November 1998
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.
THE SCENE couldn’t have played any better if Dan Jenkins had conceived it himself. The Fort Worth native is sitting with Edwin “Bud” Shrake, his friend and fellow scribe, at a restaurant in Highlands, North Carolina, a mountainous, golf course—bejeweled enclave he describes as the closest thing the region has to a Santa Fe. As if on cue, the waitress arrives with news of the day’s lunch special: herb-encrusted meat loaf.
“Encrusted with what?” Jenkins asks, eyes crinkling.
“Herbs,” the waitress says.
“Can’t I just get meat loaf?”
Semi-fancy food is just one of the things 68-year-old Jenkins rails against in his eighth novel, Rude Behavior (Doubleday), which was published in September. It has been a pet peeve for most of his career, though as a best-selling author and world traveler, perhaps it’s his own fault that he finds himself in so many restaurants that serve that kind of stuff in the first place. “I have to get off on all the things that bother me these days,” he says. “The older you get, the more irritated you get. I have sport with everything I deal with in this particular life.” In Rude Behavior the list also includes pro football owners and referees, incomprehensible college-sports regulations, diminishing magazine expense accounts, Hollywood producers, traffic, bad barbecue, gold-digging women, adulterous men, West Texas snakes, and political correctness in general.
The third installment in a trilogy that began with 1972’s Semi-Tough and continued with 1984’s Life Its Ownself, Rude Behavior chronicles the latest adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett, the pride of Paschal High, the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs, and the New York Giants. When we last left Billy Clyde, he was enduring a less satisfying stint as a network NFL commentator. In the new book he enters the league’s upper echelons, as he and his financially well-endowed father-in-law, Big Ed Bookman, look to put an expansion team halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo in a town they’ve named Big Food—a tribute to the region’s giant biscuits and gravy. Billy Clyde’s usual coterie (best pal Shake Tiller, ex-teammate T. J. Lambert, wife Barbara Jane Bookman, sportswriter pal Jim Tom Pinch) is along for the ride, and so is “bidnessman” Tommy Earl Bruner, who was imported from 1981’s Baja Oklahoma.
Rude Behavior is Jenkins’ first work of fiction since 1993, a longish time for such a prolific writer but understandable given that he has undergone both a bypass operation and gallbladder surgery in recent years. Anyway, he’s been busy doing other things: As Golf Digest’s reigning wiseman, he pens a monthly column and covers the sport’s four major tournaments, and he has edited a series of biographies of Texas football greats, including Doak Walker, Sammy Baugh, Darrel Royal, and John David Crow. “I write a book when I feel like there’s one I want to write,” he says. “I know how it’s going to start, I know how it’s going to end, and I like to surprise myself in the middle.”
In the case of Rude Behavior, Jenkins’ primary impetus was the chance to revisit old characters. But beyond that, it feels like a long-overdue expectoration of bile from a man who has loved and loathed football for as long as he can recall. The truth is, he has never much cared for the professional variety since the day in 1974 that Sports Illustrated switched his beat from college ball to the NFL. Twenty-four years later, he still thinks the pro game is tarnished by a meaningless regular season, ridiculous financial prerogatives, pampered players, and bloated coaching staffs full of pretentious “strategists.” But mostly he hates the way it dominates the media. “It’s the most overwritten, overcovered sport I’ve ever been around,” he says. He once mocked the media’s coverage in an essay that parodied the daily grind of stories during Super Bowl week:
“NEW ORLEANS—The two Super Bowl teams practiced offense and defense today. They will probably do it again tomorrow.
NEW ORLEANS—Both coaches said breaks would decide Sunday’s game, unless they don’t.
NEW ORLEANS—Injuries could play a big part in Sunday’s Super Bowl, or not.
NEW ORLEANS—An NFL spokesman confirmed today that the Super Bowl halftime show will be more spectacular than ever.”
Jenkins’ real grudge against pro football, however, is that it has overshadowed the college game. “[The NFL] has turned college football into what high school football used to be,” he says. But if he is somewhat disillusioned with NCAA regulations (a bumper sticker in Rude Behavior reads “I’d Rather Be on Probation Than Lose to Baylor”) and the increasing commodification of the “amateur” game, he still finds resonance in college ball’s fan allegiances and regional significance. He even prefers the annual drama of the “poll bowls” to any kind of playoff system. “I’d rather have two teams claim the national championship and let people argue about it,” he says.
Jenkins, who has a collection of college football annuals going back to the thirties, calls himself a “historical nut” when it comes to the sport. “It’s my hobby and my passion,” he explains. “It’s a lifelong love affair. On Saturdays, don’t talk to me. I’ll even watch Maryland—Wake Forest.” Although it’s painful for a TCU alumnus to admit it, he lives in college ball’s current cradle—the Southeast, specifically Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida—which puts him within easy distance of Gators, Seminoles, Hurricanes, and (Georgia) Dawgs. “It’s like being in Texas in its college football heyday,” he says. “National championships stacked up like old tires. I keep telling everyone, ‘Hey, this don’t happen forever.’”
If anyone should know, he should. “I’ve been around college football my whole life,” he says. “If you grow up in Texas and you’re not interested in football, they drown you at an early age.” In a Playboy column a decade ago, Jenkins rhapsodized about a “gigantic struggle” he attended in 1938, when he was eight. The opponents were Baylor and TCU. Davey O’Brien’s Horned Frogs won the national championship that year, despite the season-long efforts of the pollsters to anoint Notre Dame. It was that season, Jenkins wrote, that made him want to become a sportswriter, “if for no other reason than to help combat Notre Dame’s clout in the polls in future years.”
