Gone Fishin’ With Ben Simmons

17 min read

IT’S APPROACHING 11 A.M. on a humid day in May. Ben Simmons has been out fishing in the waters southeast of Miami since 6:15, his boat pushing away from the marina with a waning crescent still hung in the sky. The 29-year-old has spent most of the morning up on the bow of his 53-foot Scout, casting and reeling, casting and reeling, waiting, scanning. “Any moment, something can happen,” he says. A few hours in, not much has. He caught some bar jack, a wahoo that he’ll keep to eat later, and a mahimahi that was so small it had to be tossed back. So he finally takes a seat inside the air-conditioned enclosure on the deck of his boat and puts his bare feet up. His hands rest in his lap.

“There’s nothing there besides what’s underneath,” he says, gesturing at the glassy ocean, when I ask what he likes about fishing. His answers are short at first, becoming more animated the longer we talk. He keeps a watchful eye on Captain Ray (“Cap” to Simmons), who takes him on many of his fishing excursions, and exits the enclosed center console to grab a rod. Simmons finds fishing peaceful, but he also likes the “surprise factor,” that at any moment, anything can happen, and you have to be ready for that.

Just a few minutes later, right on cue, he sees Cap’s line catch. “Oh, he’s on!” Simmons says, and in one motion, his lithe 6’10” frame is up and through the enclosure, his powerful arms taking control of the rod. He gets the fish in easily. A barracuda. Not terrible for eating, but it runs a high risk of causing ciguatera, a type of food poisoning. Plus, it “smells like shit,” he says. (Fortunately, I didn’t get a chance to confirm.) So it lives another day, and Simmons returns to his seat, clearly reinvigorated by the rush. “I’m back, I’m back,” he says with a chuckle.

It’s good to see Simmons smiling and moving freely, exhibiting the combination of size, speed, and vision that first caught the eye of NBA scouts. It’s why he was once considered one of the most promising young talents in basketball. On the day we go fishing, however, it’s been 379 days since Simmons stepped on an NBA court. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been paying attention. “Watching the playoffs gave me a little bit of juice to wanna compete at that level,” he says. “I’m like, I can compete with any of these guys.”

Before he can do that, he needs to get his mind and body right. Since suffering a pinched nerve in a 2020 game, he’s been dealing with debilitating flare-ups in his lower back and legs. Simmons compares his injury to charging your phone with a finicky cord—any sudden movement or change to the angle and you’ve lost the juice. To further complicate matters, the pain and discomfort can linger long after the tissue has been repaired. Healing requires an entire nervous system reset. And—maybe you’ve noticed—Simmons’s last several years haven’t exactly been low-stress.

In 2021, he and the Philadelphia 76ers went through one of the most public, drawn out, and dramatic breakups in the history of professional sports. A four-month standoff put Simmons under an intense scrutiny that, in many ways, hasn’t let up in the five years since, largely because his career hasn’t been the same since. After the Nets bought out the rest of his five-year, $177 million contract in February 2025 and he did a half-year stint with the Los Angeles Clippers, he decided to opt out of the ’25–’26 season. “What if I wanna take some time for myself and put myself in the best position to play [again]?” he asked himself last off-season. “I was like, You know what? Fuck it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But this is what feels right.”

At the time, nobody really knew Simmons’s mindset because, well, Ben Simmons doesn’t always offer a lot of insight into Ben Simmons. So in December, when it was announced that he had purchased a majority ownership stake in the South Florida Sails Angling Club, a fishing team that competes in a professional league called the Sport Fishing Championship (think the PGA Tour or Formula One, but for fishing), instead of returning to the court, the news—like all Ben Simmons news—made waves: Sorry, three-time NBA All-Star Ben Simmons has…gone fishing?

Today, yes, he has. He’s wearing a tan shirt and black shorts, both loose and billowy. His black Costa sunglasses rest on the brim of a forest green trucker hat that says reel one fishing club, which is a name shared by his boat and his apparel company. Its slogan? “Good things come to those who wait.” So Simmons is waiting—for the fish right now, for the right opportunity to return to basketball in the months ahead. “I needed to get away, and have some space, and just find myself again.”

