A Cook’s Tour 
Books
Grumpy Old Man
At 68, legendary Fort Worth sportswriter Dan Jenkins is irritated by pretty much everything. He gets sweet revenge in his aptly named new novel, Rude Behavior.
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Like Billy Clyde, Jenkins would go on to star at TCU, albeit on the greens rather than the gridiron. And even as he captained the Horned Frog golf team, he began his journalism career, taking a job at the Fort Worth Press alongside Blackie Sherrod, who hired him on the strength of an article he had written as a senior in high school in 1948. For the next decade-plus, at both the Press and the Dallas Times-Herald, Sherrod, Jenkins, Shrake, and Gary Cartwright turned the Metroplex into a home for the nation’s best sportswriting. Among their most famous achievements was the invention of Rickie Ron and Dickie Don Yewbet, two nonexistent West Texas running backs whose incredible stats sizzled off the sports page every Saturday morning. But Jenkins didn’t have to cross the line into outright fiction to produce imaginative, entertaining work that was a few steps to the left of the usual breathless, reverent game story or armchair quarterbacking column. “Dan Jenkins was doing [New Journalism] when he was nineteen years old, and he didn’t know it,” Sherrod says in The Franchise, Michael MacCambridge’s history of Sports Illustrated magazine.
In 1959, after two mulligans, Jenkins married his third wife, June Burrage, who’d been a high school friend. (The couple, still together, have three children: two sons, Marty and Danny, and a daughter, Sally, a celebrated sportswriter in her own right.) Three years later, they moved to New York, and Jenkins went to work at Sports Illustrated. Despite his innate Texanness, he was destined for a city more on a par with his outsized personality. “He’s the most confident guy I ever met,” Cartwright says. “It never occurred to him he couldn’t do anything. He got to New York and in two weeks every maître d’ in town knew his name.” Along with Shrake (who joined the SI staff a year later), Jenkins embraced the hard-bitten, hard-drinking life of an ink-stained wretch. He became a legend at such places as “21” and Elaine’s, not only for his wit and charm but also for his impressive stamina and readily available expense account.
Of course, there was also the work. The sixties were SI’s golden years, and as the country’s leading college football expert as well as a preeminent golf writer, Jenkins was untouchable. As MacCambridge notes, his combination of clout and creativity was so potent that he was able to cover the Masters, an event he has now documented for 47 straight years, seemingly without ever leaving the clubhouse. Instead, the story would come to him between alternating doses of J&B and coffee. (These days, Jenkins decries the clean-living modern sportswriter—“They don’t drink and smoke anymore. They jog and shit!”—though he now takes his coffee half decaf, half regular.) His work at SI ultimately earned him a place in the pantheon of America’s greatest sportswriters. Jenkins “influenced sportswriting as much as anybody who has ever written,” veteran sportswriter Mike Lupica says in The Franchise.
When Jenkins sat down to write his first novel in the early seventies, he ended up producing something with just as much impact. “It was a revelation, that goddamn book,” says Herman Gollob, the Waco-born, Houston-raised Jewish Aggie who edited Semi-Tough. “It revolutionized sports novels.” A rave review by David Halberstam in the New York Times helped land it on the best-seller list—even though, as Jenkins puts it, the book “led the league in profanity for its time.” Its unadorned racial banter was also praised by the likes of Alex Haley and Gore Vidal. Jenkins himself thinks Semi-Tough was popular because “people thought, ‘Well, this is what pro football is really like behind the scenes,’ which wasn’t what I intended. I thought I was writing a romantic comedy, if you’ll forgive me for using the phrase.”
Whatever the case, a significant Texas writer had arrived. “Dan’s books are rich,” Gollob says. “He would never want to say these are books of social criticism or morality, but that’s exactly what they are.” Jenkins captures and lampoons a certain bombastic breed of Texan better than anyone, whether the big bucks and big egos of men or the big hair and big hearts of women. His reach extends well beyond sports into country music (Baja Oklahoma), Texas history (1988’s Fast Copy), and even network TV politics (1976’s Limo). The latter, coauthored by Shrake, is his personal favorite. “It’s the funniest book either one of us ever wrote,” he says.
It’s the only book they ever wrote together, though all of Jenkins’ novels are filled with the comic fruit of their relationship, particularly in 1993’s You Gotta Play Hurt, his rollicking satire (via Jim Tom Pinch) of sports journalism. And Semi-Tough’s infamous girl-rating system (with ten as the worst and one as the best, just like the college football polls) came straight out of life. In essence, Jenkins and Shrake are Billy Clyde and his wide receiver compadre Shake Tiller (though Jenkins says that, in reality, Big Ed Bookman is the character he most resembles). If their paths have diverged professionally and geographically since their days at SI, the two remain quite a pair: Shrake tall and dry; Jenkins ruddy and barbed. They are the kind of friends who can finish each other’s stories and swap verbal darts without ever drawing blood.
“Dan throws away more golf balls than most people own in their lifetime,” Shrake says after lunch, as he and Jenkins move from downtown Highlands to the leafy peaks and valleys of the Cullasaja Country Club.
“We play here because nobody f—s with us. We hit as many balls as we want, and we don’t keep score,” says Jenkins, now decked out in a purple TCU cap, white TCU golf shirt, and TCU glove.
Jenkins can be plenty competitive if circumstances (i.e., a personal wager) demand it, but on this day, it’s all about fun. That means proceeding straight to the back nine when the first few holes turn out to be logjammed. It means being on what passes for his best behavior. “I have a reporter watching,” he cracks, “so I have to repair my divots.” It means hitting multiple balls off the tee, then picking the best one. (In print he lists “hit till you’re happy” as one of the “great modern inventions,” and he means it.) On the course there’s a generous mulligan policy. “It’s mountain golf,” he says. “Nobody can read these greens.” Then, on a downhill hole that includes a rough, a sand trap, and two water crossings: “Here’s another one of the greatest golf holes in America we don’t know how to play.”
After Jenkins launches a particularly big boomer off the tee, Shrake mentions that in his younger days his friend “could hit it as far as Hogan.” He’s not joking. Jenkins has golfed since he was eight and starred in college, though full-time devotion to the game was never in the cards. “I think everybody who knows how to play golf at an early age fancies himself a pro golfer some day, but at fourteen you run into guys who can beat your ass,” he says. “I was a scratch player, but my game didn’t travel. And by then I wanted to be a sportswriter.”
He still does. On a Sunday night after a major tournament, Jenkins’ Golf Digest deadline looms as large as a twenty-foot putt, but that’s when he’s truly in his element. “It’s like you’ve seen this theater, and now it’s time for you and your trusty Olivetti—or your trusty Toshiba—to perform,” he says. The only trouble is that he’s been performing for nearly half a century. Being mythic has its price. “I’ve become the guy I used to run from: the old fart standing under the tree on the clubhouse verandah telling stories. ‘Oh, you think these greens are fast …’”
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