Paul Lionel Zimmerman was born on October 23, 1932, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and died on November 1, 2018.
He was known to readers as “Dr. Z”.
He was an American football sportswriter and former player.
He wrote for the weekly magazine Sports Illustrated, as well as the magazine’s website, SI.com.
He is sometimes confused with Paul B. Zimmerman, a sportswriter who covered football for the Los Angeles Times from 1931 to 1968.
He endured a stroke on November 22, 2008, which, joined with two later strokes, left him unfit to walk or compose and just ready to talk a couple of words; Zimmerman was as yet ready to speak with some physical movements and as late as 2013, was still of sound personality.
He moved on from Horace Mann School in the Bronx before turning into a school football player at Stanford and Columbia University, where he composed for the Columbia Daily Spectator.
A hostile lineman, he was an individual from a United States Army football group while positioned in Germany, and later played small time football in 1963 for the Westchester Crusaders of the Atlantic Coast Football League.
He started his formal news-casting profession at the New York Journal-American and the New York World-Telegram and Sun before proceeding onward to wind up an ordinary at the New York Post in 1966.
He moved to Sports Illustrated in 1979, where he composed a week by week section and amusement forecasts, and granted the magazine’s yearly All-Pros until his stroke.
He was best known for NFL picks distributed each week amid the NFL season.
Zimmerman was famous for supporting his wagers. For example, he would ‘pick the Cowboys—as long as they can stop the run.’
He was the writer of the football tome The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football (Dutton; modified release, 1970) and his 1984 refresh of that book, The New Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football (Simon and Schuster).
Zimmerman other books incorporate Football Lingo (WW Norton 1967, with Zander Hollander); The Linebackers (a 1972 short content for Scholastic Press); The Last Season of Weeb Ewbank (Farrar Straus and Giroux 1974); and Duane Thomas and the Fall of America’s Team (Warner Books 1988; credited to Thomas and Zimmerman, it contains journal passages by Thomas yet generally the content is that of Zimmerman).
His diary “Dr. Z: The Lost Memoirs of an Irreverent Football Writer” (Triumph Books) was discharged in September 2017, with stories accumulated and altered by Peter King of Sports Illustrated’s MMQB site.
Paul Lionel Zimmerman passed away at 86 years old.