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 owne.