Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking gambling, World Cup loyalties, griddles, window seat etiquette, and more.
Your letters:
Capn Po:
I don't understand what's going on with Brendan Sorsby. The NCAA has banned him because he bet on his own team. The NFL's response seems to be, “Hey, we're holding a special draft, just sign up so one of our teams can make you the face of the franchise.” What? He bet on his own team! Am I out of touch or is this nuts?
Let’s catch other readers up before I get to your question. Brendan Sorsby is the Texas Tech QB who is on the verge of being banned by the NCAA for the upcoming season for placing bets, occasionally on his own team, throughout his entire college career at Indiana, Cincinnati, and now Tech. More than that, Sorsby suffers from severe gambling addiction, as outlined here:
Sources who have reviewed the betting data told On3 that, dating back to 2022, Sorsby placed more than 10,000 wagers and at one point averaged 20 bets per day. The quarterback placed bets across multiple states, using a range of gambling apps.
A case like Sorsby’s is the inevitable byproduct of the legalization and cultural embrace of sports gambling. The networks are in on the racket, as are the pro leagues, as is the college football industrial complex. The sport is so bought in on gambling that Texas Tech doesn't even see a problem with having a gambling addict play quarterback for them. In fact, school president Lawrence Schovanec released a public letter arguing that the best way to cure Sorsby's illness might be for him to keep playing for the Red Raiders. From CBS Sports:
"I do believe that there should be consequences, but it's my opinion that he shouldn't be penalized for the rest of this year of his whole career," McGuire said. "I think when you look at what has been put out, he's been really transparent and honest with us, he's got a serious program, and I think the best place to get help is him being at Texas Tech and able to play."
That sums it up, doesn’t it? Gambling's parasitic hold on sports has become so strong that the words "point-shaving scandal" don't even seem to have entered a university president's head when considering the possibility of a confirmed addict playing the most important position on the field.
Tech gives even less of a shit about Sorsby's illness than they do the integrity of the game. They just want him on the field, and Sorsby wants to keep playing so that he can pay off the bazillion dollars in debt he presumably owes to the online sports books. Does ESPN give a shit about the guy? No, because the network makes hundreds of millions of dollars directly from its multi-year “collaboration,” to use network head Jimmy Pitaro’s phrasing, with DraftKings. That’s how you end up with permanently awkward coverage of Sorsby across every major outlet. In that context, the NFL is arguably the least culpable party in this whole thing.
But that’s only because they haven’t gotten their hands on Sorsby yet. Should a judge in Lubbock side with the NCAA on Sorsby’s playing status, he could enter the NFL’s supplemental draft, the rules of which I have never fully understood. All I know is that the Giants once landed Dave Brown in the supplemental draft, which bodes poorly for any current team tempted to stash Sorsby on their 2026 roster. Just to answer the question from our reader above, the supplemental draft has always existed. The NFL didn’t conjure it out of thin air this month just to accommodate Sorsby, because the NFL has always had mechanisms in place to accommodate its more dubious prospects … like Dave Brown!
Therefore, it’s not especially nuts that a team like the Jets might try to land Sorsby a few days from now. It’s very much fitting with these nutty times we live in. And if Sorsby gets caught betting on his own NFL team—I can’t believe Tech’s rehab program failed him!—that too wouldn’t be an outlier in the crazy department. NBA slob Terry Rozier got paid $100,000 to take a dive, man. This shit is endemic across every league, every major conference, every TV network. There will be more Sorsbys in the future, and all of their cases will end up downplayed by those who continue to profit from the casino-ization of America. None of the guilty parties here will care until they’re forced to by law. A tut-tutting op-ed from me certainly won’t change anything.
Andrew:
I'm thinking of moving on from my gas grill to become a griddle man. I will keep my ceramic charcoal grill of course, so I can still smoke stuff. But then I’ll get a griddle so that I can scrape and smash and season while pretending Guy Fieri is drooling on my shoulder. What say you? Are griddles just trendy and stupid? Are they the air fryer of the patio? Will I hate it after a couple summers?
I have never had a griddle on my patio, so I can’t give you a decent answer. I did once have a grill with a burner on its flank, so that you could heat up a basting sauce while you cooked up a brisket or whatever. I also once owned a grill that had a little searing bar under the far side of the grate. Do you know how many times I used those little accessories? Never. I never bothered when I could just do all of that other shit in my kitchen instead. I bet the same level of indifference awaits you, amigo.
