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ROCKFORD, Ill. — Every April, more than 250 athletes representing over 50 schools descend on a third-tier city to play the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA) National Championships. This year, Nationals took place in Rockford's UW Health Sports Factory, a concrete hangar wedged between the Rock River and a lifeless train track. Inside, state-of-the-art cameras swiveled above professionally pipe-and-draped stadium courts. Wood floors gleamed beneath 40 tables, barriered into a crisp blue grid. Live draw monitors faced a table of 2025 championship photos and 3D-printed 2026 trophies. All of it was assembled by 75 gray-poloed officials, who deploy from a 500-square-foot command station to referee, umpire, and livestream. Over three days and a whopping seven events—men’s doubles, women’s doubles, coed teams, women’s teams, men’s singles, women’s singles, and a new hardbat format called PeakaPong—they would facilitate over 600 matches for one of North America’s biggest table tennis events. Big does not mean glamorous, or most important. This tournament is not the World Championships, and it’s definitely not the Olympics, but it occupies a special place in the world of high-level table tennis in the Americas. It’s a tournament where pros and national team players can face off against enthusiasts and relative beginners, where senior citizens work side by side with children, and where alumni return to coach, network, or just soak in the atmosphere. Nobody gets paid, and nobody plays for all that much, either. Players receive neither prize money, world ranking points, nor international tournament qualifications; most teams pay their own way. The tournament organizers are also volunteers. Everyone shows up for love of the game—and they play and administrate it ferociously.  As the first of three days began, hundreds of flat-soled shoes and tacky rubbers sent the sport’s characteristic pops, clicks, stomps, and squeaks into the rafters. They were soon joined by celebratory shouts from competitors and teammates, baritone PA implorement to clear trash from the expeditiously cluttered aisles, giddy laughs as uniformed packs strolled to submit their match sheets at the control desk or buy food at concessions. The atmosphere was intent but buoyant. Something special was being manufactured here.

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 chopsticks, dated nicknames, robots, and more. Your letters: Joe:

With the institution of replay review and ABS, it can sometimes feel like baseball is a little too normal these days, that it lacks whimsy or esoterica, or that games can no longer be decided by vestigial rules that were codified during the Hayes administration. This impression, I am happy to report, is false. The sheer number of permutations of bat and ball and player requires a robust rulebook that nevertheless still must on occasion come down to human judgment. What happened Monday night in San Diego is proof that there is still some mystery in the world. Matt Shaw led off the Chicago Cubs' ninth against Mason Miller with a little squibber down the third-base line, and it appeared to be trickling foul as it ran out of momentum. Just as it came to a stop—just!—Ty France picked it up ever so daintily, perhaps trying a bit of a frame job to make it look even more foul than it appeared on first glance. But it did appear foul. https://twitter.com/TalkinBaseball_/status/2048986910572355681

On their very first offensive possession of Game 4 on Monday night, the Detroit Pistons did what every big man–turned-commentator suggests every team do on its first possession: They ran a play to get their center a post-up. In this case, Duncan Robinson backscreened Wendell Carter Jr., forcing Desmond Bane to switch onto Jalen Duren. Duren had borne the lion's share of blame for the Pistons' embarrassing performance through the first three games of the series, a stretch spent not only getting outschemed and outclassed by a team that had seemed incapable of doing either against anyone all season, but also getting out-banged and out-hustled. The entire value proposition of the Pistons is that with their collective physicality, particularly the explosive muscularity of Duren, nobody can bully them. Best to get him rolling early. But no. The Magic knew exactly what Detroit's plan was, and Bane snuffed it out for a steal. They then marched down the court, and Carter Jr. splashed a wide-open three. This sequence was the series in miniature: The Pistons straining to complete the simplest of actions while Orlando bludgeoned them into easy submission; Detroit playing neolithic offense while the Magic showed an understanding of the modern game, where centers space the floor instead of cosplaying paint-bound bigs of old. Orlando won Game 4, 94-88, to take a totally deserved 3-1 lead over the East's No. 1 seed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yUo-kK9j1o

