Paul Zimmerman

Paul Lionel Zimmerman (born October 23, 1932 in Philadelphia, U.S.) is the son of Charles S. Zimmerman and Rose Zimmerman. Also known to readers as "Dr. Z", he is an American football sportswriter who 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.

Zimmerman suffered a stroke on November 22, 2008, which, combined with two later strokes, has left him unable to walk or write and only able to speak a few words; he can still communicate with some physical motions and is said to, as of 2013, still be sound of mind.

Zimmerman was born in Philadelphia and moved to New York in elementary school. He was married to Dr. Kate Hart for 20 years. They had two children, Sarah and Michael. Zimmerman remarried Linda Bailey ("the Flaming Redhead") in 1999.

Zimmerman graduated from 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. An offensive lineman, he was a member of a United States Army football team while stationed in Germany, and later played minor-league football in 1963 for the Westchester Crusaders of the Atlantic Coast Football League. Zimmerman began his formal journalism career at the New York Journal-American and the New York World-Telegram and Sun before moving on to become a regular at the New York Post in 1966. In addition to football, Zimmerman covered three Olympic Games for the Post, including the hostage crisis at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, Germany.

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