That doesn’t mean I’m griddle-averse. Quite the contrary. When I was growing up in Minnesota, our house had an indoor Jenn-Air griddle that my parents used to cook on. They loved it so much that they had a griddle installed in their new kitchen when we moved to a new state. And my fondest memory of college was the manned griddle in Colby’s biggest dining hall. You could get eggs made to order for breakfast, and burgers and chicken sandwiches made to order during the other meal periods. It fucking rocked. Says a lot about me that the best time I had in college was eating grilled chicken for lunch, but there you have it.
So you better believe that I have entertained the idea of having my own griddle to cook up split hot dogs or fry up a mess of hash browns. I could just buy a griddle pan (from Williams Sonoma!) if I felt like it. And yet, I’ve never purchased one. This is almost certainly out of laziness, but it also might be because I prefer my griddled food to be cooked by someone else, preferably a surly Greek fella working behind the counter at a New York City diner. Oh, Stavros … Oh Stavros, your banana pancakes are so crispy and delicious at 2:00 a.m.
Actually Andrew, go ahead and buy that griddle for your patio and make me something with it. I’m hungry now.
Jeff:
How many more World War II movies can there possibly be? Apparently there's a new one about D-Day with Brendan Frasier? Hasn't that well run dry by now? How are we not bored by more WW2 content yet?
It’s the last war that America won, and where America was the good guys. That’s why World War II movies will always be catnip to boomers. Those movies portray the America those old fogies dream about, rather than the actual joke of a country that we all currently reside in. We’ve got a guy in the Oval Office now speaking in refrigerator magnet slogans. It’s pathetic.
The good news here is that the boomer generation is dying off as we speak, and subsequent generations like mine are only so interested in World War II nostalgia porn. I broke down in tears at the end of Saving Private Ryan, so I’m an established sap for this kind of shit. But that movie is 27 years old now, and I can’t get it up for a zillionth version of it. So apologies to Brendan Fraser and the rest of the cast of Pressure (Andrew Scott! Kerry Condon! Holy shit!), but when you’re pitching me on a movie about the weather forecasting for D-Day, I’d rather just think about buying a griddle instead.
Besides, I was raised on Vietnam flicks anyway. Gimme more movies about shit wars where America fucks up over and over again, please. That’s the America I know best.
Barry:
I work in tech. Shit blows up constantly. When it does, one of the aspects of my job is finding an RCA or root cause analysis. Anyway, you mentioned your stroke having an unknown cause. I'm not allowed to settle on "unknown" at work, and if something unknown happens in my personal life, I cannot rest until I've researched it. So my question is ... how much does the unknown factor weigh on you? I think I'd lose sleep because I'd assume I'm one undocumented mistake away from falling asleep and never waking up. Does that happen to you? Are you fucking terrified?
I am not. I beat that stroke, didn’t I? If I can survive that particular bolt of lightning, then that makes me invincible. Invincible, I tell you! TRY TO STOP ME, GOD!
[an airplane falls out of the sky and lands on my head while also somehow taking out the entire current Minnesota Vikings roster]
Anyway, I never cared all that much about why I suffered a sudden brain hemorrhage in 2018. In the immediate aftermath of my accident, I only cared about getting better. And now that I’ve recovered, I only care about what I’m going to do with my life going forward. Dwelling on the past is a waste of my time, especially when more qualified people (doctors) couldn’t find a decent explanation for it. For the most part, I’ve done all I can to mitigate the odds of another stroke, most notably quitting booze. The rest is out of my control, and I accept that. Life is better that way.
There is one thing that occasionally revisits my mind. When I was conducting interviews for The Night The Lights Went Out, the man who operated on me, Dr. John Caridi, told me this:
“Every fiber of my being believes that this was not spontaneous. Something happened.”
Ominous, yeah? Sometimes I think about him telling me that and wonder if I was assaulted that night. It’s possible, I suppose. I was alone when I collapsed, and I have no memory of the incident at all. So someone could have ambushed me while I was going to take a piss. But if they did, I’ll never know, and I accept that. Besides, I survived their best shot anyway. So I dare you to come at me again, Aaron Rodgers. King Kong ain’t got shit on me.
