Today is Dan McQuade’s funeral. To celebrate our friend, we wanted to give the people he worked with a place to explain what they loved so much about him.
If you would like to support Dan’s widow Jan, and his son Simon, you can do so here.
David Roth, Defector Editor
Dan was always into something, in the work he was doing and more broadly as a way of being in the world. Long before I became his editor at Defector, I knew that the ideas he pitched were not like everyone else’s, and that he was not like everyone else. At the old site, he would come up with video concepts and message me things like “Hey, do you want to look at some Ryan Klesko cards with me for a thing?” or “Can you bring in some of your jerseys for a video so Dom Cosentino can make fun of them?” and I would say yes. (Sadly, the “Antiques Shitshow” video archive is lost to the ages.)
At Defector, where we don’t have a dedicated studio to turn those passing ideas into short-form video but were otherwise free of the constraints that came with the old site, Dan dreamed bigger and weirder, and I kept saying yes. The ideas he had were so clearly the result of his own specific obsessions that there was no reason to say anything else. He’d already worked that new T-shirt idea all the way out in his head; there just needed to be a blog tying it all to the 1995 film Hackers, and that would be along in a little bit. Or a little bit longer than that, because Dan was reading contemporaneous reviews of the film on Newspapers.com, or wanted to call Matthew Lillard for a quote, or whatever. When Dan had started on something, he would simply go on investigating it further, turning it over until he’d cracked it to his satisfaction, and made it shine.
This sometimes meant waiting a little while longer for a draft, but it was the extra bit needed to make an idea into a proper Dan McQuade post. When he was into something, he needed to know as much as he could possibly know about it, and find the thing in it that made him care so much. He would hook into something and stay on the line while it pulled him toward the horizon, on serious stories but especially on silly ones, and only when he was ready would he reel it in. He wore his talent so lightly, and did that work with such high spirits, that it was easy to miss just how much he put into everything he did. It was how he could be so serious about silly stuff, and so funny about things that were infuriating or sad. He waited until he could see all of it, and then he would describe it. He’d take all the work he put into understanding this stuff and have it come out in his voice, like a story he’d tell, with all the switchbacks, jokes and sudden parenthetical asides.
Everything I loved about Dan came from that combination of enthusiasm and craft, from that inexhaustible appetite for new things to be into and bottomless passion for describing his experience of being into it. He was like this with his family, his cat, his friends and his city, and with what seems in retrospect to have been a world-historic number of group chats. He saw things that reminded him of people in his life and he told them as much, or just got that thing for that person and sent it to them. Dan cared so much about so many things and so many people. That care is part of what made him such a magnetic person to be around, but it is also at the center of what made him who he was. He loved good things and bad things just about equally, as far as I could tell. He seemed to get a lot out of all of it.
But that satisfaction came, I always thought, from how much he put into it, and how much he really meant it. It’s why no one wrote the way he did. It’s what I admired most about him, and what I am going to miss the most about him. The last time we talked, I got to tell him how lucky I felt to get to do all the dumb shit we got to do together, and that I loved him. For all the awful and infuriating unfinished business, I’m at least grateful I got to say that. What I did not say then, but will say here, is how much I aspire to be the way he was—to have the generosity and energy to care in the way he cared, to love that much and that freely, and to be as sincere in my desire to learn and as capable of finding delight in sharing that knowledge. I can’t think of any better way to be than that.
Sabrina Imbler, Defector Staff Writer
When I joined Defector, I realized I’d never met anyone like Dan McQuade. We first bonded over our cats, which is when Dan told me about his plan to base a Defector shirt off a cat shirt that appeared in the 1995 film Hackers, which I thought was pretty cool. I really like the 1995 film Hackers, but I didn’t remember the pivotal cat shirt. So I watched Hackers again, thinking I must not have paid enough attention to it the first time around. That’s how I learned that the cat shirt in Hackers is not a huge part of that movie; it’s worn by a supporting character in a small number of scenes.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s a really cool shirt. But I think this was the first moment when I understood the passions of Dan, a man who knew himself so deeply that he could look at any sliver of the world and find something so attuned to his sensibility that it brought him joy. Dan cared about so many things in his life so deeply, the big things like his wife Jan, his son Simon, and his cat Detective, and also things like New Jersey rest stops, bootleg boardwalk T-shirts, the fleet of neighborhood cats that visited him in Philadelphia, and the Romanian Eurovision song “Yodel It.”
If Dan cared about something, he cared about it so much so that he would find a way for you to care about it, too. Early in my time at Defector, when Dan came to the office to film a “Let’s Remember Some Guys” video with Roth and Lauren—a series that at the time I didn’t totally understand—he bought a pack of animal trading cards for us to remember. I was so touched by this gesture, by the classic McQuade gift of highly specific memorabilia, and that’s how I realized how fun it is to remember some (little) guys. The more I got to know Dan, the more I learned about the other spaces where our obsessions overlapped, like Eurovision and bad Christmas movies. We got to collaborate on some delightful roundtables, during which I got a peek inside the vast chambers of Dan’s mind. I have no idea how he stored all that information, like the fact that Bobby Darin’s son sued McDonald’s over the moon-faced crooner Mack Tonight that appeared in ads as a poor rip-off of Darin.
It sounds rote and obvious, but I’m mad that Dan didn’t have more time. I’m mad I never got a chance to visit him and Philly, so he could show me around the giant park by his house, which apparently teemed with frogs, or the Hermit Cave by his house, which, according to Dan, “is not a cave and not used by hermits but there WERE hermits in my neighborhood in the late 1600s.” That’s the thing about Dan: He saw his neighborhood as a wonderland, with a frog utopia, a hermit cave, a roving band of merry neighborhood cats. I want to see the world through those McQuade goggles, where things take on a sheen of the spectacular by virtue of how much you care about them, by how deeply you come to know the people and places around you, and how much you want to share them with the people you love. Dan taught me that life can be as wondrous as you want it to be, in part by making my world more wondrous with his presence. Dan, I miss you already. I can’t believe you’re gone. I promise I will keep sharing the wonders around me with the people I love, and caring as much as I can about everything.
Billy Haisley, Defector Editor
I am used to getting the “Wow, that’s so cool!” response when I tell people what I do for a living, but Dan was the first person to react like that after hearing about my first job: bussing tables at Texas Roadhouse in high school. It should be no shock that the mall game George Plimpton’s soft spot for kitsch extended to chain restaurants too.
After learning this fact about me, Dan would periodically hit me up about funny Roadhouse things he’d come across. Look, Lana Del Rey is also a fan of the place! Check out this subtly bizarre mural at one Roadhouse he dined at, which surprisingly does have a logical explanation! Look at this absolutely random wrestling match hosted in a Texas Roadhouse parking lot, and in my home state of Indiana at that!
Texas Roadhouse was just one of the topics we’d shoot the shit about in our DMs. Others included our shared interest in the sociology of Notre Dame and Penn State football fan cultures; our shared appreciation for streetwear; our shared belief that Banksy gets kind of a bad rap; and his love for sending people cool and/or funny college sports merch and my love for laughing at my fellow IU alums’ enduring Bobby Knight homerism. But the Roadhouse stuff is most indicative of the Dan I’d come to know after working with him for nearly a decade.
For one, the kinds of things Dan would unearth regarding Texas Roadhouse are things nobody else in the world would’ve spotted themselves. He moved through the world with uncommon curiosity, with soft eyes that were always, always alert to the notable, funny, odd or important, and anything in between. What’s more, he loved sharing with others the gems his soft eyes had discovered. Mine is merely one of dozens of similar stories people have shared since his death, all of them involving Dan going out of his way to keep up a relationship with someone via the most obscure of interests.
To know anything about Dan is to know that he was incredibly popular—the unofficial (and therefore truer) mayor of Philly. But to actually know Dan personally is to immediately understand why he was so popular, how he had met so many people and how so many of them came to consider him a friend. Dan was such a compendium of offbeat shit that he could bond with literally anyone by seeking out the one corner of his infinite knowledge base which overlapped with theirs, then grow that into a deep and lasting friendship. Dan had an insatiable passion for things and facts, but especially a passion for people, for life itself, in all of its weird, warty beauty. He knew everyone and everyone knew him, and it was because he cared so much about everything and everyone one he came across. This is, I think, a big reason why the Philadelphia he wrote about was so alluring, even to those of us who’ve never stepped foot on Broad Street. His Philly is a genuine community, the kind that modern life has done its best to eradicate but, blessedly, still endures thanks to people like Dan. His approach to life is one I’ve always been in awe of, and it’s an example I think everyone who knew him hopes to carry on in some way.
On the night we found out about his death, it was my wife’s turn to put our toddler to bed—becoming new dads was another one of the things Dan and I bonded over, and it’s the aspect of his death that’s most crushing to think about—but I swapped with her, needing some extra cuddle time with our little guy. When I started to sing our usual bedtime song, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” he shook me off and instead requested “The Muffin Man,” the Ms. Rachel version. Though painfully corny, I was nonetheless moved while singing it, thinking that I do not in fact know any of the people around town from whom we buy muffins, pizza, and ice cream, but that I know someone who did know his.
Barry Petchesky, Defector Editor
It could have been a billion-dollar idea: Ask Dan at halftime of a 76ers game how his team was doing. If he complained about their play, called them a bunch of bums, moaned that they’re losing losers who only know how to lose, said they’re going to get blown out—bet on the Sixers to win. They’d almost always win. By, like, 20 points. I’ve never met anyone who hated his good teams more, or believed in them less. He was a true Philadelphian.
