Tiger Woods, the most dominant golfer of his era, will have to submit his prescription drug records to law enforcement as part of the investigation into his March 27 traffic crash, a judge ruled Tuesday. But those records will not be made public under the state's legendarily broad public-records law after Martin County Judge Darren Steele ordered that the documents be made available to just select people connected to the court case.
Records generated during the process of gathering evidence for a trial, known in court as discovery, generally become public record in Florida once they are turned over to a defendant.
Woods was arrested in March in Jupiter Island, Fla., where he has a home, and was charged with driving under the influence and refusing to submit to a drug test after his black Land Rover clipped the back of a pickup truck and rolled over on its side.
The Pittsburgh Steelers, eager to cast off whatever traces of cultural relevance they once had, announced on Wednesday that they were willing to wait for quarterback Aaron Rodgers to help ease them into a quiet, lonely death.
“I’m optimistic we can get a deal wrapped someti...
Outfielders have a lot of time on their hands to be alone with their thoughts. The San Francisco Giants don't win a lot of baseball games. Put those two things together and you get magic. Erotic magic.
The history of the outfield post-win celebration is short but storied. W...
Brandon Clarke has died. Paramedics reportedly responded to an emergency call from a home in the San Fernando Valley around dinner time Monday, and declared Clarke dead at the scene. He was 29 years old, and a seven-year NBA veteran who'd played his entire professional caree...
On Tuesday night, two days after getting ejected for elbow crimes, Victor Wembanyama played in his first true must-win playoff game. Facing that pressure for the first time in his charmed career, how would he respond?
Glance at the box score of Game 5 between his San Antoni...
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 bunk beds, working from home, good moms, undershirts, and more.
After burning down an entire state's worth of bridges with his incredibly messy exit from Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin is now the head coach at LSU. The controversy surrounding his departure from Oxford did the impossible, making Kiffin's name even more infamous than it already was...
With the score tied halfway through the fourth quarter of Monday night's Game 4 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Los Angeles Lakers, OKC's Ajay Mitchell sized up Marcus Smart in the left corner. The shot clock was rapidly draining and his teammates were all watched over...
Remoras evolved to be clingy. The suction cup on their foreheads allows them to attach to larger animals like fridge magnets. Remoras hitch free rides on creatures of their choosing: sharks, rays, whales, dugongs, turtles, even parrotfish. But it has been traditionally assum...
It’s almost quaint to read now, but author Lauren Weisberger spent the majority of her 2003 press tour for the release of The Devil Wears Prada trying to distance it from its obvious source material. “So much of the book is composed of stories from my friends,” she told Publ...
The following is excerpted from The Long Game by Leander Schaerlaeckens, to be published on May 12, 2026 by Viking. It is available for purchase now.
Velibor Milutinović, or Bora to both friend and foe, was born in Yugoslavia and orphaned by World War II. After a childhoo...
Cameron Brink came back to a very different team than the one she left in June of 2024, when she tore the ACL in her left knee in a game against the Connecticut Sun. That year's Los Angeles Sparks were firmly rebuilding—or, as veteran guard Lexie Brown described th...
NBR hall of famer Tom Krell, who claimed to have reached basketball nirvana when he joined the show for the playoff mega-preview with Tom Ley one month ago, is back for another appearance on the show this week. He briefly had that state tested when his Denver Nuggets went out like chumps, but he recovered enough to put in another all-time performance.
Topics include: Christian Braun's facial hair, Anthony Edwards's heroism, fatherhood and the pursuit of romantic love vis-á-vis the two previous topics, the Mormonization of American culture, Adorno vs. Kierkegaard (in a basketball context), Darryn Peterson's apparent over-fondness for creatine, and so much more. Tom also shared a demo of a song he's working on under his stage name How To Dress Well that involves flipping a sample of Bones Hyland singing in his car on Instagram. This one's a banger.
In the summer of 2024, during the WNBA’s Olympic break, several Atlanta Dream players who weren’t competing in Paris had gathered for a midseason training camp of sorts. Anyone watching would have seen what looked like a typical 3-on-3 scrimmage. In reality, it was anything ...