Matthew:
I recently got so high I remembered that umps and refs are human beings who are supposed to be, by definition, the best at what they do. After getting tired of online discourse about what the hardest thing in sports is, my question is… what is the hardest thing to do in professional sports from the perspective of the referee/umpire? I believe it’s calling balls and strikes.
It’s being a hockey ref and skating up and down the ice for 60 minutes. The ability of any game official to see a play happen at game speed and instantly recognize what’s happened is genuinely impressive, but to do it while skating a fucking marathon is next level. I’d be dead on the ice within five minutes. I’d also be a terrible home plate ump because I’d flinch at every single pitch thrown. But at least I’d be standing still, and at least ABS could bail me out. But the endless skating job is harder. I bet those guys have thighs like oaks.
HALFTIME!
Stephen:
The '94 World Cup was a big thing for me, an eight-year-old sports fan. I still remember Eric Wynalda's free-kick equalizer against Switzerland and believing the USMNT could beat Brazil in the round of 16. It was the first time I remember soccer being something I could see on TV and obsess over, and I did. The USMNT was my first love, later to be joined by the USWNT and Arsenal. A litany of highs from the women and mostly lows from the men followed. But as we're getting toward kickoff of this World Cup, Trump been rattling around in my mind. Are we, the USMNTs supporters, complicit if we fill the stadiums or wave and wear the stars and stripes? Part of me wants to say that we shouldn't let Trump take this from us. Part of me knows that I haven't always had charitable thoughts for the Germans who rooted for German athletes at the Berlin Olympics or the Argentines who rooted for their countrymen in 1978. What are our collective responsibilities when we're the ones doing the sportswashing?
I also remember the ’94 World Cup distinctively. What I remember the most, weirdly, was a group stage game where Bob Ley of ESPN, doing play-by-play because he was such a big soccer head, screamed out, “Bolivia scores a goal!!!” I don’t remember the final of that game (Bolivia finished last in its group and didn’t win any of its games), I just remember Ley getting super pumped and jacked on behalf of Bolivia. As a soccer hater at the time, I found his excitement highly amusing. Real “I’ll kill myself if Portugal doesn’t win” energy. I also remember Alexi Lalas having cool hair. He’s an asshole now.
Which brings us to today! I am no longer a soccer hater, and I am greatly looking forward to this year’s tournament filling in what is usually one of the deadest spots in the sports calendar. I will watch these games despite the immense fuckery surrounding them, as detailed here, there, and everywhere. If Qatar could get me to watch the 2023 World Cup despite using literal slaves to build the infrastructure for it, you know I’m more than capable of bringing that hypocrisy back stateside. Hypocrisy, after all, is what Americans like me do best.
That means I’ll still cheer, albeit wanly, for the USMNT, even if that means cheering on a handful of players on the roster who think that President Dumbfuck is the second coming of Jesus Christ. The only recent time I actively cheered against a Team USA was in the World Baseball Classic, because that team brought Trump-like behavior onto the diamond with it. They were a fucking miserable watch, and they deserved to get got by Venezuela in the final. So if Christian Pulisic starts ratting out opponents to ICE while bringing the ball up the field, I’ll turn against him and the rest of his team. But if they, as individuals, don’t give me a reason to despise them, then I won’t.
Of course, the USMNT has given me many reasons to despise them in the past. Not only have they always sucked, but they’ve sucked while playing a lifeless brand of soccer that would be laughed off of any other continent, Antarctica included. For all I know, Michael Bradley is still on the team’s roster, ready to bore everyone in the stadium to death. That’s the kind of team I can quickly grow to despise, even if they all somehow had Megan Rapinoe's politics. I have friends who are somewhat bullish on the 2026 USMNT, because it has multiple talented players on the roster, instead of the usual one or zero. But you’ll never get me to buy in that deeply. The second I see these guys spend an entire half puttering around their own half of the field, I’m gonna adopt Bolivia as my favorite team.
(I'm now being told that Bolivia isn't in the field this year, in which case... ISS COMIN' 'OME!!!)