Michael is a bad movie. Let’s just get that out of the way now. It is a movie designed less to tell a story than to recreate moments, ones you are probably already familiar with. It is a movie designed to give you a karaoke experience in a theater setting with other like-minded Michael Jackson fans. It is a movie designed to make the estate of a dead pop star a great deal of money, in line with other milquetoast biopics about other stars, like Bohemian Rhapsody or Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (more like deliver me from this theater). It is a movie not at all designed to tell a history, least of all the history of Michael Jackson. "Directed," in the scariest of scare quotes, by Antoine Fuqua, Michael tells a very abridged version of Jackson's ascendence, from child superstar (played by Juliano Valdi) to king of pop (played by Jackson's nephew, Jaafar Jackson). Much of the Motown and Jackson 5 era is told in montage, only stopping intermittently to highlight how sensitive of a person Michael is and how disconnected he is from other people due to his demanding father and being in a big pop group with his brothers. Later, as Jackson moves into adulthood, the movie aims to recreate the magic behind the making of the albums Off The Wall and Thriller, while stopping intermittently to highlight how sensitive of a person Michael is and how disconnected he is from other people: watching cartoons with his mom, wanting to play Twister with his big brothers, adopting a monkey named Bubbles, who shows up in this movie like he was one of the Avengers. There are many moral problems with this movie, which we will get into, but just from a filmmaking perspective, so much of this is unbelievably cynical. It's one thing to watch a superhero movie and know that its primary job is to sell toys and merchandise; it's quite another to watch a biopic with more or less the same objective. The movie treats Jackson as if he were some sort of Marvel character, with subtle references to his many cosmetic surgeries, his addiction to painkillers, and his fixation with Peter Pan sprinkled in like Easter eggs for his biggest fans to go seek out. Even if a movie produced in collaboration with Jackson's infamously protective estate was never going to seriously confront Jackson's child sexual abuse cases, there is presumably a lot that could be said about even a sanitized version of one of the greatest, most fascinating artists of all time. And yet, Jackson is barely a person in his own movie. He is at best an idea, one vaguely though carefully sketched to undermine the bad things you know about him.

Smart money says that sports gambling scandals will be more dog-licks-man than man-bites-dog real soon. But for now, this rates as big college football news: Texas Tech announced on Monday that quarterback Brendan Sorsby has left the program to get treated for a gambling addiction. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported that Sorsby, who transferred to the Red Raiders in January after two years at Cincinnati, will enter a residential rehab facility. According to the school, the length of his stay at the treatment center is “indefinite.” “We love Brendan and support his decision to seek professional help,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire said, in a statement released by the school. “Taking this step requires courage, and our primary focus is on him as a person.”

Steve Javie can’t recall much from the actual game itself, but he’ll always remember what happened later that night. It was Javie’s first NBA Finals game in 1995, always a huge deal for an up-and-coming referee. Several of his family members were in the crowd. Finals games back then started at 9:00 p.m. Eastern; Javie and his fellow refs didn’t leave the arena until the wee hours of the morning. When they returned to their hotel, crew chief Joey Crawford had a room set up with food and drinks for the crew and their families to enjoy. After a couple hours of celebrating his achievement, Javie couldn’t sleep. He was wired from the rush of his first time on the NBA’s biggest stage. A 7:00 a.m. flight the next morning loomed large. He mentioned it to Crawford, his longtime mentor.

The Boston Red Sox are owned by the same people who own Liverpool FC, and are therefore acutely aware of the crucial soccer rubric that managers should be fired every few months in order to keep the job tender and supple on the grill. And yet, despite that, they hadn't fired a Liverpool manager since Brendan Rodgers got the sack in 2015. Those owners have, however, given us the first firing of the 2026 baseball season, and potentially the most incendiary one in years, by cacking Red Sox manager Alex Cora and multiple members of his staff. The finer details of this can be found in the latest installment of "Comrade Xu Watches Shitty Baseball"; the broad strokes can be gleaned with a glance at the American League standings. But we're not concerned with the Red Sox and their seminal role in creating a three-way tie for 12th with the Kansas City Royals and Chicago White Sox. We're thinking more of the two teams currently worse than those three, and why they haven't done the performative kneejerkery of firing their own manager. Your friends and compatriots at the bottom of the coal chute are the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets, and their broader circumstances are both similar and similarly dire. The Mets' issues are obvious. Owner Steve Cohen has spent eleventy skillion dollars on a team that just powered through a 12-game losing streak, beat the Twins twice and then got swept over the weekend by THE COLORADO ROCKIES, FOR BAAL'S SAKE! They currently feature the league's highest payroll, its fourth-oldest roster, and the sport's worst figures for fewest runs scored and OPS. Carlos Mendoza still has his job because, as near as we can tell, Cohen is pissed that he didn't think of doing that before John Henry thought of firing Cora, let alone firing him so spectacularly.