Dan was basically the mayor of Philadelphia. He knew everyone. One time, while reporting a story, a source mentioned someone named “Karate Mark.” Dan wondered if that was the same Karate Mark he knew (it was). He loved his city and the people in it, and was honest and clear-eyed about its shortcomings, but he would never have lived anywhere else. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have been him without that rowdy, peevish, idiosyncratic big city that felt so often like a small town. He was its greatest evangelist and proudest son.
Another Dan moneymaking opportunity: He paid attention to the tiny local college hoops teams far more than any normal person should. He told me once, before an early-season non-conference game, exactly why some shitsplat Pennsylvania Catholic school would cover the +42.5 spread against a ranked team. He had legitimate logic behind it. They only lost by 41. Dan was a genius.
It’s possible that Dan did leverage his handicapping abilities into megawealth, but then blew it all investing in malls. Malls are where he was truly happy. Or rather Mall Culture, which expands beyond the physical boundaries of mallspace: When we went to Atlantic City, the thing Dan was most excited for was eating at the Rainforest Cafe.
This is because Dan was our generation’s foremost chronicler of American camp. He was the master of giving serious treatment to things that don’t take themselves seriously, like bootleg T-shirts, Baywatch Nights, or the city of Philadelphia itself. He applied an anthropologist’s rigor and a poet’s eye for detail. He was fascinated by our artistic byroads and subcultures, and wanted to celebrate them.
I mourn for all the blogs he won’t get to write. That may sound stupid or lame to you, but I don’t think Dan would’ve thought so. He had a blogger’s heart, and writing about his interests gave him as much joy as the thing itself.
That was Dan’s guiding light, I think: He wanted to share all the things he loved with other people. Every blog he wrote was an attempt to capture and convey the joy he felt over some new discovery or old attachment. There was an almost childlike purity in this drive of his—a thing had made him happy, so he wanted to show it to you so it could make you happy. He was so fucking good at that. Listen to his cackle and “whoo!” at the sad little La Salle smoke machine, and tell me you’re not laughing too.
That Dan’s professional interests were also his personal interests was a happy coincidence. He was my colleague of many years, yes, but more accurately he was my friend that I happened to work with. That the man got paid to write about what he loves was a blessing. But he also kept some things just for him—otherwise we’d have seen endless blogs about how much he loved his wife, his son, and his cat. OK, maybe there were a lot of blogs about his cat.
Two weeks ago, I told Dan that I was not going to go soft on hating his despicable Philly teams just because he was dying. He made me swear to stick to my promise. I think it’s the least we can all do.
Albert Burneko, Defector Editor
In Dan’s writing and journalism, the past was less a trail behind the present than a luminous and illuminating accretion. The more history anything had, the brighter it glowed. A place was everything that ever happened there and everyone who witnessed it; a sports team was everyone who ever played for it, loved hating it, or hated loving it; an event was everything that led to it; a person was everyone who knew them, remembered them, loved them, had a story about them to tell.
Assigning Dan a blog could be hilarious: “Give me 800 words about this thing that happened yesterday,” and his next stop was Newspapers.com, where he would discover the earliest thing anybody ever wrote about any of the potential blog’s proper nouns, 93 years ago. And this would enrich the blog, because how could it not? So what if it also made the blog take a bit longer? How could that be a bad thing?
This has a lot to recommend as a way of writing about things, but much more importantly as a way of encountering the world. The thrill of reading Dan, for me, was in the quality of depth in that approach, which I chalk up to his essential Dan-ness, imparted to his work. Profundity, sure, but here I mean “depth” more in dimensional terms. Philadelphia’s soon-to-close flagship Macy’s isn’t just Macy’s, the store closing here in the present. It is also Wanamaker’s, the store it was 30 years ago, and Hecht’s, Strawbridge’s, and Lord & Taylor, cohabitating in one place, aglow. When the Macy’s closes, all of them close; all those memories lose something that anchored them in the world. The loss pierces to a depth it might otherwise not, and that is the loveliest and truest justice that can be done at a parting. The most painful, too.
The last time I saw Dan was at Defector’s August 2025 staff retreat in Ocean City, Maryland. He and I shared a table with a few others in the banquet room where we held our meetings. Dan—that great gravelly voice, the fabulous Philly accent, the way he always sounded like he was smiling and seemingly always was—had so much enthusiasm for the work of sorting out all our visions for the company’s future, for dreaming of what it could be and all the fun we could have with it. All of his many ideas came bubbling up out of delight at what we had made and were making. They were all, at heart, celebratory.
To me, that was Dan McQuade. He loved this place so much. It glows with him.
Megan Greenwell, Former Deadspin Editor-In-Chief
I can’t remember exactly why the Wildwood Boardwalk T-shirt recap was so late that year, but it was late enough that I gently suggested to Dan that his energy might be better spent on anything other than just one more research trip to the beach. This did not go over well. The next morning, I got a text, sent from the Wildwood Boardwalk, with a picture of a T-shirt depicting the cartoon character Arthur holding a Hennessy bottle. “You would stop us from publishing THIS?” the message said.
A minute or two later, another picture with another T-shirt, but the same message. Then another, and another. He must have sent me three dozen individual photos. Every one made me laugh harder than the one before, not even because of the T-shirts but because of his commitment to the bit. “You would stop us from publishing THIS?” ran through my head for weeks. The recap ran, obviously. It was perfect.
Nobody committed to a bit like Dan. Nobody brought as much childlike enthusiasm—genuine wonder!—to their reporting. Nobody loved sharing what they’d learned, from the profound to the deeply stupid, as much as he did. What a gift to have gotten to learn from him. What a heartbreaking, infuriating, essential reminder to be more like him.
Drew Magary, Defector Columnist
When I first started popping gummies, I thought the dosage listed on the bag was per piece, not for the whole bag. So I once told Roth I’d had 200mg, and he was like HOLY SHIT DREW WHAT THE FUCK, and I was like Damn, maybe I went too hard. So I went to Dan, because he was the most informed stoner I knew, and asked if 200mg was too much. And in that very loud, very Dan voice, he was like “Nah, that should be fine.” And I was like, “Oh OK, Roth is just being a tightass. Phew!” If I ever actually ate 200mg of THC, I would probably hallucinate a bear eating my face off.
Samer Kalaf, Defector Editor
Dan was a master of the specific, and he demonstrated it every day. When he’d share an article written by someone else online, it would typically be accompanied by a no-context line from the piece, indicating that it struck him in some way. He loved to turn over a sentence in his head, examining it for a particular word or phrase that could spark a thought or a chain reaction of jokes. For instance, he was endlessly amused by an almost certainly bogus Michael Jordan quote displayed at an NCAA Tournament game in 2016; you might say it indirectly set the stage for him to report out, years later, that Ed Harris did not say “Acting is like scoring a touchdown.”
Dan paid attention to the details because they would tickle or vex him, sometimes both. His curiosity regularly led him to incredible, unique pieces of writing. To this day, I remember the way in which he introduced a national audience to the existence of “Karate Mark,” but not before first confirming the information with “Classic Jeff.” As he once said, he was “forged in the fires of 1990s internet irony,” and it influenced his work in the best way possible.
Beyond his writing, as a person, Dan was always thinking of others. He retained an astounding memory not just for fake quotes or Philadelphia-area celebrities, but the interests of those around him: his family, his friends, his colleagues. He would mentally note what you liked, then text you every now and again to show you something in that genre, so you could enjoy it together: a bootleg Bart Simpson T-shirt, an old wrestling magazine, a Mr. Bean meme whose humor would be excruciating and nearly impossible to explain to a wider audience.
Sometimes these gifts would be tangible: He would literally mail you something he thought you’d like. He’d regularly send me Defector stickers, because we both enjoyed putting them up in the wild, and we’d let each other know when our friends spotted them. He once sent me a video of a beautiful view from the top of a trail in Hawaii, then brought the phone camera down to show a pole on which he had stuck his cat’s face and our company logo.
Dan’s generosity and enthusiasm were unparalleled. The man was constantly joking, pitching, researching, writing, helping out someone else. He lived in the present, but always with an eye on his next project in the near future, making it all the more gutting to have to use the past tense to talk about him.
Sam Woolley, Former Gawker Media Illustrator
The exact moment Dan and I first met is fuzzy, but the day he was hired is crystal clear. Someone told me, “Oh, there’s a sneakerhead coming to the site.” That was all I needed to hear. He was automatically my friend.
Back then, the art department sat next to Deadspin, at the top of a massive set of stairs. Every time Dan made the trek from his beloved Philly to the New York office, he’d pass by art on his way up. A quick hello almost never stayed quick. Thirty seconds would turn into 15 minutes of talking about whatever shoes he’d just hit on Nike, or the latest pair he’d somehow managed to snag through a raffle. He loved sharing his luck—not to brag, but because it genuinely brought him joy. Honestly, it brought me joy too.
Dan and I got to know each other better during the company’s super popular “pivot to video,” when we developed a sneaker show together. The show never saw the light of day, but the time we spent working on it revealed just how great of a dude he was. A real one. I wish I could go back and read the Slack messages from that era: two sneaker-obsessed dudes constantly one-upping each other. Competition was fun with Dan, because he made it fun.
Even after leaving GMG, the sneaker hits and occasional casual texts kept coming. That was Dan: someone who shared something special with everyone around him, whether it was enthusiasm, kindness, or just a genuine connection. If I remember correctly, I think he even got married in sneakers, which somehow feels exactly right.
Rest in peace, jawn. You’ll be missed.
Alex Sujong Laughlin, Defector Podcast Producer
Something I love about Dan is that he was a total freak about clothing. We had extremely different taste, but we shared the experience of nerding out and hunting for things on the secondhand market. When I decided to spend the day vintage shopping in Philadelphia, I asked him for recs, and he sent me hundreds of words via TEXT, listing all the stores I should hit, writing little blurbs about what to look for in each one. His encyclopedic knowledge of the things he loved was something I really admired.
