Some people hated T.J. Simers.
This is where the former Orange County Register and longtime Los Angeles Times sports columnist would defy the expectation of a follow-up line about how some people loved him, too.
Simers, who died Sunday at 73 years old after a battle with a brain tumor, was a force on the Southern California sports scene and relished his role as a villain and an agitator. He enjoyed his verbal sparring with coaches and star athletes at press conferences and in locker rooms and didn’t hesitate to slice and dice those he found deserving of his award-winning column’s wrath.
“He had guts,” said Bill Dwyre, Simers’ sports editor at the Times for much of his tenure there. “He had great journalistic instincts. He was the sports department’s Mike Royko.”
For the Illinois-raised Simers, Royko was the standard by which columnists were measured. The Chicago institution and Pulitzer Prize winner took on public figures in news pages of multiple Windy City publications; Simers, however, did it in the sports pages.
After he graduated from Northern Illinois University, he worked for several newspapers across the country, and Simers landed at the Times in 1990. He was a prominent NFL beat writer during the stretch when the Los Angeles area lost two teams and then tried to land a new one through the league’s expansion process.
Simers was fiercely competitive and had no qualms questioning the myriad power brokers who wanted to own a new team and the league owners and executives.
The Times’ Dwyre eventually elevated Simers into a columnist role and spent the next couple decades jokingly taking the blame for creating the monster.
Once Simers was armed with a column, he occasionally was as much of the story as the Lakers, Dodgers, Angels, Trojans and Bruins he covered. Some on the Southern California sports scene seemed to get the role he played and traded punches with him; he respected them. Others complained – he would’ve said they whined – or tried to avoid him; they did not garner his respect.
And his approach was a different flavor to readers who were used to “pablum,” as Dwyre put it.
“They couldn’t believe the things he’d write about their teams,” he said.
The situation at the Times eventually devolved for Simers – the details of his departure were the subject of his lawsuit against the Times for age and disability discrimination – and he joined the Register in 2013 for a stint that lasted just nine months before he took a voluntary buyout.
In his introductory column, he took a jab at a local team while he showed he had heart.
“I have the three prettiest grandchildren in the whole world, so yours finish fourth at best,” he wrote back before his fourth granddaughter was born. “There’s nothing wrong with that; the Angels seem to aspire every year to finish fourth.”
In his final column for the Register, he wrote about the initiative he started to raise money for Children’s Hospital of Orange County. He convinced readers to contribute $10 to CHOC for every game the Angels won.
Anybody who got to know Simers understood that his column persona was one thing, but the Yorba Linda resident’s devotion to his family was another altogether. His wife Ginny and two daughters – and son-in-law – were frequent characters in his columns and the most important parts of his life, at least until he had grandchildren.
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Simers’ death drew mostly kind reactions on social media – the relative lack of derision might’ve disappointed him, even if it had been in poor form – and a tribute at the end of ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” a show on which he was an original panelist in 2002.
“RIP, T.J., thank you for all you did to lift me up and love and prayers to your beautiful family, my dear friend!” former Times reporter Lance Pugmire, now with PPV.com and boxingscene.com, posted on X (formerly Twitter).
After all, some people did love T.J. Simers.
T.J. Simers columns in the Orange County Register
ESPN’s @TonyReali and @AroundtheHorn pay tribute to original ATH panelist T.J. Simers to conclude today’s show. pic.twitter.com/Y1k9iG4VQ2
— bill hofheimer (@bhofheimer_espn) June 3, 2024
