Before He Became A Wrestling Legend, Tito Santana Needed A Name | Defectordefector.com The following excerpt is from The Six Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Wrestlemania, a book about the author’s 12,525-mile road trip to reunite with the Iron Sheik and to find the other wrestlers w...
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Mark Cavendish Endured So Much To Break The Tour de France's Most Hallowed Record | Defectordefector.com When Mark Cavendish crossed the line in Saint-Vulbas on Wednesday, the first thing that came to my mind wasn’t any of his previous 34 stage wins at the Tour de France, but rather his crash at the 2018...
Long Rebuilds Are For Prey, Not Predators | Defectordefector.com One year ago, the Nashville Predators needed to change. In the summer of 2023, they’d just missed the playoffs for the first time in nine years and had completed a perfectly neat rise-and-fall arc. Bu...
The 'Lost' Finale Is Good | Defectordefector.com Lost celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and it’s back on Netflix now. As a result, there’s already a whole lot of pontificating and evaluating and reevaluating and episode-ranking from the wid...
Make A 'Grey's Anatomy' Spin-Off But This Time It's Ants | Defectordefector.com What is this, a hospital for ants?
Before Tomato Time Comes Tomato Fever | Defectordefector.com The ripening of tomatoes—their sudden flushing on some warm afternoon, pink or orange or something chartreuse-ish, spreading up from the bottom, toward the stem—is not always a welcome development. Be...
Andy Murray Is Sitting Out His Last Dance | Defectordefector.com Andy Murray, who is retiring from tennis after the Paris Olympics, announced on Tuesday morning that he’s pulling out of Wimbledon’s singles draw. The culprit is—surprise, surprise—an injury. A recent...
Roster Flexibility Is A Flexible Term | Defectordefector.com So let’s review, because the holiday is upon us and we’re not going to spend a lot of time sorting out this particular migraine. LeBron James opted out of the last year of his current contract, which ...
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard's Aces Are A New Nightmare | Defectordefector.com LONDON — While catching some shade near the Wimbledon practice courts a few days before the tournament started, I watched Sebastian Korda take what looked to me like perfect serves. Korda is a twiggy ...
U.S. Soccer Is Damned If It Does | Defectordefector.com Now that the performative rage over the U.S. Men’s National Team’s epic failure in the Copa America has died down, let us consider the comedic possibilities going forward. One, that the suits and boot...
Tadej Pogačar Opens The Tour de France As Pugnacious As Ever | Defectordefector.com Inside the final kilometer of the Col du Galibier, near the end of Stage 4, Tadej Pogačar ripped away from the rapidly shrinking peloton with venomous intent. His attacks always feel inevitable, and e...
Charlotte, The Stingray At The Heart Of Scandal, Has Died | Defectordefector.com The slippery, chaotic, and rumor-filled saga of Charlotte the miraculously pregnant stingray has come to a sad end: Charlotte is dead, as the Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO in Hendersonville, N.C.,...
How I Became An All-Caps Fetishist | Defectordefector.com Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking about pa...
Marketa Vondrousova Is The Forgotten Champion | Defectordefector.com No one wanted Marketa Vondrousova to become a major champion in the first place. In 2023, she was merely Ons Jabeur’s opponent in the Wimbledon final. Jabeur, one of the most likable players on tour, ...
The NHL Quietly Ends Its Punishments For The Blackhawks' Sexual Assault Scandal | Defectordefector.com In a move that the NHL very likely intended to bury under a deluge of free-agent news, the league announced on Monday that it as reinstated former Chicago Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville, former GM ...
The Jets Are Desperate Enough To Enable Aaron Rodgers | Defectordefector.com Aaron Rodgers is back from his mysterious sojourn, an unexcused absence from New York Jets mandatory minicamp for which the team bent over backward to downplay the whole “unexcused” and “mandatory” pa...
Klay Thompson Left It All In Oakland | Defectordefector.com The farther you get from Oakland, the more you understand why Klay Thompson is now a Maverick. Not San Francisco, mind you: San Francisco never really saw the Thompson who was the second chair in the ...
A Noisy Loss Is Still Just A Loss | Defectordefector.com Nothing brings on an impromptu and intense season of recrimination quite like a group-stage exit. Ten days ago, the USMNT opened the Copa America with a 2-0 win over Bolivia and was making travel plan...
Galway Boots Dublin Out Of All-Irelands With Historic Upset | Defectordefector.com Galway used a second half nobody knew they had in ‘em on Saturday to edge dynastic Dublin, 0-17 0-16, in the All-Ireland football quarterfinals before about 50,000 fans at Croke Park. Galway hadn’t b...
The Mets' Pride Night, As Witnessed By Someone Who Cared A Lot About The NHL Draft | Defectordefector.com QUEENS, N.Y. — My high school’s senior honor nights were always held in the auditorium, and kind of like graduation, it was a whole production. We had to have a rehearsal for it, and every student had...
On Touching And Other Forms Of Intimacy | Defectordefector.com In Max Verstappen’s first-ever race in a Red Bull car, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg—former best friends turned famously hateful Formula 1 teammates—took each other out in the very first lap, giftin...
Merry James Wood Day To All Who Celebrate | Defectordefector.com Well now! That was quite a wait, wasn’t it? Sure, it was frustrating, and at times even downright miserable, and we did not always handle our emotions in ways that we can now look back upon with pride...
Jesse "Bam" Rodriguez Is A Little Guy With Big Aspirations | Defectordefector.com Boxing doesn’t respect the little guys. Fans prefer to see mountain-men topple each other with bone-cracking punches over two smaller fighters eating each other’s best shots all night long. But heavyw...
The Crossword, July 1: Crosstown Rivals | Defectordefector.com How can you not be romantic about crosswords? This week’s puzzle was constructed by Darby Ratliff and Will Eisenberg and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our f...
Paul George And The Sixers Have To Make This Work | Defectordefector.com The biggest signing of the NBA offseason happened while everyone was asleep. Hours before the sun rose on Monday, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Paul George is signing a four-year, $212 milli...