In 2009, superstar tight end Aaron Hernandez helped the Florida Gators win a national championship. In 2012, Hernandez played in a Super Bowl for the New England Patriots and signed a $40 million contract extension.

But that same year, he was investigated in connection with a double murder. A year later, he shot Alexander Bradley, one of his best friends, in the eye and killed another man, Odin Lloyd. Two years later, Hernandez was convicted of Odin’s murder, and in 2017, Hernandez committed suicide while in prison.

Such are the headlines of Hernandez’s short and violent life and death, the details that extend beyond the die-hard football fan to create an image in popular culture that is hard to shake. While Hernandez clearly had drug problems, committed violent crimes and grown increasingly paranoid, his full story is a complicated one: Hernandez suffered physical abuse in an abusive, dysfunctional family; was sexually abused as a boy; felt forced by society’s constraints to hide his homosexuality; was eaten and spit out by the powers that be in college football; and suffered severe brain damage, resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which likely affected his behavior.

Those nuances and more were revealed and detailed in 2018 by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team, in a series of newspaper articles and a podcast. That was followed by a 2020 Netflix docuseries, “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez.”

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1. Aaron Hernandez in 2009 while playing for Florida. (Dave Martin/Associated Press) 2. In 2015, Hernandez during jury deliberations at his murder trial. (AP pool)

But these days, more Americans are getting their facts from scripted shows than from newsreels, podcasts and documentaries, whether it’s “When They See Us,” Ava DuVernay’s Netflix limited series about the Central Park Five, or the “American Crime Story” retellings of the O.J. Simpson saga and the Gianni Versace murder. Now, the “American Crime Story” production team is expanding with “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” a 10-episode retelling of Hernandez’s life and death based on the Globe’s reporting. The limited series premieres Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET on FX with two episodes and will stream the following day on Hulu.

Brad Simpson, one of the series’ executive producers, says they were tipped off by FX executives Nick Grad and John Landgraf that the podcasts were about to be released, so they read the Globe articles.

“It had that in-depth reporting that we love to have in our shows, and we started developing the series with an eye toward it becoming part of our various franchises about the culture of America,” he says.

Simpson says fellow executive producer Ryan Murphy loved that this was a story about “a person with a fractured identity, like so many of our shows.”

The reporting revealed a story that was “much more heartbreaking and complex than I had imagined,” said Nina Jacobson, another executive producer. “When you think you know a story and then you come across something that’s reported in depth, it really changes how you look at it (and) that always makes me stand up.”

She adds that since football is our national religion, Hernandez’s rise and fall “was not just the story of one person, but a reflection of us as a country.”

Numerous writers were interested in tackling the story, but the producers chose Stuart Zicherman because of his resume — Simpson cites “The Americans” — but also because he’s a passionate football fan who still has the emotional distance to see the damage the game can do to people. Simpson says Zicherman made a compelling pitch about the intersection of celebrity, sports, sexuality and masculinity.

“It’s about character and football comes second, and what makes this story different from a million sports stories is the story about Aaron and his family, the people on his team and the coaches,” he says. “It’s going to be a Shakespearean tragedy with compelling characters at the center.”

Zicherman says he made his initial pitch with a huge reel that, when unfolded, revealed all the twists and turns of the story. “I like to write about stories that people think they know, but they don’t,” he says. “We tend to label people, and Hernandez was a monster, but no one is born a monster, and I wanted to tell that story without forgiving him for what he did.”

Zicherman based his work on the concept of the ‘American Crime Story’, where ‘one crime or event is taken and it becomes about something much larger in American society.’

The series explores toxic masculinity at home and in the locker rooms, how violence on the football field can spill over into everyday life, and how a dysfunctional family can be both a support and a downfall.

Aaron Hernandez, left, plays tight end for the New England Patriots in 2011. After his death, Hernandez was diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

(Elise Amendola/Associated Press)

There’s also the issue of CTE, the brain injury caused by repeated blows to the head. “We’re not saying that CTE turned Aaron into a killer — he was exposed to violence and was prone to violence — but he did become very paranoid and even more short-tempered,” says Zicherman, who notes that Hernandez’s drug use also may have worsened his brain injury.

