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Saul “Canelo” Alvarez won another title over the weekend while making a ton of money and looking damn good in the ring. So why is it so easy to feel sorry for him?  The deserving Mexican legend got past a quick start from reigning WBC super middleweight champion Christian Mbilli, then pounded the essentially unknown underdog champ’s will to win out of him and took his belt via unanimous decision on Saturday in front of a disinterested crowd in a small arena in Riyadh. The start of the fight was delayed for about an hour, reportedly because Turki Al-Sheikh, the Saudis’ sweet science point man, couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.  When the opening bell finally rang, Mbilli started strong. The undefeated 31-year-old Frenchman, who won his first belt last year with a vicious first-round knockout of Maciej Sulecki, was not only younger, bigger and faster than the grizzled veteran, he was also busier. Mbilli was shoving Canelo into corners and throwing punches in bunches. Canelo was accurate with his counters, but Mbilli was more than holding his own early on. In the third round, when Canelo had his back against the ropes, he began pounding his own chest and inviting Mbilli to take more shots at him. Canelo had made the very same gestures during a 2022 loss to light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol, perhaps to fire himself up, but in that case ended up bringing himself more pain. 

SAN FRANCISCO — Every championship is different, though they're all composed of the same emotional materials. A champion is supposed to have overcome circumstances, smelting the raw materials of loss and pain into a durable alloy of resolve. For fanbases, titles are redemptive, victory transmuting heartbreak into joy. The form can accommodate many particularities, but whatever the preceding heartbreak, a championship's message is always the same: It was all worth it. This template breaks down in the case of the Golden State Valkyries. They haven't had to overcome anything. They've enjoyed ubiquitous, unqualified adoration from the entire region since they flashed into existence two years ago. As I watched the confetti rain down on the freshly crowned WNBA champs and 18,000 screaming fans in San Francisco on Saturday night, I was struck foremost by a sense of surreality. None of this was supposed to happen. Owner Joe Lacob made waves by boasting that the Valks would win a title within five years, only for reality to prove a then-bold prediction needlessly conservative. This championship redeemed no visible struggle; there was no narrative convention to adhere to. So how do you make sense of something this unexpected? I think the place to start is with the fans, the bloc of people who expected it the most. One of the more remarkable early developments of the Valkyries' rise was the immediate coherence of a huge fanbase. You'll see in every writeup that the Valks have sold out every single game of their existence, at an NBA arena no less. That only hints at the broader dynamics that have made this team so beloved since before there were players on a team to even love in the first place. The ongoing women's sports boom started booming away from the Bay Area, leaving people in the region to look enviously over at their counterparts in Los Angeles or Portland and wonder when it would be our turn. The NWSL's Bay FC started playing a year before the Valkyries, though they were all the way down in San Jose, an hour from either San Francisco or Oakland, and therefore have never been as easily integrated into the cultural fabric of the region.

Everyone in Detroit has a responsibility to keep Haley Stevens away from the Gordie Howe Bridge today, because at the rate she's going, she'll burn that one, too. An outgoing House rep and failed Democratic candidate for Senate who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in a hotly contested Michigan primary earlier this year, Stevens has made the news cycle in the lead-up to Tuesday's general election all about her. While she initially absorbed her August primary defeat without entering into a gigantic public meltdown, over the past several days she has shuffled, then walked, then full-on sprinted toward Republican candidate Mike Rogers, officially endorsing him to the ire of Dems everywhere. Even Chuck Schumer, who never met a centrist he couldn't make excuses for, called it a "despicable betrayal." What exactly happened to cause Stevens to explode like this? An easy target for blame here is Stevens's delectably named fiance, Jason Turkish, who has gone on a media tour of his own, trying to tie El-Sayed's campaign to antisemitism. But Stevens is 43 years old, so the "it's because of a boy" excuse feels insufficient, and downright rude for depriving her of agency when it comes to detonating her career. A more compelling, though still quite sad, explanation is just that she's a sore loser who thought she was owed a Senate seat, and still can't accept that she didn't get it despite tens of millions of dollars backing her in the primary. In this view, her crash-out is not just malicious—though it definitely is—but also immature. In an Anderson Cooper CNN interview Sunday evening, Stevens seemed like she was thinking through her ideas about 10 seconds after they left her mouth. She somehow attempted to square the idea that she wanted Democrats to win control of the Senate, even while rooting and voting against El-Sayed in a critical election to that whole endeavor. This interview was nothing close to an ambush, and yet Stevens, given repeated chances, couldn't come up with a message that made even a lick of sense. That nasally Michigander accent sure sounds a lot better when I hear it at Culver's than when it's being used to try to sabotage the future of the country.