Jorge Corona, Former Deadspin Video Producer
Dan McQuade lit my world with his love. We met at Deadspin, probably when he tagged along with Hannah Keyser and I on a reporting trip to Wildwood. Through work, I was treated to the great experience of reading boardwalk T-shirts, and the people wearing them, with Dan. I’m a practitioner of the art myself now, though unlike Dan, I never sprung for any T-shirts to add to my closet.
Then there are the malls. Dan and I went to Minneapolis together, to the big one: the Mall of America. We made a video there where, while exploring the peculiarities of this particular mall, we improbably ran into actor Morris Chestnut and his son. We were shocked, but Dan didn’t miss a beat, interviewing Morris like he was just another person. Later, on that same reporting trip, he would share his love of the Philadelphia Eagles, and he would bask along with half a stadium and a whole city as the Eagles beat the Patriots and won the Super Bowl.
To read a Dan blog was to read about his adoration of a peculiarity, his love of the hilarity in banality, and to have that all filtered through his big heart. In studio videos we made in New York, Dan shared his pog collection, his thoughts on pizza (one of the foods he did eat), his wrestling proclivities (with Nick Aldis, who roasted him mercilessly), and his love of Gritty. In our off-camera conversations, he shared his love as a colleague, supporting written and video pieces with interest and curiosity. He also shared his love of his family, and the family cat.
We kept in touch, and I lent him a hand on Defector’s first few videos, which he oversaw. Only a few months ago, Dan texted me, without mention of his health, and we reminisced about our work together, mostly about our Gritty video, which still cracked us up. We agreed that we had a lot of fun, even among the tumult of union fights and private equity ownership. Dan mentioned he was going to try to get more into video editing, and I told him to keep me posted on ways that I could help.
Losing Dan sucks. My life is richer because I was lucky enough to spend time with him. I treasure the memory of the days we spent together, and I hope to one day read and watch his work, however that looks or feels like in the Great Beyond. Here on Earth, I’ll try to imagine a good boardwalk T-shirt he might have put on when he crossed over.
Rest in peace, pal.
Ray Ratto, Defector Staff Writer
The Defector logo is slightly bent in the middle, and knowing what we know about the staff, “bent” seems like the right metaphor. But it also reeks of Dan, not because he was necessarily bent any more than the rest of our mosh pit of nitwittery, but because nobody at Defector worked more directly with the logo more often. When he wasn’t angsting audibly about the Eagles and Phillies, daily between the hours of 5:30 a.m. and Please Stop, he was the merch maven, the person whose consistently bemused face rose iridescently above “Quit Your Job,” “Chefector,” The Cat Head With The Rose, and “Gross Gas.” He was in the center of it all, and what he didn’t do himself, he managed to find the right people to make it happen. You can fairly say that he is the “Q” behind “Quit,” even though he never truly did.
Indeed, his memory and the stories about him are legendary, even if nobody can relax on past triumphs in a town like Philadelphia. Even the Super Bowl they won only gave the fan base, Dan included, turbo-powered agita over what comes in the unsettled future with a crackpot like Nick Sirianni. In many ways, the perfect Philadelphia season was that Super Bowl, because it never settled the internal shrieks over the Sirianni-fest for even a day, and that’s exactly the kind of team Dan would find most commodious. While most people knew him for his honesty, gentility, conviviality, and kindness, the idea that the phrase “Fuckin’ Jalen Hurts” was never far from his thoughts remains just as Dan as any of those other traits. And because Dan was a civic polymath, his bemused scorn was not limited to the athlete who most recently committed a crime against the town.
Dan was the actual Philadelphian as opposed to the stereotypical Philadelphian, inseparable from the town and its gloried weirdnesses while being much more rational than our shared imagery of it. He was indeed the best kind of fellow—a good hang in all circumstances, especially when he was playing host—and that isn’t typically said of your standard-issue Philadelphian. In a town where you haven’t made your bones until a regular WIP listener calls in during afternoon drive and says you suck, Dan would have taken such an epithet and said without a moment’s bother, “Of course I do. We all do. That’s why we’ve stayed.” It’s how Dan could find the truth behind the love-to-hate/hate relationship with his teams, and simultaneously have a deep emotional relationship with its broader band of weirdos, ne’er-do-wells and folks who say you suck without provocation and whose right to do so you fight to protect. He left us all in a better place for having known him with the things he said, wrote, did, and was. If that means, as an act of McQuadian solidarity, we must all admit that we suck too, it’s only because he would have pulled us aside to show us the compliment lurking behind the words, like the true son of Billy Penn he was.
Laura Wagner, Former Defector Staff Writer
Dan took delight. Nothing was too small to pay attention to, from decorative quotes at a rest stop service area to the fucked-up basketball court on Love Island to the closing of a mall from his teen years. Dan treated people the same way: inherently worthy of his time and attention, seeing the parts that go overlooked.
When I left Defector for a new job, I was homesick, missing the people whose humor and sensibilities had shaped a big part of my post-college self. Maybe that was obvious, or more likely it was just Dan’s nature to keep in touch, but he would reach out every so often with a nice thing to say about one of my stories, or a spikeball promotion he saw, or something Georgetown-related, and then we’d chat.
Recently, we shared updates about our kids. He sent photos of Simon visiting the mall, perched on a red lawn chair, zipping down a slide. A few days after Defector’s fifth birthday party, he sent another photo: Simon in a swing and Dan standing next to him, one hand on his small shoulders. The trees behind them are green, and the shadows are long on the ground. Dan’s wearing sunglasses and looking one way; Simon, wispy blond hair in a ponytail, looks the other. They’re both wearing Eagles jerseys. “Here’s one where I look like his heavy,” Dan wrote. “Which I guess I am in a way.” It was beautiful to get a glimpse of how he delighted in his son.
Lauren Theisen, Defector Editor
If you read Dan McQuade, you knew how it felt to go down the rabbit hole with him. Whether he was delivering tons of research on a serious topic—like the myth of cops overdosing by touching fentanyl—or using his talents to make you laugh—“In the 1940s, the Palisades Amusement Park baby races once chose a winner ‘because he was better-looking’”—the hallmark of most of Dan’s best work was that he searched all the nooks and crannies for the most colorful, memorable, and hilarious details that the archives had preserved.
I know how much his writing impacted his readers, and it was also a privilege, as someone who worked with him for eight years, to get to see that process from behind the scenes. To work with Dan on a piece, or to even just talk to him about a mutual interest, was to watch him relentlessly pursue whatever sparked his attention, where over the course of the next hour or more, he would pop into your messages again and again: “Oh, I found this … and this … and this.” Learning from his ability to navigate all the data in old newspapers and obscure corners of YouTube made me a better writer in a tangible way, and I’m so grateful for that.
I’m also thankful that I got to experience his ability to pick out small absurdities and share them passionately with the world—bits like “Acting is like scoring a touchdown” attributed to Ed Harris at a New Jersey rest stop; interviewing a guy who accidentally bought 10,400 Greg Briley cards; the puny La Salle smoke machine; investigating a new method of drinking water; or the multiple Devin The Dugong posters I have in my home, courtesy of Dan, that reference old video games I’ve never actually played. Dan had such a good eye for the silly little things that peek out from otherwise normal settings, and he had the boundless energy to explain those things to other people in a way that stuck with them too. I’ll remember him every time I crack up at something that is simultaneously innocuous and ridiculous. Go Birds.
Patrick Redford, Defector Staff Writer
Dan McQuade personified generosity. In the most literal sense of the word, he was a prolific gift-giver: Several times per year, he would send me a photo of some vintage T-shirt and ask if I wanted it, or simply send one to me regular-style. Defector merchandise often appeared on my doorstep without ceremony, courtesy of Dan. I suspect similar stuff happened to other colleagues, as if one of Dan’s primary ways of mediating between the people he cared about and a largely cruel, indifferent world was to act as a sort of Philadelphia Santa Claus. The point was never the stuff. The point was that Dan knew how being thought of would make you feel. This was a guy who gave out big candy bars on Halloween just because they made people happy.
The spirit of generosity also animated his work. Nobody saw the world like Dan. In his writing, the world—by which I mean of course Philadelphia—was an inherently ridiculous place. He clearly took a great sense of joy from the incongruous and the farcical. In particular, the self-seriousness with which ultimately goofy people carried themselves was a source of joy, and Dan’s ability to find ways to laugh at and with those sorts of people was only matched by his enthusiasm to bring you into the joke.
Dan was insistent upon bringing you along with him. He spent the second sentence of a story about his cancer diagnosis comparing his (fantastic) hair to a fancy dog’s ears. He wrote about the fake wet, empty alley behind Tom Brady’s Super Bowl broadcast, with a real sense of joy. He wrote a story with the headline “Aaaaaaauuuuuggghhhhh!!!” less than two months ago. The throughline is that Dan shared his way of seeing things with everyone. He wanted us to laugh along with him. When Tim Marchman hired Dan at Deadspin, he told me he thought Dan was perhaps the most universally beloved man on the internet.
I have never been to Philadelphia, but have spent plenty of time with shadow-mayor figures, and I know how good it can feel to have a place you love reflected back at you with as much humor and love as Dan brought to his relationship to his city. I can’t imagine Philly without Dan, nor Dan without Philly, and it is somewhat staggering to think of how outsized Philadelphia feels in the American sports media imaginarium. It feels like every third sportswriter is either from Philly or has completed a tour of duty there. On a long enough timeline, perhaps every great poster I knew will at some point end up there, seduced by the city’s cheap real estate and rock-eating attitude. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to credit Dan’s generosity for this impression I have. He loved Philly enough to be obsessed with it despite and often because of its flaws, giving a language to millions of people who lived there or simply had an internet connection to express their own admiration or repulsion. What a gift that is.
