that they are still so possessive of my father because it reminds me how deeply they appreciated him, not only as a football player but as a human being.”

Several Eagles luminaries including 1980s quarterback Randall Cunningham, appear in the film. Cunningham, also an ordained minister, credits White with leading him to Christianity after Cunningham “wasn’t living right.” We also see the famous moment when White, addressing a Billy Graham Crusade at Veterans Stadium in 1992, tearfully informed the crowd that his teammate, Jerome Brown, had been killed in a car crash earlier that day.

» READ MORE: Ranking the 50 greatest Eagles players of all time

But beyond football, this is a rare mainstream sports documentary that is also about religious faith. Bragg is the son of a preacher and is attuned to the film’s religious themes. Most of the Philadelphia interviews were shot at Center City’s First Unitarian Church, with interview subjects sitting in the pews.

In the film, White preaches in church, as well as in the locker room. More controversially, he also frequently railed against homosexuality and, in a speech to the Wisconsin State Legislature during his time with the Green Bay Packers, ran through a series of insulting racial stereotypes. This type of talk cost White both endorsement deals and a shot at a broadcasting career.

So it’s somewhat surprising to see White, in the interview from 2004, sound a very different note.

He concluded that “some things that have been taught, based on how we believe, based on what I used to believe. When I read the Hebrew scripture, it tells me something a whole lot different from what I’ve been taught.”

In the Didinger interview, he backed away from his previous assertions that God had told him to sign with the Packers in 1993.

At the end of his life, Bragg said, White remained a “believer” and while he did not, in the interview, explicitly disavow his earlier comments about gay people, the filmmakers believe that he may very well have been on that path.

“There was such a change in his thinking … that you shouldn’t judge people,” Bragg said.

“He was as immersed in his religion as he had ever been,” Didinger says in the film, “he was just going about it in a different way.”

The filmmakers are clear that the 2004 interview showed a spiritual journey that was not yet finished — and one that White would sadly not live to complete.

“He hadn’t yet resolved everything that he was going through then,” Rodgers said of White. “He was very much in a process. And we captured him in this process, where he had not yet come to conclusions.”

“Minister of Defense” debuts on ESPN at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 13, and will be available to stream afterward on ESPN+.