He tells the story to expose the people and institutions that directly harmed Hernandez or at least failed to “change the narrative” because of their own selfish motives, such as then-Florida coach Urban Meyer, who enticed Hernandez and his family with promises he didn’t keep and then pushed the young man out the door when he became a challenge.

“We turn our athletes into commodities and we don’t always see what’s best for them,” Zicherman said. “The Patriots were also blinded by his talent.

“But I also want the public to see that there is a much bigger picture here and that we are all a little bit complicit – we raise our athletes, pay them a fortune and build them up as heroes,” he says, only to turn on them when things go wrong.

In addition to the big picture, Zicherman focused on Hernandez’s story as someone “trying to find his authentic self,” giving him a common thread as Hernandez bounces from childhood to high school to Florida, the NFL and ultimately the world of drugs and crime that has consumed him. “By the end, he’s gone crazy from all the secrets he’s been keeping.”

Zicherman says the Globe’s Spotlight team not only delivered an accurate and thorough story, they also brought him to Boston “to ask a million questions” and then visited the writers’ room to answer even more questions. “They had talked to everybody and they had done that work, and they were a great resource,” he says.

But journalists and documentarians are limited by what they can demonstrably prove. Zicherman says the series resists overt fictionalization, but they felt it had to go further than the Spotlight series.

Josh Rivera as Aaron Hernandez, who was convicted of the murder of Odin Lloyd, in a scene from “American Sports Story.”

(Eric Liebowitz/FX)

“In the writers’ room we spent a lot of time connecting the dots and trying to emotionally figure out why things are happening and trying to find answers to things,” he says.

The most important thing was to explain why Hernandez killed Lloyd. “It always bothered me that no one knew in all the investigation,” Zicherman says. “It was a clumsy attempt that seemed offhand and didn’t make sense.”

There are theories that Hernandez wanted to keep his sexuality or his involvement in the double murder a secret, but Zicherman believes it had more to do with how low Hernandez had fallen.

“I built the killing spree out of the stew of all the moments throughout the season,” Zicherman says. “Hernandez is hiding so many secrets and mixing it with drug use, and he’s paranoid as hell because he’s taken a lot of hits to the head. It’s all of those things together; I don’t think it was one thing.”

Beyond the scripts, the most important factor would be the casting of Hernandez. Here, the team got lucky. Jacobson produced “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” and watched Josh Rivera perform. “I really saw what he was made of,” she says of Rivera, who previously played Chino in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” “He’s an incredibly refined, down-to-earth, natural, charismatic actor. And he was that in every take.”

But while Jacobson was sold, she also trusted Murphy’s judgment and wanted to let the audition process play out “to see if he would push Ryan to the top, too.”

At the end of the callbacks, after he had matched actors who had been competing for various roles, Murphy turned around and said, “Well, it’s obviously Josh,” so they called him back before he could leave the audition.

Zicherman says that many other actors emphasized the violence and the darkness, but Rivera “played the vulnerability and other emotional components and the inner emotionality. Once we had him, I started taking away dialogue to let moments play out on his face — the other characters could talk and we could watch his broken heart.”

(Rivera, he adds, is also a “joker who loves to sing, dance and joke,” and Hernandez, before things went bad, was the class clown.)

Rivera is in almost every scene. Simpson notes that he had to work out regularly to stay big and that he had to wear makeup for several hours for the tattoos. “He wore it incredibly well and he was always enthusiastic and energetic,” Simpson says. “He was often exhausted, but the fact that he didn’t go into a dark place is a testament to who Josh is as a person. He set the tone for the set.”

Simpson recalls just one day when Rivera was understandably overwhelmed by the task. “We were standing in a muddy field at 3 a.m., reenacting the murder of Odin Lloyd, and there was just a moment where Josh had to stop. He turned to everyone and said, ‘This is just too incredibly sad,'” Simpson says. “I think we were all haunted by that moment.”