SIMMONS GREW UP in Australia, in Newcastle, New South Wales. His dad, Dave Simmons, a Bronx native, played professional basketball for the Melbourne Tigers and then married Julie Tribe, an Australian who worked as an aerobics instructor and an executive assistant. (Simmons’s accent is slight but you can hear it slip out in his a’s: “Newcaaahstle.”) He was big and gifted with a rare athleticism that made him stand out not just in basketball but also Australian rules football (“footy” for the locals). “When he was 14 or 15, to say he might make the NBA, that was a stretch,” recalls his godfather, David Patrick, who played basketball with Simmons’s dad in Australia. “No one was thinking that—that’s not a thought when you’re in Australia.”

But scouts in America begged to differ after seeing a 15-year-old, 6’8″ Simmons play at an invitational camp in California. He made such an impression that, the next year, he moved to Florida to play at Montverde Academy, a basketball factory whose best products ride the conveyor belt all the way to the NBA. By the time Simmons was a junior, he was already the most drooled-over prospect in his class. In addition to size and strength, he had a speed and athleticism usually reserved for much smaller players. His skill set presented a nightmare for opponents: He could guard anyone, but no one could guard him. Then there was his vision. He had the three-moves-ahead foresight of a chess grandmaster. He didn’t have a reliable jump shot, but he was so wildly talented in every other facet of the game that people compared him to LeBron James and Magic Johnson anyway.

In 2016, after a brief one-and-done stopover at LSU to meet the NBA’s minimum age requirement, Simmons was selected number one overall in the NBA draft by the Philadelphia 76ers. He broke his foot before the 2016 season and missed it, but in 2017–2018, his first year playing, he largely lived up to the expectations placed on him. He helped take the 76ers from the fourth-worst record among the NBA’s 30 teams (28-54) to the fifth best (52-30). He won Rookie of the Year. “Hey, LeBron, Ben Simmons is here, we’re all good,” radio host Colin Cowherd famously said on his show that year.

He made the NBA All-Star team each of the next three seasons. He became the second-fastest player in the history of the NBA to record 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 1,000 assists, trailing only Oscar Robertson and achieving the feat in 9 fewer games than Magic Johnson and 33 fewer than LeBron. In February 2020, Simmons tweaked his back in a game against the Milwaukee Bucks. The pain was apparently so bad he threw up. He missed the next eight games, and then COVID halted the season. When it resumed five months later, Simmons played in three games and partially dislocated his kneecap. Season over. During the 2020–2021 season, he bounced back: He finished 12th in MVP voting and was runner-up for Defensive Player of the Year.

But it wasn’t all Brotherly Love. Though Simmons helped lead the Sixers to three straight playoff appearances, they kept getting booted early. And, well, he never developed a consistent jump shot. Incredibly, Simmons, who has played primarily as a point guard, has made just five three-pointers in his NBA career. (He made an All-Star team before he made a single three.) In fact, the average distance of Simmons’s 3,720 career field goal attempts is 4.4 feet from the rim (almost five inches more than Shaq’s average). This became a particular problem in the postseason, when teams exploited this weakness by backing off and daring Simmons to shoot. Sixers fans grew frustrated that he didn’t shoot more, and with each playoff exit from 2018 to 2020, the pressure built, thwarted hope collecting like water in a kinked hose.

And then, in the 2021 playoffs, it burst. The Sixers lost to the Atlanta Hawks in the second round. All series, Simmons struggled from the free throw line. In the final three games, he scored just 19 points, and he didn’t take a single shot in the fourth quarter. The moment that changed the entire trajectory of his career came with about 3:30 left in the decisive Game 7, his team down by two. Instead of taking an open, game-tying dunk, he passed the ball to his teammate Matisse Thybulle, who was fouled. Thybulle made only one of two free throws, and the Hawks kept the lead for the rest of the game. The Sixers went home—again.