It's silly to pretend that some otherworldly deity is determining the fates of your favorite sports teams, but what else am I supposed to believe when Lamar Jackson, who had been sidelined with a vaguely described ankle sprain for three games, finally makes it back on the field against the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, only to immediately jam his thumb and leave after one play on offense? The Baltimore Ravens quarterback is most likely out for the rest of the season, as the injury to his throwing hand will require surgery and a trip to the IR. Watching Jackson leave the game, which the Ravens lost 36-10 after also losing backup QB Tyler Huntley to injury, felt similar to when Aaron Rodgers, fresh from carrying the American flag onto the field as a New York Jet for the first time, was taken out for the season on his first drive. That moment marked the beginning of the end for Rodgers and the Jets, as they never captured the magic they hoped to create (Rodgers went 5-12 as the starter the following season). Will it be the same for Lamar Jackson? I've been a fan of Jackson since 2016, when I watched him completely dismantle my school, Florida State, while he was at Louisville on his way to winning the Heisman. He's been one of the most exciting players in football for the past decade. Today, though, I can't help but return to the feeling I had in January 2025, when I watched Mark Andrews drop a pass for a two-point conversion in the divisional round of the playoffs against the Bills, a play which could've sent the game to overtime. In that moment, I felt in my bones that it was over for this version of the Ravens. Not necessarily for Jackson, who was playing his best ball at that point, but for the rest of the team.

It's not particularly surprising to look at the top of the table in the Premier League and see Arsenal and Manchester City. Aside from Liverpool's 2024-25 title-winning campaign, those two sides have dominated the last half decade in England's top flight, and though City has a pending punishment that might shoot them down the pyramid, it's safe to say that these are the two best teams in the best league. Arsenal and City have another thing in common, though, besides their lofty spots on the table: They have both been pecked by the Seagulls of Brighton & Hove Albion. If one were to look at the advanced stats from Saturday's match between Manchester City and Brighton, without looking at the score, it would be safe to assume that City ran rampant. Shots, possession, xG, passing accuracy, dribbles—by every metric, City had statistical supremacy at its home ground. Well, every metric but the one that matters: goals scored. Thanks to an 11th-minute Yasin Ayari tally, Brighton came away from Saturday's match with its first-ever win at the Etihad Stadium, the most goals scored in the Premier League, and a stranglehold on third place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtDH-zkXi1A

This year, Kimi Antonelli got lucky. Antonelli drives the fastest car on the grid. He is young—very recently a teenager, even; he turned 20 in August—and that means when faced with an entirely new and controversial ruleset, he didn't have years of prior programming to overcome. Despite his youth, Antonelli has a good sense of narrative satisfaction. This Sunday, during the Mexican Grand Prix, he made sure to snag a podium place in the race where he became the youngest-ever Formula 1 driver to win a Drivers' Championship, hoisted in celebration by the generational superstars before him. Past, present, future. It was the third iteration of an Antonelli–Max Verstappen–Lewis Hamilton podium this year. When the podium roster first occurred in Canada, still early in the season, it was already tempting to refer to the moment as legendary: Antonelli was riding a four-race win streak, and led his much more experienced teammate, George Russell, by 43 points in the championship. But last year proved that inexperienced winners can lose championships even after being staked to larger, later leads, and Antonelli is as inexperienced as it gets, while Russell was getting unlucky with engine failures and mechanical issues. Antonelli had a substantial slump in form over the summer the previous year as a rookie, after a string of good performances to start the season. Over the same stretch of the calendar this year, Antonelli suffered two engine failures from strong positions and otherwise earned a podium. Put aside those two engine failures, and so far this season, the only other race in which he did not finish on the podium was the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where he finished P5. Formula 1 is a sport in which it is notoriously difficult to distinguish generational talents by their skill rather than by their results. Even the greatest drivers of all time cannot overcome massive gaps in machinery. Even a generational driver will need the correct team, the correct car, the correct regulations, the correct teammate, the correct timing; a generational driver must deliver several seasons of consistent results to prove their standing. But last year provided a timely example of what it looks like when two merely very good drivers, matched in their very-goodness, are given a rocketship to guide to a championship: a close but not particularly exciting battle marked more by ass-over-heels fumbling and obnoxious team orders than iconic victories.