Ultimately, there are more Philadelphias than there are Dan McQuades. I’m honored to call him a colleague and a friend.
Tom Ley, Defector Editor-In-Chief
I admired Dan so much. I admired the way he cultivated his unique set of interests. I admired how easily his convictions came to him, and how unfussy he was about adhering to them. I admired how he built a life for himself, one premised on making genuine connections with the members of his community, and showing true compassion to the most vulnerable among us.
The thing I loved about him most, though, was that he worked at it. I never felt that Dan’s generosity, talent, and beloved status inside and outside of Philadelphia came to him by accident. I got the sense that he was someone who dealt with just as much anxiety and fear as the rest of us, but still managed to be this glowing presence in everyone’s life because that’s what he intended to do. He thought hard about how to be a good person, and how to improve the experience of everyone he came into contact with, and he acted on those thoughts every day.
Anyone who isn’t an asshole knows how hard it is to do that, to measure the distance between the kind of person it’s easy to be and the kind of person you want to be, and then decide to walk it. Dan traversed that distance every day, and when he got sick, I decided that it was finally time for me to start trying to be more like him. I’ve been making modest progress—doing more things to try and help, to be a more generative presence in the world—and all that time I thought about how funny it would be to tell someone that I was only doing this or that because of some guy I knew from work. Eventually I figured Dan would find that funny too, so a few days after he told me he was dying, I sent him a text message explaining some of the credit he was allowed to take. I don’t know if it got there in time for him to be able to read it. I hope it did.
Diana Moskovitz, Defector Editor
Dan McQuade was his own worst hype man. He wouldn’t tell you that he played a critical role in exposing decades of rape allegations made by dozens of women, involving one of the most powerful men in comedy. He wouldn’t brag about his influence on the way video journalism works on the internet. He never talked up his place in internet history and, specifically, how Philadelphia defined itself on a national stage. He would forget to tell you about how many reporters he helped for no credit at all, how much he loved and cared for his family, or how many people he befriended. By my estimate, at least half of Philly and 75 percent of journalism believes they were best friends with Dan McQuade. He made you feel that way.
So that leaves it up to us to brag about Dan.
It’s impossible to tell the story of Dan McQuade without Bill Cosby. If you’re young, you might not understand the power Cosby once wielded on our culture, and in the Philadelphia area in particular, where he lived for decades, even after the end of his 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show. That series turned Cosby, already a successful standup comedian with previous TV experience, into one of the richest men in entertainment and earned him the moniker “America’s Dad.”
Starting in the early 2000s, multiple women came forward to say that Cosby drugged and raped them. This included Andrea Constand, who had been director of operations for the women’s basketball team at Temple University, where Cosby was a powerful donor. Over time, when no criminal charges were brought and Constand settled her civil suit, the women’s stories largely faded from the public memory. But in October of 2014, Dan’s ears perked up when he heard the comedian Hannibal Buress mention Cosby’s name at a comedy show. It was a stroke of luck Dan was there; he went at the last minute to the show at the Trocadero with a friend. Dan heard Buress say Cosby’s name and did what any good reporter would do: He grabbed his phone and started recording.
“It’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the fuckin’ smuggest old black man persona that I hate,” Buress said that night. “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ’80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches. I don’t curse on stage. But, yeah, you’re a rapist.”
Dan published a story about it the next day for Philadelphia Magazine, with the video included. He didn’t plan for it to go viral. He just thought, “Well, that’s a story, and perhaps this can help bring those women’s stories back into the public eye.” But it went everywhere. Dan received a lot of internet vitriol for this, but he hated talking about that part; he’d change the conversation as soon as any of it came up. He’d also change the topic if you tried to praise him too much for it. It was classic Dan. He saw himself as just a reporter doing his job to the best of his ability. A comedian calling out Cosby in his hometown of Philadelphia? That’s a story. Nothing more or less to it than that.
That would be enough for most journalists to sit comfortably on their laurels and let everyone know they were that person. But Dan kept going. For some Philadelphians, it might not even be the most important work he did. This is the man who finally got to the bottom of Rocky’s training route, figured out that Princess Diana really did buy her own Eagles jacket, could explain what was amazing about the La Salle smoke machine, and seemingly knew the entire history of Wildwood boardwalk T-shirts. He understood the power of video, as both GIFs and longer formats, how they could be their own form of storytelling on the internet long before the business ghouls and their doomed-to-fail “pivot to video.” He didn’t need an analytics dashboard or a click-through rate to make his decisions. He just knew. He was seemingly born with some of the best news instincts I’ve ever seen in a person.
That’s why, years before I became coworkers with Dan, I already felt like I knew him. And yet, when I finally got to work with him, I learned the greatest surprise of all: He was impossibly nice, a wonderful colleague, a genius who never wanted you to feel inferior or stupid compared to him. I do not know how many times over the years I asked Dan for a screenshot or a cut of video because, embarrassingly, I’m just bad at that stuff. Not once did he tell me, “Hey, just learn to do that on your own,” or ignore my message. He’d squeeze in my request anyway. He was just so happy to be a reporter and to work with people. He took joy doing this. He was proud of his work and our work. Nothing was beneath him.
As great as his many bylined pieces are on Defector, there’s so much more he did here that you don’t know about. He rarely talked about his role in one of Defector’s first big stories, written by Maitreyi Anantharaman and Chris Thompson: our quest to uncover what was Color Star, the still somewhat unexplained company that briefly partnered with the Philadelphia 76ers. It was Dan who ran our merch shop and made so many of our graphics. When the site kept growing, it was Dan who stepped forward and asked to become our visual editor, so he could make all our stories look the best they could. At the time, I asked Dan if, as an editor, he wanted to start joining us in our editor meetings. In typical Dan fashion, he said nah. He had no interest in wielding power. He just wanted to do good work and make everyone else’s better, too.
Dan always wanted to help in any way, and doubly so if it was about Philadelphia. However much you believe he loved Philadelphia, he loved it more. I traveled to Philadelphia twice to cover both of Cosby’s criminal trials. Each time, Dan insisted on making sure we hung out, and gave me a long and Dan-approved list of things to do in the city. Meeting up for a coffee? Be prepared for Dan to recommend half a dozen possibilities, all based on your personal preference or style. One time we met up and walked along the Delaware River, with Dan pointing out each landmark and vendor, and telling me its entire history.
When he came to Los Angeles, he always let me know. That didn’t make me special—Dan always told everyone he knew when he was coming to their town. He was just that kind of guy; because he was that beautiful a person, he really did have that many friends. One of my few regrets is the last time he came to Los Angeles. We talked about hanging out, but it never came together. Like many a foolish mortal, I told myself we had more time.
That’s what hurts me the most. Even after going over how he was a hard-working reporter, a giving and caring colleague, a tireless advocate for Philadelphia, that’s not when I cry. I cry when I realize I don’t get to see Dan again. There isn’t a next time. No more of his updates about Simon. No more swapping photos of our cats. No more bragging from him about how Jan really is the best wife ever. No more reporter-to-reporter grousing about the state of journalism. No more offers to help me out of the blue when he sees in our work chat that I’m struggling to find something. No more yakking about malls or fashion. No more telling me we’ll meet up next time he’s in my city, or I’m in his. No more out-of-the-blue messages when I’m having a bad day to make sure I’m OK. No more reading a blog I wrote, thinking it was good, somehow remembering that while he’s undergoing cancer treatment, and then making sure to tell me how he felt when he finally sees me in person. It’s rare enough to work with someone who is half as brilliant and morally upright as Dan. I got to work with the real thing.
Of course, we didn’t agree on everything. No friendship is perfect. He was a Philadelphia Catholic; I come from Pittsburgh Jews. But it wasn’t the religions that separated us. It was that he was raised in Eagles green and white, and I in Steelers black and gold. Despite the teams not being in the same division or even conference, there’s no love lost between the fan bases on either side of Pennsylvania. (Even if, technically, we once were the Steagles. Surely Dan would have pointed this out.)
And yet, when I think about how much I miss Dan and how much I’d give to have him back for just one day, what I ultimately want to say is a phrase that would make any Yinzer shudder. But I will say it now in Dan’s honor: Go Birds.
Hannah Keyser, Former Deadspin Staff Writer
One of the first times Dan McQuade and I hung out in person, he wanted to go to Century 21. Internally, I was judgmental and a little disappointed. I thought this guy was into vintage fashion, like me. I thought we were going to go thrifting for designer duds, not to a discount department store. But Dan had something so much better than fashion sense: He had a truly distinct style and an unassuming confidence.
He had conviction in his interests and values that wasn’t about validation seeking or signaling. Dan never doubted what he believed was important and cool, and his enthusiasm for those things made it true. He was proof that true self-confidence makes you kind.
Of course I was a fan of Dan’s work. I was lucky enough to go to Wildwood with him for the annual T-shirts story. It’s an experience you could auction off, and any self-respecting Delaware Valley resident would bid. I had grown up going to Wildwood, I graduated from the same school Dan did, and while living in Brooklyn, I repped Philly vociferously. Befriending Dan made me see these data points not as a source of bloviating self-mythology (as I’m prone to), but rather emblems of an expansive club and rich culture where he was both bard and king. I remain in awe of his ability to be effortlessly unique as a person and creative force.
In the last couple years, our friendship shifted when we both had babies. Instead of texts about bootleg Philly sports merch, we traded pictures of our sons. Dan became a parent first. He would send me dispatches from a few months in the future of what joys awaited. Looking back, I see that I complained about the exhaustion and anxiety, and he never did. Dan was always utterly uninhibited about what he loved, and he loved his son.
