From Deadspin to Defector
Drew Magary ’98 is still writing with a sharp and acerbic edge after surviving a traumatic brain injury and a modern-media shakeup
Flat on his back on a bed in the ICU with a breathing mask on his face and an assortment of tubes and wires attached to his body, Drew Magary ’98 was slowly regaining consciousness.
“Let me see a couple of fingers if you can hear me,” the nurse said.
Still foggy, Magary raised his two middle ones.
His friends and family erupted in laughs and tears of relief. That was Drew.
Magary believed he was waking up on the morning after an awards event in New York City that he had hosted for Deadspin, the offbeat sports-and-more news site that he and his colleagues help build, but he had instead been in an induced coma for almost two weeks, his life in the balance.
In a cement corridor at the post-event party at a karaoke club, Magary fell and smashed his skull in three places. He suffered a brain hemorrhage so severe it nearly killed him, and doctors could not say at the time whether he might have suffered permanent, debilitating brain damage. As to why he fell, Magary will never know for sure. “I’m not going to solve some amazing mystery,” he said. “I had to learn to accept that there are some mysteries in your life, most of them don’t get solved.”
Mostly and miraculously, Magary recovered. He permanently lost the hearing in one ear and his sense of smell almost completely. He lost much of his sense of taste for a long period, and his cerebrum is damaged for life, but neurologically he is fine despite having, as he jokes, 95 percent of a brain. He recounts it all in his book, The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir After Brain Damage, published in fall 2021 by Penguin Random House.
Magary is now a founder and writer at Defector, an online sports media outlet modeled after Deadspin. He has also authored six books and is a columnist for SFGate, a Bay Area news outlet.
Colby helped shape his writing
Magary came to Colby as a transfer student from the University of Michigan, following his sister, Amanda Magary Kice ’97, to Mayflower Hill. At Colby, he majored in English. The academic program challenged him, especially the courses he took with Cedric Bryant, Lee Professor of English, Emeritus.
“But there’s zero chance that I’m as good a writer as I am now without doing the work I had to do at Colby,” he said.
After graduating, he worked in advertising for a decade while writing for sports blogs on the side. Editors at GQ spotted his wry posts and hired him, which also led to book deals. Soon he was at Deadspin, probably the ideal venue for him.
As a writer, he is mordant and irreverent. For a recent piece at SFGate, Magary rented a Tesla Cybertruck and drove it around San Francisco to see what kind of reaction would ensue (about equal parts gawking and road rage). His holiday offering was “The 2024 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog,” which included an off-color review of a box of marshmallows (six for $14.95).
A long recovery
As he worked primarily from home during his recovery, Magary was able to get back his writing relatively quickly, though with difficulty. A cochlear implant restored most of his hearing abilities after a period of adjustment.
According to a 2009 study in the Journal of Neurotrauma, as many as 1.4 million people in the U.S. suffer a traumatic brain injury each year, and more than three million live with disabilities from TBI. More than a quarter of those people will at some point have a major depressive disorder, and mood swings can also be prevalent.
Magary is frank about the pain and difficulty he caused his family and others. Six months after the fall, he was highly sensitive and lashing out at those close to him at times. “I wanted everyone to accommodate my predicament without my having to make a fuss about it,” he wrote.
Magary got therapy began to examine his own thoughts, and became self-aware in ways he hadn’t before. And it worked. In his book, Magary recounts asking his wife, Garine, if he was getting better.
“Oh my god, yes,” she replied.
Magary has kept up with what he calls the best practices. “I have all the tips and tricks and supplies I’ve acquired along the way, which have steeled me to live through these hairier parts of life,” he said. “It made me a stronger, mentally healthier person, and a happier person. I think I’m also doing better writing now, with a clearer mind.”
Cherished time at Deadspin
Magary loved everything about his time at Deadspin, where he made his name and developed his style writing everything from his trademark, cutting reviews of NFL squads to assessments of Shake Shack and children’s television.
“Deadspin rocked. It was the best,” he said, recalling first finding the sports blog as a reader. “These people were saying all the things I always say when I’m watching games. They not only talk about sports, but they talk about the sports media. Honestly, that was a big deal.”
By 2019, Deadspin was in choppy waters. It had been part of the Gawker Media group of websites, and a defamation lawsuit by Hulk Hogan bankrupted the company. Deadspin was eventually bought by G/O Media, which was in turn owned by a private equity firm.
The new management insisted Deadspin writers stick to sports after the writers had critiqued G/O’s executives. Rather than obey the dictum, in one of the more memorable acts of defiance in contemporary media, the entire top staff at the site, about 20 people in all, resigned en masse. Deadspin, for all intents and purposes, was defunct.
That December, a year after his accident, at a gathering at a beer hall in Brooklyn with his former colleagues, the Deadspin renegades learned that backers had come forward with an offer to start a new website. What was supposed to be a funeral turned into a christening, and the new site, Defector, launched in September 2020.
‘A direct reader-writer relationship’
Defector is as endearingly motley as Deadspin was, maybe more so. On a recent day, you could find Super Bowl fare, such as articles on Patrick Mahomes’s very bad day, Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, or a lovely, valedictory appreciation of director David Lynch.
Magary said that Defector has about 40,000 subscribers, and earns almost 95 percent of its revenue from subscriptions with the rest from merchandise, advertising, and podcasts.
“It’s a direct reader-writer relationship. You pay us for the posts, we’re gonna give you the best posts we possibly can.”
So far, Defector has survived—and thrived. It has added staff in a business known for cutting jobs. Magary is grateful.
“I have an enormous amount of appreciation for my wife, my kids, my parents, and all the doctors and physical therapists who helped me back to health,” he said. “I’m still deaf and I can’t smell, but I’ve learned to live with those disabilities, and my mental health is actually the best it’s ever been. I didn’t enjoy almost dying, but I’ve pulled out of it alright.”
