Mina Kimes is a famous American journalist who specializes in business and sports reporting. The extremely charismatic and likable Kimes has won numerous journalism awards. Aside from appearing on screen, Mina Kimes has also written for Fortune, Bloomberg News, and ESPN. She is a senior writer at ESPN and an NFL analyst on NFL LIVE. Let’s find out more about her.
Mina Kimes: Things You Want To Know
When was Mina Kimes born?
Mina Kimes was born on September 8th, 1985 in Omaha, Nebraska. Her father worked in the United States Air Force as a captain. Mina Kimes is biracial and her mother is of Korean descent.
Where did Mina Kimes study?
Mina Kimes moved to Arizona with her family during her teenage years. She attended high school at Mesquite High School in Gilbert, Arizona. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
Mina Kimes: Journalism Career
Business journalism
Mina Kimes’ first position after college was at Fortune Small Business Magazine in 2007. As a business journalist, she won awards from the New York Press Club, the National Press Club, and the Asian American Journalists Association, amongst other places. Her 2012 investigation entitled Bad to the Bone exposed the unauthorized use of a cement to repair bone tissue, with lethal consequences, for which she won the Henry R. Luce Award. The Columbia Journalism Review included her exposes among its business must-reads for 2012. In 2014, she received the Larry Birger Young Business Journalist Prize from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
She joined Bloomberg News in 2013 as an investigative reporter. Her profiles of business executives Doug Oberhelman of Caterpillar, in a piece titled King Kat, and Sears executive Eddie Lampert, in a piece titled The Sun Tzu at Sears, won her the Front Page Award for business reporting.
ESPN
Kimes was offered a position by ESPN editors in 2014 after she wrote an essay on Tumblr about a “bond between herself and her dad and the Seattle Seahawks.” At ESPN, she has written about young sports superstars, such as University of Houston basketball player Devonta Pollard. She has written profiles of NFL players Aaron Rodgers, Darrelle Revis, Tyrod Taylor, Antonio Brown, Baker Mayfield, and Michael and Martellus Bennett, and wrote a feature on Korean League of Legends star Faker.
Kimes is an active panelist on Around The Horn and has appeared on Highly Questionable, The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz and High Noon. She hosts an NFL-focused podcast entitled The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny, a reference to her dog.
From October 2019 until July 2020, Kimes hosted ESPN Daily, a daily news podcast.
On June 30, 2020, Kimes was announced as an NFL analyst for ESPN’s relaunch of NFL Live for the 2020-21 NFL season.
Mina Kimes also wrote an article for ESPN in 2018 which predicted the bright future of current Dallas Mavericks superstar Luka Doncic before he was drafted. She wrote that he is by far the greatest European prospect in NBA history and he is physically so imposing that if “he was born in the American South, he would have been a football player”.
In 2019, Mina Kimes was hired by the Los Angeles Rams to be a color commentator for their preseason football games.
Kimes was a co-host, along with Amanda Dobbins, of The Ringer’s “Big Little Live” aftershow about the HBO series Big Little Lies.
Who is Mina Kimes married to?
Mina Kimes got married to Nick Sylvester in 2015. The couple lives in Los Angeles along with their dog Lenny, who makes lots of appearances with Mina Kimes online.
Which is Mina Kimes’ favourite football team?
Mina Kimes is a huge fan of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. Her love for the team started because her father is from Seattle. Mina Kimes even has an “XLVIII” tattoo on her right bicep to commemorate the Seattle Seahawks victory over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.
Speaking about her passionate love for football, Mina Kimes said:
I f****** love football. If I didn’t work at ESPN, which I didn’t until 2014, I would still be watching a psychotic amount of football for someone that doesn’t do this for a living. I hope that never changes.”
Pablo Torre, a longtime friend and fellow ESPN commentator, said this about her, “Mina is not only a very intelligent, creative, enterprising person, she is also somebody who wants to master things. What she has done in sports, it’s astonishing, really.”
“Talking about those things doesn’t take away the joy that I get from talking about sports,” Kimes said. “In fact, it stems from it because I wouldn’t talk about them if I didn’t love sports so much. … I think the people that are best equipped to convey those messages or have those conversations are often the people who love sports the most, and I hope that when people watch me, they feel that way.”
“This has to do with all sorts of bigger picture stuff about where we are as a country, which I understand, but when it comes to is it OK for a Seahawks fan to express as much but to also profile Aaron Rogers, I think the proof’s in the pudding,” Torre said.
Former NFL quarterback, who appears on numerous segments with Mina Kimes, was initially skeptical about her because she was not an ex-athlete and she acted like a know-it-all. Orlovsky said this about Kimes, “She’s the person who never played who kind of talks like she did.”
Kimes acknowledges her unique position as a woman with an authoritative voice in football, but she doesn’t focus on it.
“You have to prove your worth in other ways,” said Kimes, whose fluency in advanced statistical analysis has even made Orlovsky a believer. “I have always found that if I came in excessively prepared, emphasis on excessively, that was sort of the best case I could make for myself.”
Before her first radio appearance, Mina Kimes came on the set with 70 pages of notes. She ended up using only three of those pages. Coming in as a successful feature writer, when working often meant weeks or months of reporting for just one well-thought-out story, the rapid pace of recording radio or live TV seemed daunting.
The thick stack of notes only illustrated the pressure she put on herself to be perfect.
“My fear of making mistakes or my anxiety about being perceived as less than serious or perfect was holding me back from being good at my job,” Kimes said. “People don’t want to watch television or listen to the radio or listen to podcasts for perfect. They want personality.”
Kimes’ unique blend of humor, self-deprecation and knowledge makes her a fan favorite. Those fans include her co-workers: Torre said filming “Highly Questionable” with Kimes and Dan LeBatard is the most fun he has on TV these days.
During a pandemic that’s persisted for five months, it feels to Torre that it’s as close to hanging out with his friends in real life as he can get.
Aside from being an extremely smart, well read and intelligent sports journalist,, Mina Kimes is also one of the funniest journalists around. She has recently started acting like a Tampa Bay Buccaneers super fan just to rub the nose of good friend and fellow sports journalist Katie Nolan, who is a die hard New England Patriots fan.
Here’s another clip of Mina Kimes’ best bloopers, showing how her self deprecating sense of humor has made her so popular among fans.