Dan, Jan, and Simon were among the first non-family members to meet my son. They came to see me when Archer was just a few weeks old, and made parenthood feel at once more real and more fun than the haze of the early days. It seemed like there was so much to look forward to. Especially because Dan had brought a present for my baby: a pair of tiny vintage Nikes he had thrifted.
Jasper Wang, Defector VP Of Revenue And Operations
Dan McQuade had so many idiosyncratic interests, but most of all, he was interested in people. Our first interaction was over Zoom in the spring of 2020. It was some manner of planning call for Defector’s eventual launch, during the very early COVID period, and things felt tense. I believe at that time everyone was aware that I was a consultant deemed trustworthy enough to help out with the business plan, but it was the first time many of my now-longtime coworkers were actually seeing my face. I went over some sort of spreadsheet and asked if there were any questions, and after a beat, Dan jumped in: “I don’t think these are the kind of questions you’re looking for, but … who are you? Like, what’s your deal, why do you want to work with us?” He wasn’t too worried about the numbers; he just wanted to ask me who my favorite sports blogger was. (I answered: Ashley Feinberg.)
As I scroll through my text messages with Dan, I see evidence of all the times he really listened to me, really took an interest in my interests in a way that quickly added up to a friendship. He let me know every time he read something from a 2000s-era Cracked writer, saw an ad for Steak ‘Em-Up, watched any Ivy League basketball game, learned about a new financial scam from the Money Stuff newsletter, saw a promotional savings rate over 4 percent. He was an observant man with a million simultaneous thoughts, and he was always on the lookout for where his interests might overlap with yours, so he could make that human connection.
Dan’s brain was always going a mile a minute at work, too. He was enormously proud of Defector, and it seemed like every week he had a brand-new idea for the company. On a Saturday morning in January 2024, he asked me to call our lawyer about whether he could put a screenshot of Babe Ruth’s face from a 1920s movie onto a new T-shirt design he was noodling on. Three weeks later, he told me he was working on a memo requesting $5,000 to prototype a Defector point-and-click video game, with Devin the Dugong as the protagonist. I won’t lie and say I was always thrilled to be on the receiving end of those proposals. But now I’m devastated that I’ll never get another pitch for a weird, hilarious, uniquely McQuade idea. It was a tremendous honor to be Dan’s coworker, small business co-owner, and friend. We’ll miss him dearly.
Dennis Young, Former Deadspin Editor
Dan had an encyclopedic knowledge of Philadelphia region celebrities, and delighted in showing people the malformed stars in every constellation there. As he once put it, Philly is “a city that has long paced the country in the Creating Local Celebrities field.” It’s true, and it turned out to be a shockingly useful skill in covering professional sports. Ivy League deans and Dodge dealers are always getting caught on camera acting like maniacs at Eagles and Sixers games, to name two examples that quickly come to mind.
Dan loved bringing this up. Some people Remember Guys; Dan remembered John Bolaris. What I could never tell in the time I was lucky enough to know him was whether he was aware that he himself was the quintessential example of this phenomenon. Because if you have any connection to Philadelphia at all, however tenuous, he was Dan Fucking McQuade, a character completely out of time, the one guy perfectly suited to chronicle his city and the characters in it. I doubt most cities even have a Dan; Philly was extremely lucky to have the one.
Emma Baccellieri, Former Deadspin Staff Writer
Some pieces of my chat history with Dan McQuade that have me laughing/crying:
When I said something about TJ Maxx in passing once, and he followed up to let me know the “World’s Greatest TJ Maxx” was in Philadelphia. (“It’s on the main line and so they always have better stuff. And like stuff you know is not the crappy version of Tommy Hilfiger or whatever they make for outlets.”)When he sent me a picture of a cherry Pepsi with the message “About to drink this,” and nothing else.When I did a television news hit that I was horribly nervous to do, and McQuade reached out to say it was great and he recorded the whole thing, should he send me a copy? I said thanks, but no thanks, I wanted to forget that it ever happened. But he knew I might want it eventually (or, more to the point, that my parents might want it right that minute), and so he sent the recording over anyway without making it a big deal. When he couldn’t sleep one night last summer and told me that he “ended up doing a lot of Pepsi Kona research,” meaning the coffee-flavored Pepsi that was test-marketed in and around Philadelphia in the late 1990s. He sent me several old newspaper articles, including one about a tasting downtown that included the sentence, “Even the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants will be there.” When I posted on Instagram asking for recommendations before a trip to Switzerland, and he said, “Look for Mr. Clean. He’s sometimes ‘Mr. Proper’ in Europe.”
I was hesitant to say much here over the past few days. There are so many people who knew McQuade much better than I ever did, who had been much closer, and I did not want to seem like I was falsely claiming a tight friendship. We worked together only briefly, years ago now, and we met in person only a few times. But I found myself so distraught by the news of his death, and as I was going through all of these messages and texts and emails, it suddenly felt so obvious. Dan could be your coworker only briefly, and you could meet him only a few times, but he would still record your television appearance, and he would remember all of the weird things you liked, and he would let you know when he was drinking an interesting soda for no reason. This was the whole point. He was so warm, thoughtful, and open that he could make anyone feel like they were a close friend. There had never been any chance of portraying false closeness here. McQuade made sure that it was all real.
Chris Thompson, Defector Staff Writer
The last couple of times I spoke to Dan, we talked about parenting and his son. In a Brooklyn bar, Dan and I dashed around, laying out stickers and assorted merch items for Defector’s fifth anniversary party. I remember asking him some tired get-me-over question about dadhood—how’s sleep, or how’s potty training—because new parents often commiserate, abstracting their children and pinging insecurities back and forth. Dan brushed away my wack chit-chat, politely but efficiently: Instead of talking in generic terms about a nameless organism progressing through developmental phases, he talked to me about his specific son, a singular little being, not incomplete and checking a pediatrician’s boxes but already entire and vivid, wholly worthy of fascination without any particular regard for what might come next. He talked with sparkling delight about his son’s favorite things, and little things they did together, and the shirts and shoes his son liked to wear, or that Dan liked for him to wear. It was a quick and awesome lesson for me in how to be real in the world, how much richer your experiences of people can be if you are able to dump your insecurities, and how to be a proud dad. Dan was wild about his son.
It knocks me over to think of Simon having to learn so much about his dad secondhand. I’ve been grappling with it; some failsafe in my mind keeps forcing me away. The unfairness of it is staggering. You hope that it’s true of everyone that memories of their life will persevere as a comfort to those who loved them, and who they loved. This is genuinely an exceptional case: No one I have ever personally known has blessed the world with so rich an impression. I’m comforted by the knowledge that Dan left such a deep and permanent mark in the world. I think he had twice as many friends as anyone else I know, and those friends will never run out of Dan stories to tell. It seems to me that he came by it the old-fashioned way: by getting to know people, by always having something to offer, and by doing good stuff in the world. I admired Dan’s genuine interest in all kinds of people and their stories, his open delight in certain very silly things, his appetite for context and history, and above all the dogged and selfless expression of his commitment to his community. You basically could not do better for a model of civic engagement: It wouldn’t be very weird for Philadelphia to erect a Dan statue. He was super-duper wrong to support the Philadelphia sports teams, but even that can be forgiven in so lovely a person.
Recently he sent me a photo of Simon wearing a particular vintage Disney T-shirt. It was still too large, Dan admitted, but close enough. The man wanted to show someone his beautiful boy, and our common appreciation of Disney things was a suitable pretext. I didn’t realize then that time was running out on these T-shirts, that Dan had a reason to skip ahead to 3T. He told me he was thinking about how soon he could get his son into another too-large vintage T-shirt that he’d socked away in a drawer someplace. I imagine his family unearthing Dan’s rare treasures off into the distant future: T-shirts and shoes, sure, but also assorted works, clipped videos, little archival discoveries, surprising friends, distant admirers, and above all, stories. Stories and stories. Our memories of Dan are a blessing.
Anders Kapur, Former Deadspin Video Producer
Even though I knew Dan briefly and only as a coworker, I still feel it’s important for me to write up a little something and send it in, because life is made of those sorts of relationships just as much as it is of our closest relationships. The way a person carries themselves before such acquaintances (that they’re forced to spend time with and may not like all that much) tells you a lot about who they are.
Dan and I worked together in the dying days of Deadspin, brought together by the dreaded pivot to video. But Dan felt no dread by the pivot. Dan fucking loved making videos like no writer I’ve ever met. He’d take the Amtrak up from Philly on a nearly weekly basis to goof around on camera with me, Jorge, and Kiran, showing off his streetwear collection, passing judgment on crackpot rule suggestions for various sports, and waxing poetic about the Philadelphia Eagles.
Dan McQuade carried himself as only Dan McQuade could: curious, engaged, gracious, and unapologetically himself. He was a dude who could make me care about everything from his Philly sports obsessions to Japanese menswear. I will remember our discussions on the finer points of Jersey Shore culture, in its many regional variations and expressions. I will remember the guys we remembered during his appearances on the set of “Let’s Remember Some Guys.” I will remember that the next time I saw Dan after a conversation, in which I mentioned a book he’d just read that sounded right up my alley, he brought the book to NYC for me unbidden and told me to hang onto it for as long as I liked. I always felt guilty for never returning it, but I guess it can sit on my shelf for a while longer now.
Dan leaves behind a legacy of hugely entertaining and idiosyncratic writing—I personally looked forward to his yearly Wildwood Boardwalk T-shirt surveys—and a Dan-shaped hole in the world that no one else is qualified to fill. He will live on in the memories of all who knew him, even those whose paths he crossed for a moment. Since I have no real NFL allegiance, and it’s what Dan would have wanted, I’ll swallow my general aversion to Philly sports and leave it at this: Go Birds.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Former Jezebel Editor
Dan McQuade was the greatest chronicler of Philadelphia’s power brokers, and loved the luxury discount store Century 21 more than anyone. He treated important local developments with the solemn gravity they required—a journalist after my own heart. Most importantly, he was the gentlest, kindest, loveliest friend. We didn’t see each other often enough, but joked and gossiped all the time; on Christmas, he texted me a photo of RFK Jr. hanging out with Diplo, a frequent topic of conversation. Dan was always excited about something, but nothing enthused him more than being a dad. He was excellent at that, and at life. I am gutted and will miss him.