Much of the blame zeroed in on the dunk that never happened. For Sixers fans, it was the charge that set off their powder keg of collected frustrations: that he was too passive, lacked confidence, and needed to shoot more. Simmons got killed in the press—and even caught heat from his own organization. His teammate Joel Embiid told the media that Simmons’s pass was the turning point in his team’s loss. Coach Doc Rivers told a reporter, “I don’t know,” when asked if Simmons can be the point guard of a championship team.

Simmons has since said that, in hindsight, he should’ve just dunked. When I ask him about it today, he seems good-natured about it all, saying he jokes with Thybulle about that moment. “I wasn’t hitting my shit, so motherfucker, you knock it down!” Simmons laughs. “I just gave it to somebody who was shooting a higher percentage free throw at the time. So what is the difference? How about he should’ve made the fucking free throws? But he didn’t and it is what it is. That’s still my boy. I love the guy.”

Before the 2021–2022 season, Simmons asked for a trade, despite having four years and $147 million left on his contract. But the Sixers, unable to find a trade they liked, kept him. A standoff began. Simmons didn’t report for training camp and the Sixers didn’t pay him the $8.25 million he was owed on October 1. Simmons missed the home opener, then told the team he wasn’t mentally ready to play. Because there was a clause in the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement that said players couldn’t be fined because of “mental disability,” some people found this to be convenient timing. And because Simmons refused to meet with the team’s mental health specialists, the Sixers continued fining him, eventually withholding nearly $20 million. (Simmons filed a grievance to get this money and eventually settled in arbitration for an undisclosed amount.)

Four months later, in February 2022, he got traded to the Brooklyn Nets. In his introductory press conference, Simmons addressed his mental health. “For me, the mental health has nothing to do with the trade,” he said. “It was a bunch of things that I was dealing with as a person, in my personal life, that I don’t really want to go into depth with. But I’m here now—it’s a blessing to be in an organization like this. I’m just looking forward to getting back on the floor and building something great here.”

Except he aggravated his back again while trying to get in shape after four months off and missed the remainder of the 2021–2022 season. People called him soft or suggested he might be milking the injury. (Stephen A. Smith went so far as to call Simmons “the weakest, most pathetic excuse for a professional athlete we have ever seen in not just American history, but the history of sports.”) He got his first surgery that offseason, a microdiscectomy, to relieve pressure on the pinched nerve. Over the next three seasons, he played just 108 of 246 regular season games, had two seasons cut short by previous back injuries, had a second surgery (a microscopic partial discectomy), and signed with the Los Angeles Clippers. Despite playing 51 games in the 2024–2025 season and showing up presumably healthy, Simmons says he was in “so much” pain. “People have no idea. I couldn’t walk around.”

Because Simmons’s injury involved nerves, he often had shooting pain in his glute and down his leg. He says he felt so fragile that oftentimes he had to change how he breathed. I ask if he can give me an example of something he could do easily before the injury that became difficult after it. He laughs at the absurdity of it. “Go and get a rebound. Dunk the ball. Guard. Play defense. Be physical. Everything you need to be a basketball player. It felt like I was just kinda out there as a body.”

I ask him if it’s true that he struggled with his confidence during the end of his time in Philly. “I was injured,” he says, sounding weary, like someone who is tired of having this argument again. “So many people speak about confidence. If I was not confident, I would not get on the court again, I would not go to the Clippers, I wouldn’t play in Brooklyn. It’s health. It’s just being healthy.”

Simmons says it took him a long time to realize that it was also a nervous system issue. “You can’t be in a state where you’re in a high-stress situation all the time, especially trying to recover from a back injury,” he says. “I would’ve rather gone through a broken foot again, ’cause it would have been clear and easy.”

This is why Simmons finds it particularly frustrating when people question his love of the game or his competitiveness, or constantly evaluate his game through the lens of how he once played. “The joy that I play with comes from being healthy,” he says. “How do you love something when you’re fucked up? How do you love something that you do when you’re incapable of doing it?”