Baseball managers have very little say in whether or not their teams score 17 runs in a game, and only marginally more in whether or not their teams only allow one. Nevertheless, the optics of firing a coach—amendment: six coaches—right after a 17-1 victory are at the very least strange enough that Boston Red Sox management might have considered deferring the decision for one more day. They did not, and so, in full, manager Alex Cora, bench coach Ramón Vázquez, hitting coach Peter Fatse, third-base coach Kyle Hudson, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson, and hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin departed Baltimore unceremoniously after a 17-1 victory, on a black van that had COACHES4HIRE printed on its side. (The website coaches4hire.com is currently down.) This being baseball, it is not the first time a coach has been fired after winning by a 16-run margin, though the last time was on May 30, 1887, and included such proper nouns as "Cyclone" Ryan, "Lip" Pike, and the Cleveland Blues. In this case, the New York Metropolitans beat the Blues 18-2 and then fired manager Bob Ferguson. According to Baseball-Reference, the Metropolitans were eighth in the American Association with a record of 6-24, and the game, despite featuring 20 total runs, only lasted about 1:50. The Red Sox, though they are last in the American League East, have at 11-17 a better record than the New York Metropolitans did, but the rationale behind "fire everyone but the pitching staff" is at least clear. With a wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created plus, perhaps the most complete catch-all metric for baseball offense) of 84, the Red Sox are currently the third-worst offensive team in baseball, ahead of only the modern-day New York Metropolitans and their wretched nemeses-in-arms, the Philadelphia Phillies. Most notable would be the performance of former rookie Roman Anthony, who is undergoing a pretty dramatic sophomore slump, posting a wRC+ just over 90 compared to his previous season's mark of 140. That said, Red Sox pitching has hardly been stellar in isolation. Though the precise ranking depends on which standard and/or peripheral metrics the beholder favors, it firmly in the range of below average to very bad.

Down 58-41 at halftime on Sunday, the San Antonio Spurs were facing the most pressure they had in the brief but spectacular Victor Wembanyama playoff era. That said more about the team's inexperience with this kind of pressure than it did about needing to avoid a 2-2 first-round series against the Portland Trail Blazers, a team they should easily put away. While Wembanyama is the focal point of everything the Spurs do, somebody else on the team needed to step up to overcome such a deficit in Game 4. Yesterday, it was De'Aaron Fox, for a 114-93 victory and 3-1 series lead. Correlated with the concerns about pressure management is the matter of how Wembanyama would hold up against the ravages of the NBA playoffs. Game 4 marked his return from a concussion—which he obliquely indicated was mishandled, though he did not specify in what way—and though he announced himself with a huge dunk in the game's opening minutes, his team's offense was flat in the first half. San Antonio shot 16-for-46 over the first two quarters, struggling to get to the rim or finish there as Portland's sludgy defense gunked up the works. Toumani Camara and Jrue Holiday hounded ballhandlers and blew up actions early, and a bunch of nasty veterans supported them for 48 minutes of solid rim protection. The impact of all that defensive excellence was applied unevenly through the first three games; while Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle have both been balling, Fox's first three playoff games as a Spur were underwhelming. His young charges have gotten to go at Scoot Henderson and Jerami Grant, while he's been stalked by Camara and Holiday almost the entire time he's been on the court. Harper was scorching in Game 3, briefly and spectacularly materializing the lofty comp of Ethical James Harden With Bounce.