Brandy Jensen, Defector Editor
I’ve struggled to figure out what to say about Dan. At times, I’ve questioned whether it’s even my place to say anything, given that everyone else here knew him so much better and for so much longer. But one thing I learned very quickly about Dan was that he couldn’t abide someone feeling out of place. When I first started, he went out of his way to be welcoming, knowing that a workplace where everyone has shared memories and inside jokes can be a little intimidating for a newcomer. He wanted me to feel at home here, in this place that he was proud of and loved. He wanted me to love it too.
Dan was like that about a lot of things. His writing bursts with the enthusiasm of someone who finds the world and the people in it endlessly interesting, and in every case you get to the end feeling like an initiate. Not into a secret or closely guarded group, but a worldview. He was able to share so much of himself this way, and he left his mark on a frankly astonishing number of people. I’ll admit I sort of assumed the idea of Dan being the mayor of Philadelphia was a bit that people around here did, but last week I realized that basically every person I know in that city—people from different social contexts that I wouldn’t think of together in any other situation—all knew and adored Dan. It is, frankly, total bullshit that someone who was so good at life, so good at doing the things that make life meaningful, didn’t get more time to keep doing them. I will try to be a little better at them for the time I have left.
Luis Paez-Pumar, Defector Staff Writer
In 2021, without really planning it, Dan and I both ended up at a Game Changer Wrestling show in Atlantic City. This wasn’t a particularly uncommon event; we were both wrestling fans, and we had seen a handful of shows together. Usually those shows were in big arenas or at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens. But this GCW show was the first time I had been to a small indie event at the same time as Dan, one in which we could walk around, chat, and see the other wrestling sickos. During one of the breaks, I walked over to Dan’s seat and chatted with him about whatever for five minutes. In that time, no fewer than 10 people dropped by to say hello to Dan, either people he knew from years of attending shows like this, or just from being Dan McQuade, Mayor of Philadelphia. (We might have been an hour away, but that aura followed him to Atlantic City.) Once the wrestling resumed, I chuckled about this but didn’t really think of it further.
Last week I thought of it again as the love began to pour in, with so many different people remembering that Dan, simply, was the best. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him, and it was always funny to see that in action. Dan was so funny and so kind, even when he was mad at you. I won’t go into detail, but last year I pissed him off—work-wise and by accident, I swear!—and his anger, mild as it was, lasted for all of five minutes before he told me to forget it ever happened. He was right to be mad, but he was also too Dan to let that bother him.
Dan made me mad, too, mostly because he had so many opinions about so many things, so it was bound to happen that we would disagree. The man hated Final Fantasy Tactics, for goodness’ sake! And yet there was no one I’d rather chat with about Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Orange Cassidy, or the damn Philadelphia Eagles, a team I have come to know too much about in large part because of Dan himself. I’m sure others will note this, but because Dan cared so much about what he cared about, it was infectious, even if you didn’t care about those things or, maybe more importantly, if you did care about them but not in the same way. He just wanted people to know the weird things he was into, and he was so good at making you care about those things. Beyond how good he was at coordinating our merch, how much he helped me set up our Twitch account, or how many dumb JRPG tweets we sent each other, that’s the thing I’ll remember most about Dan: He cared so much and so deeply.
Tara Jacoby, Former Gawker Media Illustrator
I met Dan around 10 years ago. We only met a handful of times at various work events and worked together over Slack here and there. I left that job, a few years passed, then I decided to leave New York and move to Philly to be closer to family. Dan, seeing this, reached out and was one of the first people to welcome me to Philadelphia. He suggested we cowork in Fishtown. He filled me in on all the work goss I missed, and gave me a list of things to do in and around Philly. This became a regular thing. We’d meet at Milkcrate Cafe, talk work, Philly, art, etc. He and I collaborated on Defector and Normal Gossip art. I got to know way more about malls, New Jersey rest stops, and Philadelphia than I could have ever imagined. He was kind enough to spare me the sports talk, probably because he knew it would fall on deaf ears. The last time we met up, we were spitballing gallery show ideas.
Dan called me the week before he passed. He told me the devastating news and then we just talked, like any other day. He said how he really enjoyed working with me over the years, and how he convinced Jan to hang my Eagles poster in their room. He told me he made some progress on his book and was determined to finish it. This led to a story about the movie Mannequin, the Wanamaker Building, and how he proposed to Jan. He took me on a deep dive of how Princess Diana actually acquired her Eagles jacket. And of course, he talked about his son Simon. This was Dan: always a bright light, even in the darkest moments.
I feel really lucky to have spent time with Dan over the years. There aren’t many people out there like him. He was kind, generous, supportive, and authentic. He was a great coworker and friend. He was a loving husband and doting father. He was curious about everything, especially the things everyone else would overlook. He knew everything about Philadelphia and was eager to share it with everyone. In the end, he talked about the three things he loved the most: his wife, his son, and Philadelphia.
When I have a bad day or feel even the slightest bit cynical, I’m going to think of Dan. I’m going to try and emulate his approach to life by staying positive, curious, true to myself and generous to others. He will be missed, and Philadelphia will not be the same without him. Go Birds.
Israel Daramola, Defector Staff Writer
I was new to the Defector family, only just arriving at the top of 2023. Inevitably Dan McQuade reached out to me, as he always did whenever a new person joined the staff. He welcomed me to the site, then sent all kinds of stickers and merch as a welcome present.
Dan did a lot of the merch stuff here, and made all kinds of visual elements for the site. He was game and eager to help. He loved to message me about a blog I wrote that he enjoyed, and give me some lore around the blog’s subject matter. He had style, and I greatly value people with style. He was good at finding great sports merch, including the Princess Diana Eagles jacket, which will make me think of him more than her from now on. Getting to see the jacket in person was a real delight.
One time, he “directed” a sketch based around the David Roth cardboard cutout we sent to a lucky subscriber. Helping him out with that was one of my first assignments when I came on to Defector. I say “directed” because technically we used an outside camera crew, but it was Dan who ran the show. I like remembering him that way: as the guy with a silly idea who was just ambitious enough to make it a reality. It’s hard to lose that kind of light in this kind of world.
Giri Nathan, Defector Staff Writer
Have you heard the fable of the blind men and the elephant? Each one encounters just one part of the animal and comes away with a very different impression of what an elephant is like. Often that is also what it’s like to read tributes after someone dies.
Not this time. Have you noticed the serene alignment among Dan’s many admirers? Have you been struck by the depth of their consensus? Isn’t it astonishing that groups as different as his coworkers, the Philadelphia 76ers, public radio hosts, anonymous internet commenters, the Daily Mail, video game nerds, old college friends, sneakerheads, harm reduction volunteers, his loved ones, bootleg tee enthusiasts, neighborhood cats—all of us immediately identified and cherished the same attributes? There is probably no single issue that these varied parties agree on besides the goodness of Dan McQuade: his kindness, his humor, his infinite web of friendships and curiosities. There’s a reason these tributes all echo one another. Dan was legible, clear to all. Everyone saw the same guy and saw him deeply. To me that is the mark of a life lived forthrightly, happily, uncompromisingly. That life should’ve been so much longer, but it’s comforting to see everyone agree on how rich it already was.
Whenever we want to revisit that life, we can always go back to his writing, another arena where Dan was unambiguously Dan. The best part about reading his blogs now is that his spirit is so accurately preserved in them. These tapestries of digressions could have only been weaved together by this one dude. In his work, Dan drew on a number of traditions—meticulous archival research, old-school tabloid journalism, bloggy self-insertion, audiovisual hijinks—and created a genre all his own. He wrote in a steady deadpan, with crisp conversational sentences, allowing the absurdity of the story to speak for itself. Always a smile, never a sneer. He was situated in the goofy muck of humanity, right where the story was. And he knew that we were all in this muck together. Even when writing about thorny subjects, his work had a slow radiating warmth that only grows rarer in our world. Has any other person in documented history ever become friendlier, wiser, and smarter through heavy daily exposure to the internet?
There is a staggering density of knowledge in his writing, just as there is in any real-life conversation with Dan. If he had been born in a bygone century, I could imagine him carrying an entire city-state’s lore in his brain. (Which I suppose he has already done for modern-day Philly.) To read him, or to talk to him, is to be struck in quick succession by a sneaky bit of wordplay, a really weird lawsuit from 1981, an anecdote about a local character called something like “Karate Mark,” an insight from an academic paper, an obscure complaint about low-level college basketball. Dan cracked me up, taught me things I didn’t know I cared about, exposed me to opinions that I did not know existed, sent me stuff he thought I’d like, recorded interviews of mine I’d have never thought to record. That’s because he was always looking out for you, even when you weren’t.
He was a friend, a fan, a collector, a sharer, a learner, a great head of hair, an irreplaceable cultural resource. The overwhelming sense I have, every day since he’s passed, is that there are still many things I wish I could ask him about, to hear the McQuadian perspective. I’ll think of him every time I set foot in a rest stop, and I’ll return here often to hear that laugh.
Dave McKenna, Defector Staff Writer
Dan told me he was dying, possibly real soon, in a Slack message. I had talked with him about his cancer and treatments a few times over the last year or so, but until he sent that DM, I hadn’t thought death was even in the conversation, let alone imminent. I felt numb, dumb and useless, full of sadness for him and his family, and overwhelmed by a sense of having let him down by being so clueless about his condition that I could be blindsided by this news. I apologized to Dan for not having any response more profound than “I am so sorry.” He told me not to feel bad, and that all he wanted from me was “to see you sometime at Moriarty’s before I go.”