The sophomore slump is real, in the sense that rookies who have great seasons are rarely able to live up to such lofty expectations the following year, and fake, in the sense that it is hardly a phenomenon limited to rookies and sophomores. Rather, the sophomore slump is a m...
The Washington Wizards won the 2026 NBA Draft Lottery and were awarded the first overall selection in the upcoming player draft, scheduled for June 23. They will have their choice of the handful of top amateur prospects in the sport, from what is considered a particularly st...
The Buffalo Sabres were a great road team this year. Only the Avalanche won more games away from home, and in the first round of the playoffs the Sabres took all three games they played in Boston by a combined score of 13-3. But Montreal, as the city proved in Game 3 of its ...
If you asked philosophers what the most mysterious thing about the mind is, most of them would say: consciousness. It's just a really weird thing. An exhaustive physical description of a brain state doesn't obviously tell us anything about why that state would be associated ...
Set the tone for your week and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Kelsey Dixon, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Kelsey is a southerner by birth, a Mariah Carey fan by choice, and a Chicagoan by the grace of god. When she's not busy working as the crossword editor for the Atlantic, she can be found investigating the Edmonton Oilers polycule or breaking single-use kitchen gadgets.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE.
The Defector basketball chat was captivated by a sequence of artfully stage-lit photos in Game 1 of the Knicks-Sixers playoff series at Madison Square Garden. They were the work of Nathaniel S. Butler, senior official photographer for the NBA. Butler has shot the league from...
The (in)famous Defector Philly Bureau has been oddly silent on this bit of newsy detritus, which is not normally like it. Maybe it was just the giddiness of watching the Phillies beat the Colorado Rockies and extend their run of watchable baseball to two full weeks, or maybe...
It should not have taken a month and change for the Golden State Warriors to figure out what they wanted to do with head coach Steve Kerr, nor should it have taken that long for Kerr to figure out what to do with them. If management wanted to punish their Hall of Fame-bound ...
What makes for a memorable NBA postseason? High-level basketball is necessary, as are a few Game 7s, plenty of drama, and maybe an upset or two. But a truly entertaining playoff run also requires a dose of the bizarre. The Timberwolves and Spurs fulfilled the brief during Minnesota's 114–109 victory Sunday in Game 4.
You want bizarre? How about Victor Wembanyama, never one to display much more emotion on the court than a serene intensity, briefly channeling his inner Artest and attempting to decapitate Naz Reid with a high-velocity elbow.
There is nothing that sucks the life out of a good time like someone self-consciously asking whether you are having fun. Maybe a moment ago, you were having fun, but now, faced with their anxiety (or worse, their reassurance that certainly you are having a good time, maybe e...
Mary Bennet, middle of five, has few virtues to recommend her. Unlike her eldest sister, Jane, she is not beautiful. Nor is she witty, like second-eldest Elizabeth. Her younger sister, Kitty, may be frivolous but at least she is good-humored and has a fun nickname. Youngest ...
Pastor Mark Burns, the president's informal "spiritual advisor," wants to make one thing very clear about the extremely tall gold statue of Donald Trump that was officially dedicated last week in Doral, Miami. "Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord ...
When the bell rang to signal the 10th round of the Fabio Wardley-Daniel Dubois heavyweight fight for the WBO world title, a bloodied Wardley rose from his stool and walked off-balance to center ring, as if taking his first steps. The night began well for him: He fired an ove...
There was a time, during a personal zenith of certitude and obnoxiousness that fits perfectly over my last years of college, when I was sure I knew what a real novel was, and what it was for. As I understood it from the books that I read and read reviews of, novels were abou...
The WNBA season begins tonight. Rather than preview each team, I've decided to look at some storylines I’ll be following through some of the league's best characters. This has nothing to do with the fact that I only came back from book leave on Thursday and didn't have a lot of time to write a preview. In fact, working on a book has merely pushed me to consider alternative narrative dimensions and explore new modes of storytelling, such as this.
To watch the Detroit Pistons is to marvel at the highest level of team defense being played anywhere in the NBA. The mental strain they induce in opponents is remarkable, as offenses will cycle trough primary, secondary, and tertiary options with increasing mania, unable to ...
