Ben Simmons is a champion now. Not in the NBA, not at Madison Square Garden, not under the playoff lights he once seemed destined to own, but on the water, in the Bahamas, where his South Florida Sails won the 2026 Sport Fishing Championship Walker’s Cay Open.
There is a sentence nobody saw coming during the height of “The Process.”
The former No. 1 pick and three-time NBA All-Star’s fishing team dominated the event at Walker’s Cay, finishing with 2,925 points after six blue marlin releases and three sailfish. The New Jersey Sea Birds placed second with 1,450 points, nearly 1,500 behind the Sails. Capt. Mike King, Brad Adam, Ben Simmons and company did not just win. They ran away from the field.
The timing makes the story feel almost too strange to be real. Simmons reportedly turned down a veteran-minimum opportunity with the New York Knicks last offseason, and now those Knicks are in the Eastern Conference Finals while Simmons is celebrating a professional sport fishing title. The Knicks could have offered only a minimum deal because of their salary-cap situation, and reports at the time said Simmons passed while hoping for something above that level.
That contrast is brutal, funny and oddly fitting. The basketball world spent years waiting for Simmons to reclaim the version of himself who defended like a menace, passed like a 6-foot-10 point guard from another laboratory, and made three All-Star teams before everything became complicated. Injuries, confidence, fit, and criticism turned his NBA story into one of the league’s strangest unfinished books. He last played for the Clippers during the 2024-25 season and remains away from the NBA spotlight.
But on the water, Simmons found something different: ownership, competition, control, and apparently, a winning team. He acquired a stake in the South Florida Sails Angling Club as part of a broader move into Sport Fishing Championship, a professional offshore fishing circuit that has attracted athlete investors from multiple sports.
So yes, Ben Simmons is a champion. It just took a boat, blue marlin, and the Bahamas to get there.