Moriarty’s is a pub in Center City. My sons and I have been going there on periodic Philly food tours from D.C. ever since Dan told us back in our Deadspin days that it was his favorite wing spot in town. I hope he was happy to hear and read how much those trips and those wings came to mean to my family. To thank him, through the years I’d send him photos of plates of bones from spent Moriarty’s wings on our drives back down I-95.
“Yes, we can go a lot,” I typed back.
I texted Dan a few times in the days after our sad Slack conversation, hoping against hope that our Moriarty’s date—dates, even—would happen. They didn’t. I never got to speak with him again.
You never want to talk to somebody as much as right after they leave. Dan’s gone, but our Slack conversations are still around, all the way back to when we started the company. For the last week, I’ve been going through five-and-a-half years of our DMs.
Dan was different, interesting, and really nice. Our chats show all that, plus how much he loved old newspapers, used things, weird people, Catholic League basketball, bootleg T-shirts and—good god—his hometown. Before Dan, my impression of Philly, overinformed by my D.C. sports fandom, was more in line with Johnny Most’s tagline: “The city of brotherly hate.” This was the town where Eagles fans famously beat the hell out of Chief Zee, leaving the WFT mascot lying in the Veterans Stadium parking lot in his underwear and with a broken leg. But Dan made me love the place. Hell, Dan could make W.C. Fields love Philly.
All the six-hour round-trip drives just to eat wings are but one sign of Dan’s influence. A few more: I’ve been going to sleep the last few years listening to the overnight guys at WIP-FM yak about Philly teams, I own a bootleg Sixers “Trust the Process” T-shirt, and I have the Wawa app on my phone.
When I learned Dan had died, I got in the car and headed to Philadelphia with my older son. I told the strangers sitting at the table next to us at Moriarty’s that we were from D.C. and had driven up to pay tribute to my brilliant buddy Dan McQuade, and how he was the unofficial mayor, a guy who knew everybody in and everything about the town, including how great the wings at Moriarty’s are. I had to stop my rambling eulogy a few times for tears, but I was going to get through it no matter what. Then I got back to eating, and the strangers left the restaurant. A few minutes later, the hostess came over and said somebody called and paid my bill over the phone. I really wish I could Slack that story to Dan.
Kelsey McKinney, Defector Staff Writer
I met Dan McQuade on what was, at the time, one of the worst days of my life. We were both remote workers at Deadspin in 2019, and were traveling on separate trains to New York City to film a video. I don’t remember what the video was supposed to be, because we never filmed it. While I was still on the train, Barry Petchesky was fired, and the whole site we loved began to fall like an avalanche: squeaking and subtle at first, then crumbling all at once. In the office, I said something funny and heard Dan’s laugh. Later, I would learn that he had a few laughs, including one that was polite and one that was genuine. I wish so badly that I could remember what I said, because I remember that his laugh was one of the few times I felt good that day. Dan could do that for you: light up a moment as dark as the night, his real laugh honking its way through the bad feelings. I keep thinking in this moment, when everything feels so bleak, dark, and miserable, how if only Dan were here, he could help to brighten it a little bit.
I moved to Dan’s city four years ago. It would have been easy for him—a born-and-raised Philadelphian who gave his free time, talents, and obsessions to this city—to gatekeep me, a new transplant. But he was thrilled. He showed me around the city. He took me hiking in Wissahickon. He taught me to say Schuylkill. Anywhere you went with Dan, there was something to learn. A street might hold the history of a legendary bar fight or a piece of random Eagles trivia, or it might just be the street he lived on once upon a time. This has come back to bite me at times. I took everything Dan said as law, so—for example—when he off-handedly told me that the corner where the two ridiculous iconic cheesesteak shops, Pat’s and Geno’s, face each other, each adorned with a thousand shiny lights brighter than the Sun, was called “Cheesesteak Vegas,” I called it that. It turned out that this was only a name that Dan used, not a common nickname. But I can’t let it go. It is Cheesesteak Vegas, and will always be to me.
To be with Dan in the city of Philadelphia felt like entering the inner circle of a celebrity, but a rare one that everyone likes. At stadiums, in bars, on the damn street, people came up to him. “Are you Dan McQuade?” they asked sometimes. More often, they were friends of his already. He knew everyone.
Dan and I joked about the absurdist idea of a Philadelphia celebrity. No one famous in the city of Philadelphia is famous anywhere else, we agreed. The city feels like a small town, even though it is one of the United States’ biggest metro areas. Never has that felt more true than in this past week after he died. I know he would have been stunned to learn that his photo was put up on the jumbotron at the Sixers game, and that his obituary ran in The New York Times. But he would have also been stunned to learn that everyone was talking about him. Every bar I went to last week, someone came up to me to express their sadness or tell me a story about him I’d never heard. He was a man of the people. He was ours.
Once, when I went with Dan to a Phillies game, our seats were way up high, so we stood in the standing-room-only area to yap, complain, and yell at the bullpen. They gave out Bryce Harper bobbleheads at the door that night, so every few minutes, someone would walk behind us asking if we wanted to sell ours to them. We didn’t. “Who are these people?” I asked Dan. “How much could these possibly sell for?” It was the first and only time I ever asked Dan a question about Philadelphia that he didn’t know the answer to immediately.
The game continued, and Dan offered to drive us home. I think it’s fine for me to say this now: At the time, he always parked in the garage at the Live Casino. When it opened, the casino ran a promotion that it would match any gambler’s status from another casino. Dan did gamble, but he didn’t have status. Not to worry! Dan knew guys, a much more valuable and useful thing to have. One of his guys made him a fake status card for another casino, and Live matched it, no questions asked. So Dan parked there for free every time. He drove me the back way home, and on the way, he told me about the SS United States. He’d told me about it a half-dozen times already, but I let him tell it again because I liked to hear him talk about going on the ship for a story and how it still held speed records. When he dropped me off, he told me he’d let me know what he found out about the Bryce Harper bobbleheads. By that point, I had already forgotten about my questions. Dan hadn’t.
I am a curious person, but compared to Dan, I am indifferent and bored of the world around me. What made him a great reporter was his insatiable need for answers, but he was also out of his house all the time. He really lived in the city of Philadelphia. He went to restaurants, volunteered at the needle exchange, and showed up when you had a party. The day after we went to the Phillies game, Dan called me. He had gone to the post office and run into a man he went to high school with (of course), who (could I believe it?) was there to ship the bobbleheads from last night’s game to the people who had bought them from him on eBay. He knew all the answers to my questions now! Did I want to hear them?
I have thought about that call a lot this week. Of course there are plenty of more emotional and profound moments that we shared. But the thing I admired Dan for the most is that he genuinely cared about the people around him as much as he cared about all his niche obsessions. He remembered what you liked and what you said. He sent pictures of things you might like, or might hate enough that it was worthy of your attention. He was one of the most ADHD people I have ever met, but his attention always found its way back to the people around him. I will miss getting texts from him during Love Island about how much he hated the basketball court, or how whipped cream must have sponsored the episode. I will miss asking him questions about the stupidest stuff imaginable, knowing that he would know the answer. I will miss him so much. I do already.
I am lucky that here, in his city, he is all around me and will remain so. A man like Dan McQuade can never really truly die, because he loved those around him so much. So many people have been molded by his curiosity, care, and passion, and I am so grateful to have been one of them.
Dom Cosentino, Former Deadspin Staff Writer
One of my last text conversations with McQuade, from just a few months ago, was typical of our correspondence. Exchanges like this no doubt look familiar to anyone lucky enough to have been his friend:
As that text convo indicates, many of our discussions took place right where our interests intersected: replica retro jerseys of obscure Guys We Remember, uniform aesthetics, random 1990s Eagles and Steelers games, Philadelphia dive bars (an enduring favorite topic of mine), and Big 5 basketball. This (and so much more) was McQuade’s canvas. He invited so many people to savor the Philly-centric touches he’d make, but he also listened eagerly as you filled in any blanks with scattered flourishes of your own.
After reading so many of the online tributes in the past week, the thing that will stay with me about McQuade was his capacity for friendship. My experiences seem to track with so many others’. Months might have gone by, and then there would be a text about my alma mater’s smoke machine (which the next day would become a blog), or Pitt basketball’s nonsensical black uniforms with the strange “P” logo. It was McQuade’s way of reminding you he was thinking of you, that you were his friend, and that he truly cherished that friendship. It might have been his most remarkable quality.
One particular lasting memory: McQuade and I formally quit our jobs together in person, at that crummy Times Square office space where Deadspin’s crummy new owners had moved us after they bought the parent company in early 2019. Most of the rest of the staff had already bounced over the course of the previous two days. McQuade and I shared a laugh when one of us (I forget whether it was him or me) had to tell the company’s forgettable HR nitwit where the Herb’s office was, to which one of us added the rejoinder, “Welcome to G/O Media!” Some time later, in a hallway near the lobby, the Herb himself appeared. McQuade said something, making sure to say it loudly enough for the Herb to hear: “You should treat your employees better!” The Herb didn’t react; he just kept slithering until he disappeared into some nearby office. McQuade and I then made our way down to the street, where we shrugged and said our goodbyes. I hate everything about that time, but I’ll always love what we all did that week.
I only saw McQuade a handful of times after that, but the text exchanges remained fairly common. In 2024, on the fifth anniversary of our resignations, he texted me and we relived the bittersweet details of that surreal morning. It was a sad but prideful day. I’ll miss those McQuade texts. I’m also incredibly heartbroken for Jan and Simon.