When I ask Simmons why he didn’t just tell people how much pain he was in, he says that he didn’t want it to sound like an excuse. “The people I’m closest to, I’ll explain it to them,” he says. “But at the same time, I don’t have the energy to prove it to everybody, you know? And people are gonna make up whatever they want anyway.”

This is where much of the frustration aimed at Simmons comes from: He’s closed off and doesn’t always offer much in the way of explanation. His answers can also be inconsistent. When referring to his time in Philly in a later conversation, he says he was “second-guessing” and “overthinking” on the court. When I ask if he’s referring to his confidence or his body, he says it was “a mixture of things.”

His godfather says his reserved nature is intentional, a response to being so exposed as a teenage phenom alone and away from home. “He had to learn to put up boundaries quickly,” he says.

Of course, it might also be the case that what he’s gone through is not easily explained. Fans are constantly looking to Ben Simmons for answers about what happened to Ben Simmons—the missed shot opportunity, the injuries, the mental battles—but I gather that Ben Simmons came out on the water, in part, because he’s still trying to understand that too. “People are always looking for a quick answer, and so many different things were happening to where I couldn’t give an answer,” he says. “Or I didn’t have an answer.”

SIMMONS’S FIRST MEMORY of fishing is casting off a jetty at a dog beach in Newcastle when he was around 7 years old, using prawn and shrimp as bait. He “was always a family-first kid,” recalls Patrick, his godfather. “He was always with his dad, everywhere he went, holding his leg, always with his brothers and sisters.” As the youngest of six kids, he was mischievous and playful. “Ben was always up to something. If something went missing, it was probably Ben.”

Out on the water, I get a peek at this playful side. Each time Captain Ray stops the boat at a new spot, Simmons jogs his willowy frame up to the bow, rod in hand. “See how he runs up there?” says Cap, who calls Simmons one of the most tenacious fishers he’s seen in his 30 years on the water. “He’ll do that 5,000 times. Even if he doesn’t get a bite, he’ll do it, and do it, and do it.”

At one point, hungry for more action than he’s getting from the boat, Simmons slides his feet into a huge pair of fins, grabs a pole spear that’s not much taller than he is, and goes to do the work his lure couldn’t. Though Simmons describes himself as “pretty chill and calm”—a guy who likes “to barbecue with the boys, go fishing, watch some footy, just relax, have a cold beer”—I wouldn’t say his fishing disposition is relaxed. “When I’m on that boat, I’m trying to learn as much as I can every time,” he says.

Cap says being out on the boat is definitely Simmons’s “happy place.” Simmons turned to fishing—a craft that he wanted to learn more about, and could do so away from the scrutiny of others—at a time when he needed a break. “When you have a lot of things that are not going right for you in terms of what you love to do, you gotta put yourself in a different environment, and I don’t think I did a good enough job of putting myself in the right environment,” he explains. “I just kinda let it bang on me, and it hit on me the whole time until I had enough.”

“I feel like that moment when I decided [to sit out of the ’25–’26 season] and I had that control and power, that’s when [the weight] came off.”

Part of taking back that control and power may have been buying the ownership stake in the South Florida Sails. Upon the news of the purchase, Simmons told ESPN’s Andscape he “got the opportunity to invest” thanks to some luck and timing, and he hopes to bring attention to an otherwise niche sport. “There’s so much to it that people just don’t understand,” he said. “These guys are fishing on million-dollar vessels, and they’re out for days at a time. So, it’s tedious and gritty, but a lot of fun. It’s one of those worlds where you just got to kind of experience it, get into it and see what it’s about.”

From the moment he arrived in America at 16, thrust into the spotlight, and then in the NBA at 19, people have had high expectations for Simmons—what he should do, who he should be, how much he could achieve. He responded by becoming one of the best NBA players, made more than $203 million, and is now channeling that drive and passion into another sport. Whether we consider that a success story or one of the NBA’s greatest what-ifs might say more about what we expect of our athletes than it does about Ben Simmons.