Grubby:
I know you’re a fellow Guy Ritchie head, so my question is simple: who are your top three Guy Ritchie written/created characters? This is meant to exclude the Sherlock properties and other stuff he didn’t write. Mine are as follows:
1. Brick Top
2. The Coach
3. Johnny Quid
As with my other favorite artists, I don’t keep my favorites written in stone. Sometimes my favorite song by Metallica is “Orion,” sometimes it’s “Battery,” sometimes it’s some other classic of theirs. So when it comes to Guy Ritchie, I bounce between favorites in much the same way. Also, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels plays on a constant loop in my head, at all times, so I’m prone to deferring to that movie before any of the director’s other stuff. This preamble has gone on for too long now, so here’s my current list:
- Fletcher from The Gentlemen (movie version). Hugh Grant in any Guy Ritchie flick is perfect.
- Rory Breaker from Lock Stock
- Freddy Horniman from The Gentlemen (TV version)
The second season of that last one arrives in the fall. I need it like I need air.
Sean:
Over the last year, I've travelled more frequently due to a new job. As the flights I book are on much shorter notice (I used to only worry about going home for the holidays), I often can't have my preferred window seat. Even when I have a good book or movie to enjoy, I catch myself admiring the landscape for at least half the flight when I'm there. Now that I have it less often, I've noticed fewer and fewer people bother to even open the shade. They often seem too engrossed in their phones to notice, but perhaps I'm editorializing. I've noticed this behavior happening at all hours. Even if you want to take a nap, I find it inconsiderate to rob the rest of the row of a view. Am I wrong to think that window seats have a responsibility to open the shade, and that this defiance is further evidence of the moral decay of society?
This was the final petty argument on Curb Your Enthusiasm! Honestly, Larry David could have made that entire series out of airplane etiquette if he’d wanted to. Anyway, here’s my take: if you have the window seat of the plane and you’re not on a redeye, you get final say on the window shade. That’s it. Given that I always prefer an aisle seat, I can get irritated by the window passenger’s selection. But whatever, I’m not gonna make a rule about it. Americans love rules way too much. I’m never gonna convince annoying people to be un-annoying, and neither are you. So I’d let the window thing go.
Now, if someone starts watching something on their phone without using headphones? The chair.
Joe:
Assuming you're a decent athlete in your 20s, how tall do you have to be before people can give you a hard time for not being able to dunk? I'm six feet tall and no one has ever given me a hard time for not dunking. However, I've had friends who are 6’3” or 6’4”, and they are impressed with themselves because they can grab rim. But I'm not impressed. Just work a little bit harder and throw it down!
I’m 6-foot-3 and absolutely no one has ever given me shit for being unable to dunk, not even when I was 20 years old and hot. Why? Because I don’t look like I can dunk, and never have. I’m not super jacked, I don’t have visibly springy legs, and I’m as white as a polar bear. You gotta add another six inches to my frame before people start asking me why I can’t throw down. This is why I love doing pool dunks even more than the Dude Perfect crew.
Ryan:
We talk a lot about athletes now being better than ever. "Plumbers and lawyers" in the NBA, Adam Ottavino striking out the Babe, etc. Do you think this is also true of musicians? Could Jimi Hendrix still shred up numbers in this era? Was Neil Peart drumming up the score against a bunch of handymen?
No no, those guys were really good at what they did. They also had time to perfect their craft, because they didn’t have the internet distracting them from jamming on the guitar every waking minute. Not to bring up my music book binge for the 1,000th time, but one thing that struck me reading through all of those histories was how fast popular music evolved in the back half of the 20th century. Motown and Stax essentially helped usher pop music into existence. Then came The Beatles. Then, in quick succession, came the ascension of every other form: folk rock, disco, blues-influenced hard rock, funk, hip hop, heavy metal, punk, new wave, thrash, hair metal, techno, rap metal, grunge, EDM, nu metal, and on and on. All of it happened so fast, because so many talented people were involved. I could even go the other way, make like Charles Barkley, and say that today’s players are far worse than their predecessors, but that’s a boring take. All you need to know is that the best to ever do it really were the best to ever do it.
Email of the week!
Drew (not me):
So the world is horrible, but my 12-year-old twins just discovered Oasis, probably from YouTube or something. This has made the world less horrible for me and also reaffirmed my suspicion that they may have good taste. In any event, I know you have written about this before, but can you give me a quick hit of happiness by describing what the inside of your body felt like when everyone in the stadium started singing Wonderwall when you saw them live?
Actually, the best was when the fireworks went off at the end of “Champagne Supernova.” Perfect end to a perfect night.