Justin Ellis, Defector Editor
Joining Defector after the site first launched in the fall of 2020 felt a little like I was a late-season addition to a hit TV show that largely had its shit worked out. I can’t stress how much this made me feel like I should not fuck up a good thing, or otherwise taint the chemistry, but at the same time I didn’t have the shared history with everyone else, none of the war stories or inside jokes. I wasn’t there to walk off the old site. My solution to this was to set up “office hours,” basically to get to know everyone. Dan was one of the first people to sign up.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but when Dan showed up, it did not take long for the conversation to jump the rails and get into sneakers and TV shows from the ’80s and ’90s. We swapped stories of our various pursuits of classic Jordans, and the bullshit that surrounds so much of the reselling market. This was the first of many times we talked about Baywatch and Knight Rider, and I learned that Dan’s collection of cult TV likely rivaled any archive. Naturally, he offered to send any episodes or clips I wanted to watch.
Dan was just profoundly generous, freely giving his time and patience, with whatever effort it took to unwind a story or mine any hobby. This gift made him an incredible co-owner and friend, but also a ridiculously talented writer who would devote time and energy to stories that would have bored or frustrated most of us from the jump. It’s the string that tied together Dan’s pursuit of a $2 billion deli fraud, the lost works of Ricky Jay, or answering the question of what U.S. presidents could actually parallel park. How many of us are halted on any given day by the question of whether something is worth your time? Dan knew that if you spend your time on something, that makes it all worthwhile.
Dvora Meyers, Former Deadspin Staff Writer
Though we were at Penn at the same time, I didn’t meet Dan until more than 10 years after we both graduated, when we were hired around the same time at Deadspin. We were both several years into our respective media careers, except I was already beaten down and cynical, and Dan was consistently upbeat and optimistic. I would soon come to realize that this was a feature, not a bug. It was a big reason why he was so good at what he did, and how he was able to continually produce unique, engaging work for so many years. It’s hard to imagine Dan affecting a “nothing new under the sun” weariness. For him, there was always something interesting or absurd that warranted further inquiry. I don’t think his idea well ever ran dry, and probably wouldn’t have even if he had lived another 50 years, which I, and everyone else, wished he had.
But all of that is secondary to how he treated others. Several years ago, I reached out to him because a good friend of mine was undergoing cancer treatment. My friend had told me that she loved his cat, Detective John Munch, from all the photos Dan posted to Instagram. I asked him to send me extra pics to pass along to my friend to help buoy her spirits. Not only did he immediately send over a small trove of photos of his gray cat, but he continued to do so without me ever having to remind him. Asking once was enough. Dan was the kind of person who was not only there for his own friends, but also for his friends’ friends.
Dan’s final correspondence to me was a video of him humorously flailing while lighting the Hanukkah candles. “Dan McQuade’s Old Fashioned Irish-Style Menorah Lighting,” as he called it. He was enthusiastic about the ritual as he tried to figure out which way to light—left to right or right to left, the age-old question. He explained his candle-lighting scheme like a basketball coach going over a play during a timeout, and he even managed to get a swipe in at Tom Brady. Perhaps this didn’t tick all of the Jewish law boxes, but it hit all the right comedic notes. And it was classic Dan: funny without being mean (except for the Brady part), and reveling in the weirdness of it all.
Dan, I know your memory will be a blessing. It couldn’t possibly be any other way.
Tim Burke, Former Deadspin Editor
Ten years ago next week, I came to Philadelphia for the first time to be deposed by Mitch Williams’s lawyers in a failed defamation suit attempt. While in town, I made it a point to check in with Dan, someone whom I’d been nudging off and on for years to come work for us. I had been doing that because Dan is the only person I’ve ever known whose mind works even somewhat like mine does, and it’s both a gift and a curse that for better or worse comes in extremely handy when doing news blogs. I found him fascinating.
What was supposed to be one drink with me and Tim Marchman at this wood-paneled, vinyl-boothed dive bar became a very long night, a trip to Steve’s Prince of Steaks, and I’m not even sure I remember how it ended. And Dan didn’t even drink! It was a stunning thing that this guy, whose work and online persona I had respected for so long, was also a person you just needed to be around.
And that’s because the Dan McQuade spirit is in being relentlessly enthusiastic about things you’re interested in to other people, because if you find it interesting, then someone else probably does, too. It’s what led to essential reporting like this, from near the site of Four Seasons Total Landscaping:
This is what I love—what so many of us love—about Dan: his ability to notice details that on the surface aren’t noteworthy but, when provided as color, add a richness to the real. And I’m still talking about Dan in the present tense because this is a person I genuinely love, and whose spirit I believe can live within all of us if we’re just willing to look around and say, “Hey, that’s interesting. Maybe someone else finds it interesting, too.”
Kathryn Xu, Defector Staff Writer
Dan was the second person I ever spoke to from the site, and the first I met in person. He helped conduct one of my interviews after I applied to be an intern; after I got accepted, but before I started, we grabbed lunch together. At this point, I already knew I shared some things with Dan: We attended the same college, and we both wrote for the sports section of the school paper. When we met up, it was at a little bakery and café near campus that just happened to be under the school paper’s offices. After we finished, I took him up to the sports office, where there was still a clipping of Dan’s from his time at the paper.
It was a short visit at a weird hour, and the office was almost entirely empty. But as we were leaving, a woman who worked there shouted, “D-Mac!” We stopped and turned around, and she said, “Is that Dan McQuade?” I remember her with her hands on her hips, but upon reflection, I don’t know if that was actually true, or if she just said it with a hands-on-her-hips manner: Oh, you, and I can’t believe my luck.
This is about the only time I have any school pride: that Dan graduated from there and remained as singular, that it was one among many things that I share with Dan. In his mass of loving, enjoying, and collecting, Dan had so much to share, but even more than that, he always knew who to share it with. Maybe it was his openness about what he loved—dead malls, bootleg tees, Philly—and the amount of detail with which he loved those things, that made him attentive to others’ own quirks and affections. All Dan needed was one sign.
Over the years of being his colleague, I have benefitted outrageously from that attentiveness. I like comics, so he immediately emailed me his own recommendations. I like trains, so he brought me a flash drive filled with gigabytes of train videos. I like SEPTA (two of our interests combined: trains and Philly), so he sent me photos of his son pointing at regional rail trains. I like PATCO, so he brought me a PATCO workman’s Camber sweatshirt he bought in a vintage shop ages ago.
Such a simple act of care: I have something to share with you. I saw this, and it made me think of you. I hope to have a fraction of Dan’s passion that allowed him to see how his life intersected with yours, and an ounce of his ability to make something of that. Dan understood that something can be worth so much more if it is shared. You can take anything and amplify it twofold: a weird sign, a hobby, memories, grief. It’s no wonder that Dan could exemplify Philadelphia and Defector to the extent that he did. Someone, if they are that sort of person, would give you gigabytes of train videos because he had them on hand (what!) and thought you might like them. The sort of person who, if I were to see him 20 years from now, I would call out to him and put my hands on my hips, in total disbelief at my luck.
Maitreyi Anantharaman, Defector Staff Writer
I used to make fun of Dan for the Slack messages he sent us during Sixers games. Often I’d read his latest gripe about Tobias Harris or Danny Green, only to pull up the score and see that Philly had won comfortably that night—never even trailed. One season, I decided to make a spreadsheet to log all the messages: “dan’s sixers doomer slacks.” There were columns for “score at time of comment” and “egregiousness of doomerism (1-10).” My own NBA team would win 37 fewer games than Dan’s that year, and in my battered state, I couldn’t fathom watching hoops the way he did. What I wouldn’t give for just one sloppy, unsatisfying win! I only ever logged two messages, both sent on a night the Sixers dropped an early-season game to the Spurs: “The Sixers are apparently tanking for Wemby” and “They were 14-point favorites. Rivers should get fired tomorrow.” I gave up the bit because the Sixers did play like crap to start the year, enough so that his complaints didn’t feel like doomerism. Dan wasn’t wrong, just early. Doc Rivers would be fired at the end of that season.
After that year, the doomer Slacks came less often. Dan had other things on his mind, namely that he and Jan were expecting a baby. The last time I saw Dan was at our website’s fifth birthday party in New York, back in September. I’d spent the week thinking about how much we’d all changed since we started Defector. My coworkers got engaged and married, moved to new cities, bought homes, wrote books, had families. It was especially cool to see Dan become a dad to Simon. But fatherhood was just this new, natural expression of the love he already gave so freely to others. If you knew him, maybe you read that love in the thoughtful texts he’d send, or heard it when he talked about Prevention Point, the needle exchange program where he’d volunteer and give out pizzas on Friday afternoons. (He had these great photos of himself there, in typically killer fits, smiling next to huge towers of boxes.)
What I admired most about Dan was the way he could live so openly and generously, but still have enough love and spirit to bring home at the end of the day. He was the proudest husband and dad, and a devoted son, always recounting something his dad said during the Penn State game last weekend or sharing a recent text from his mom. He told me he’d stopped by his parents’ place on the way up to New York for the party, because a half-hour into the drive, he realized he missed Simon and just needed to see some family. Dan knew everyone, and everyone knew Dan, but the people who captivated him most were the ones right beside him. This, I think, is just what happens when you live like Dan did, always searching for magic in the familiar and reliably finding it. Dan treasured detail and context. He believed life was in the color. To say it another way, it didn’t matter that the Sixers won. The better story was how and why, and how it made him feel when they did. Any other telling was dishonest.
A funny thing happened around the time Dan got sick: My basketball team started winning. I wish he were alive so I could tell him that I get it now—that the Pistons are 37-12, first in the East by a healthy margin, and they are the dumbest, fraudiest, clankiest motherfuckers I have ever seen in my life.
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