Drew Magary is one of the most influential modern sports writers. He rose to prominence at Deadspin, and when its staff resigned en masse after editor Barry Petchesky was fired, he and his colleagues formed Defector in September 2020. The subscription-based site will celebrate its fifth anniversary this fall.
We recently caught up with Magary to ask him about Defector and other topics. He has written for GQ, SFGATE, and is the author of numerous books, including “The Night the Lights Went Out,” which is about his recovery from a traumatic brain injury that left him with hearing loss.
Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Awful Announcing: How’s your health these days?
Drew Magary: “My health is good. I had my accident in 2018, but I never even think about it much anymore. Enough time has passed, and I have much greater worries. I had to worry about my father’s health before he passed away. My mom’s moving to a new house now, so I gotta worry about that. I have to pick my kid up from college. Life has filled in all those gaps where ruminating over what had happened to me used to be. I’m quite used to being a brain-damaged deaf person now. I’m OK.”
What has it been like at Defector?
“It has been a blast because when we started, our initial success was us trading off on ‘Hey, the Deadspin crew is back, and they have their own site.’ But we all realized we’re not going to stay solvent if we keep trying to trade on our origin story as the years go by, cause that stuff fades from memory. Even when Deadspin was at its peak, the goal was always to bring in people who had never read it before or had heard of it before. By then, it was a national brand. But it was not always that way. Certainly not when I started. So we had to start from scratch in terms of being a place that people knew about and wanted to read.”
Why should someone subscribe to Defector?
“If you want to go to a site where the journalists and the writers on staff care very much about the writing and not the backroom politics of it and not, and not the access that we have because we don’t really have any access. And you want us to write the things that you want to read, then that’s Defector. It’s fully self-funded. It’s independent at a time when independent news barely exists, and not even at the blog level, because social media essentially eradicated so much of that late 2000s blogging culture I came up from. It’s a rare bird in that instance.”
What kind of experience do you hope readers get from the site?
“I think it’s very rare to find people like yourself in the media, and I mean this as a reader. When I first found Deadspin in 2006. I was like, ‘Where has this been all my life?’ People are talking about the sh*** I’ve always wanted to talk about. I think that sense of discovery is still very much alive for people who haven’t heard of Defector. It’s the kind of place where you can go and click on a couple of links and know right away whether or not these are your people. And when it turns out that they are your people, that’s a powerful feeling.”
You had some choice words on Mel Kiper Jr. Could you elaborate more on that?
“It’s not that I dislike Mel, because I love Mel, because he’s a sign of draft season. You see Mel on the air, it’s draft time, yay. He’s a good broadcaster. He’s a friendly presence. He takes jokes about his hair in stride. I think most in-the-know football fans know that a lot of times he will arrange his board depending upon his relationships with agents or with people behind the scenes who want their clients or their kids’ stock boosted. He was charming to me because he was in that Tarantino mold of fanboys made good, who managed to cross over to the other side because they had worked so hard and were so talented. That carried Mel through the past 50 years.”
What has changed regarding Kiper over the years?
“He has since been surpassed in terms of knowledge. I don’t find his board trustworthy. I find it entertaining because it’s a mock draft. It’s fun to look at mock drafts. But as a resource, I don’t find him all that reliable anymore. I’d rather go to Mike Tanier or check PFF grades, or because I follow the Vikings, I’d rather hear from the Vikings beat writers, like Matthew Coller and Alec Lewis. So, I think it’s hard for me to take a lot of what Mel says seriously about the draft. But I didn’t care about that in previous years because it was entertainment. He got so horny for Shedeur (Sanders) this whole draft that he just wouldn’t shut the **** up about it.”
Can you give me an example of someone getting mad because you made fun of them?
“Peter King got mad at me once. I’m on friendly terms with Peter now, but we were making fun of him every weekend at Kissing Suzy Kolber. He sent me an email once. He’s a mensch, always a nice guy. It was like, ‘Hey, maybe you can go easy on me this week’ or something like that, and then I posted it or said that ‘Peter King emailed me and told me to go easy on him this week, but f*** that. Then Peter was like, ‘Hey man, I was emailing you off the record.’ Peter had a point. He got even with me at the 2018 Deadspin Awards because he got to pour beer all over me.”
What are your thoughts on Bill Belichick these days?
“I can’t predict the dynamics of a 73-year-old man dating someone 50 years younger than him. As for the football part, Belichick has never coached in college football. He brought a lot of his failed cronies with him. These are people who seem to operate very well when they are working for Belichick, but in no other capacity. I wonder if UNC already has buyer’s remorse and is not thrilled with what’s going on, particularly right now, because it’s May. We shouldn’t be hearing from Bill Belichick right now. He should be studying tape somewhere.”
What’s your next book about?
“That’s top secret for now because if it turns out to be a piece of s*** halfway through, I’ll just bail on it. I’ll write something else. All I’ve got is a prologue written right now. The outline is complete, but things can always change. I don’t want to paint myself in a corner, and I don’t want to promise pages, because then you’ll get in George R.R. Martin trouble like that.”
What kind of influence did your late father have on your career?
“He never tried to dissuade me from being a writer. How many parents are like, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very practical. Are you sure you don’t want to be a restaurant manager instead?’ They crush your dreams because of reality. My old man never did that. He was never like, ‘Hey, Drew, you’re going to be the greatest writer in the world.’ I was always like, ‘Hey, I want to do this.’ He was like, ‘Cool.’ That was a big deal.”