There is a sign outside the NHL league offices in New York and Toronto (yep, there are two of them) stolen from construction sites that reads: "[Number Of] Days Since The Last Trade Demand." The current number is 3, and the latest is the strangest so far. It came from Tampa's notoriously taciturn star Nikita Kucherov, who had told his teammates on a team flight that he 1) would not re-sign with the Lightning next summer, 2) wants to be traded somewhere else, and 3) intends to keep playing for the time being while his wishes are accommodated by the team. That last part won him the defense of his coach, Jon Cooper, but it also won a public rejection from general manager Julien BriseBois. So yeah, stay tuned for more fun in our next exciting episode. Kucherov is the fourth big-name NHL player to seek immediate relocation to the players' new favorite team, SOTH (Somewhere Other Than Here). His pursuit of SOTH has been more amicable than his peers' because he didn't make a public show of his unhappiness (that's what agents are for) and is not refusing to play. Indeed, he assisted on three of the four Tampa Bay goals in Saturday's 5-4 shootout loss to the highly ordinary Predators, so a case can be made that he is still giving his all for the olde towne team. A better case could probably have been made if we had bothered to watch the game, but transparency requires that we admit we were watching the WNBA, because every Game 7 is by definition better than every other game in any other sport at any other time.

Our Monday crossword is the best, and don't get it twisted. This week's puzzle was constructed by Vik Shirvaikar, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Vik is a data scientist, weekend soccer referee, and long-suffering Cowboys fan from the Dallas area. 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. 

Elisabetta Palagi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa, had sent her team of research students to Ethiopia to study geladas, monkeys whose hearts appear to gleam out of their chests. But as her students watched the geladas munch on a grassy plateau alongside other grazing animals, they noticed a peculiar interaction between two other animals. A bull approached a male donkey and mounted him. This behavior did not seem to bother the donkey. The donkey did not kick him or otherwise try to escape the interaction. The researchers contacted Palagi and asked if she thought this cross-species intercourse was worth studying. "I said yes," Palagi wrote in an email. After close observation, the researchers found that the the bull, dubbed Achille, and the donkey, dubbed Patroclo, have a persistent, mutual sexual relationship, which is described in a new paper in Current Biology. Achille and Patroclo's relationship was not news to the local herders, who laughed when they saw the researchers filming the unexpected pair. "What was an unexpected observation for us was evidently a familiar sight to them," Palagi said. (The paper includes explicit footage of the pair's mating that we have omitted out of respect for their privacy.) The plateau, with scattered gelada monkeys and Achille and Patroclo nuzzling on the left.

There are two recurring trans women named Carolina in Sloane Murphy's short story collection, Shut Up, I Love You, I'll Call You Tomorrow. One's nicknamed North, and the other's nicknamed South, but nobody can seem to keep track of which is which. "Most of the time she just responds when people call her South," one of the stories says about North, who's the elder of the two. "At least no one was calling her Old Carolina." This is just one of the details in Murphy's debut that reminded me of the best Hold Steady albums, where casts of lushly described, hard-partying outsiders self-destruct during nights that feel as exciting as they are dangerous. The big difference is that the women in Murphy's stories are trans, which means their stakes are even higher. Edited by Emily Zhou, who wrote 2023's essential short story collection Girlfriends, Murphy's Shut Up, I Love You does for Trans Chicago what Zhou did for Ann Arbor and Brooklyn. This book announces a talented young writer who crafts stories with a vivid sense of time and place, filled with recognizable conversations and sly humor, punctuated by a willingness to stare at the abyss. But while being trans in 2023 was no great shakes, Murphy's collection arrives at a time when the alarm bells ring even louder—when we can't even watch sports on TV without seeing political ads from one state or another trying to demonize us, trying to tell people we don't deserve to live as we are.