Paul Zimmerman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Lionel Zimmerman (born October 23, 1932, New York City), known to many fans as "Dr. Z", is an American football sportswriter who currently writes for the weekly magazine Sports Illustrated. He is sometimes confused with (but not related to) Paul D. Zimmerman, a sportswriter who covered college football for the Los Angeles Times from 1931 to 1968.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early career
A graduate of the Horace Mann School in the Bronx before becoming a college football player at Stanford and Columbia University, where he wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator, a member of an Army football team, and a four-year player in New Jersey semi-professional football leagues, Zimmerman began his formal journalism career at the New York Journal-American and the New York World-Telegram & Sun before moving on to become a regular at the New York Post in 1966.
[edit] At Sports Illustrated
In 1979 he moved to Sports Illustrated, where he writes a weekly column and game predictions, and awards the magazine's yearly All-Pros. Since the mid-1990s, Zimmerman has been a frequent contributor to Sports Illustrated's website. There he adds a weekly column, "power rankings" of how good he thinks each team is, and a very popular mailbag to his other contributions to the magazine.
Zimmerman's method of football analysis is a comprehensive one, in which he records several football games on television per week, sometimes as many as eight, and then watches and re-watches each game while charting the onfield action in notebooks. His charts include both subjective opinions on the players and gameplay as well as objective statistical information. At any point afterward, he can then give detailed analysis of the players, teams, and games that he charted, tracking who plays well against whom, which players are improving or declining, which superstars are over-hyped, and which underrated players to "plug" in his writings.
The weekly mailbag that Zimmerman writes is a rambling one, breaking out of the conventional webpage mailbag format in which the reader's question or comment is presented which the writer then replies to. Instead, Zimmerman writes in a style somewhat resembling stream of consciousness, moving fluidly from one subject to another, liberally sprinkling in tidbits of football history, pieces of popular culture, quotations, admittedly bad jokes and puns, rants on one subject or another, and sometimes even answers the readers' questions. He often uses the literary device of his wife, the "Flaming Redhead", as he calls her, to comment on his own ramblings, ideas, or the insults his readers send him. Whether or not Zimmerman's wife actually sits near him and throws in her clever remarks is debatable, but her sneering, sarcastic, and honest character blends nicely with Zimmerman's gruff, opinionated nature.
While at the New York Post, Zimmerman also wrote a regular wine column, and his wine opinions still hold a prominent position in his weekly mailbag, with football fans adding wine queries to their football questions or comments.
Annually Zimmerman rates the performance of television network sportscasters, criticizing those football announcers who do little more than hype the stars while making inane comments on the game, ignoring the strategy or play of the game, or generally making mistakes in their commentaries. Zimmerman also goes out of his way to praise the sportscasters who provide meaningful, intelligent commentary for football fans. While covering the NFL draft in the '80s, Zimmerman was asked what the NFL player of the '90s would be like. Zimmerman responded, "The player of the '90s will be so sophisticated that he'll be able to pass any steroid test they come up with." [1]. This was the end of his own television career.
[edit] Books
Zimmerman is also the author of 1971's football classic The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football and his 1984 update of that book, titled The New Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football. His other books include The Last Season of Weeb Ewbank and Mile High: The Story of Lyle Alzado and the Amazing Denver Broncos. He currently serves on the 39-member Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee, and formerly was a member of the Hall's smaller Senior Committee, a position which Zimmerman resigned in protest over the committee's repeated rejection of men he deemed worthy candidates.