“Everybody thinks that [Ben] should’ve been LeBron or should’ve been Magic, or could’ve been this or could’ve been that, or he should’ve taken Philly to the finals or whatever the case may be,” says Patrick about his godson. “But I’m like, man, if you could’ve told me when he was 15 years old that he would’ve been the number one high school player in the country, the number one pick, a three-time All-Star, the Rookie of the Year, like, is that not enough for people to be like, man, he’s had an awesome career?”

It’s approaching noon as we head back toward the marina, the sun in full force. As the water brightens to a pale blue, Simmons shares a similar reflection. In much of our time together, he’s kept his answers tight, maintaining those boundaries he learned long ago. But now, after nearly an hour of talking, his guard seems to slip a little, and it feels like the closest I’ve gotten to his raw, unfiltered thoughts.

“You see shit every day that [makes] you feel like you should be more successful, have more money, have this, have that, whatever the fuck it is, but it’s not reality,” he says. Then, a few beats later: “When do you stop?”

THE NEXT TIME I talk to Simmons, he’s just returned from the Bahamas, where his South Florida Sails won a three-day SFC tournament in Walker’s Cay. Simmons wasn’t fishing, but he was one of the seven team members on the boat, running up and down the boat’s tower, trying to spot fish. With his help, the anglers on his team brought in six blue marlin, the most valuable prize at 450 points each, and his team racked up 2,925 points, the most by a large margin. When the news broke, the Internet lit up. Some made jokes that he’d finally won his championship, others speculated why he didn’t dunk the ball in 2021, and many seemed genuinely happy for him.

“Who would’ve thought we’d be on ESPN for some fishing?” Simmons tells me over the phone from L.A. He’s out there seeing some specialists about his back and knee. He says he’s feeling great, something he hasn’t felt in so long he can’t even put a date on it. “You kind of fall into it just being a normal thing, and then you’re like, Oh, wow, like this is how I really should be feeling. So it’s cool to feel that now.”

The plan is to stay in L.A. for a few days and then return to Miami, where he’ll ramp up his training: two and a half to three hours of lifting and body work, as well as hour-and-a-half sessions on the court, with a day or two off every week. He hopes to be back to full strength by his 30th birthday, July 20. He’s now an unrestricted free agent, and I ask him explicitly if he’s planning to play in the NBA next year.

“I plan on getting as strong as I can physically, getting my ass on the court, and then the team realizing that my abilities will be needed,” he says. “I don’t have a plan on where.” He feels like he still has a lot to offer teams (“You can’t teach 6’10” and IQ,” he says), and he’s been talking to coaches who have told him to get healthy, because if he’s healthy, he has a spot. “Maybe I’ll go back to Philly,” he says. “Miami would be nice. And not because it’s Miami—I like Erik Spoelstra, I like the Heat, I like their organization, I like the culture.”

Simmons seems to be in a good place mentally now, but with all the scrutiny that comes from being Ben Simmons, I wanted to know if there’s added pressure for this comeback. “Nah, there’s no pressure,” he says. “I had pressure when I was injured. People are gonna say the same thing every single time. It’s like, All right, well, if that’s what you think, then that’s what you think.” He thinks people are quick to forget the impact he could have on the court in his best moments, the way he contributes in ways that don’t show up on a stat sheet. “When I’m out there, I make everybody better. I play defense. I get offensive rebounds.”

If he’s finally at peace and feeling good, though, why go back at all?

“I think this is just what I’m choosing to do, like, no one’s forcing me. It’s never been about, do I love playing basketball? That’s never a question. That’s in my DNA. I think sometimes you get over all the bullshit that comes with it, though.”

Which makes me wonder—while he’s here reflecting, on the cusp of turning 30, fresh off his win at Walker’s Cay, perhaps about to embark on his comeback—is there anything he’d do differently?

“Nah, I’m Ben Simmons. I just gotta keep doing what Ben Simmons wants
to do.”

This story originally appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Men’s Health.

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