Jenkins, Dan 1929–

(Dan Thomas B. Jenkins)

PERSONAL: Born December 2, 1929, in Fort Worth, TX; son of a salesman and an antiques dealer; married third wife, June Burrage (a restaurant owner); children: Sally (a sports writer), Marty, Danny. Education: Attended Texas Christian University.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Doubleday Publicity, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Writer. Fort Worth Press, Fort Worth, TX, sportswriter, 1948–60; Dallas Times Herald, Dallas, TX, sportswriter, 1960–62; Sports Illustrated, New York, NY, sportswriter, 1962–84; Golf Digest, Wilton, CT, writer, beginning 1985.

AWARDS, HONORS: William D. Richardson Award, Golf Writers Association of America.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Sports Illustrated's The Best Eighteen Golf Holes in America, foreword by Ben Hogan, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1966.

The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1970.

Saturday's America, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1970.

Football, photographs by Walter Iooss, Jr., Abrams (New York, NY), 1986.

You Call It Sports, but I Say It's a Jungle Out There, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1989.

Bubba Talks of Life, Love, Sex, Whiskey, Politics, Foreigners, Teenagers, Movies, Food, Football, and Other Matters That Occasionally Concern Human Beings, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1993.

Fairways and Greens: The Best Golf Writing of Dan Jenkins, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1994.

(Editor, with Glenn Stout) The Best American Sports Writing, 1995, Houghton Mifflin (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Francis J. Fitzgerald) Greatest Moments in TCU Football, Adcraft (Louisville, KY), 1996.

(Contributor) Jules Alexander, The Hogan Mystique: Classic Photographs of the Great Ben Hogan, American Golfer (Greenwich, CT), 1996.

I'll Tell You One Thing, illustrations by Michel Bobot, Woodford Press (Emeryville, CA), 1999.

NOVELS

Semi-Tough, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1972.

Dead Solid Perfect, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Edwin Shrake) Limo, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1976.

Baja Oklahoma, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1981.

Life Its Ownself: The Semi-Tougher Adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett and Them, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1984.

Fast Copy, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1988.

You Gotta Play Hurt: A Novel, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1991.

Rude Behavior, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist: A Novel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2001.

Slim and None: A Novel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2005.

Author of monthly column for Playboy, beginning 1985. Coauthor, with Curt Sampson, of The Eternal Summer: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Hogan in 1960, Golf's Golden Year. Author of film and television screenplays.

ADAPTATIONS: Semi-Tough was adapted by Walter Bernstein for a film of the same title, United Artists, 1977, and for a television series of the same title, American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. (ABC), 1980.

SIDELIGHTS: A popular golf and football writer at Sports Illustrated for more than two decades, Dan Jenkins has been hailed as possibly "the best sportswriter in America" by Larry L. King in Harper's. Widely appreciated for his sense of humor and strongly expressed personal opinions, Jenkins has been compared to such noted American humorists and satirists as H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain. "I always thought it takes tremendous ego to be a writer," Jenkins told Stephanie Mansfield of the Washington Post. "To sit down and put your name on it and presume to tell people. But I enjoy it. Because I … do know more about it than they do and I want to inform them."

According to Sarah Ballard in People magazine, Jenkins has "two artistic premises—that sport is primarily a laughing matter and that life is best viewed from the back table of a friendly joint, preferably late at night." Though based in New York City for much of his career, Jenkins is proud of his Texas roots and often prefers the company of friends from his home state. Admirers say he loves to sit around and talk, and they suggest that his conversation is as funny and outspoken as his writing. However, as Jenkins reminded Mansfield, laughter is a tactic for survival. In life, he observed, "most of what's going to happen is bad. You know that going in. You got to learn to laugh."

Jenkins was "the quintessential Sports Illustrated writer" according to Roy Blount, Jr., a coworker who spoke to Mansfield. "He knew everything and everybody," Blount said, and he could report on a golf tournament by sitting at a nearby bar, where the contestants talked to him about the day's play. One of Jenkins's first books, The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate, is a collection of Sports Illustrated articles surveying golf tournaments and golf history. Jenkins evokes the early days of the professional tour in the 1930s, when the prizes were small and players compensated with a wild sense of fun. He proceeds to the more careerist atmosphere of contemporary tours, where successful golfers operate like businessmen and the lesser players await their chance at riches. According to Rex Lardner in the New York Times Book Review, "Jenkins dissects golfing … but does it so good-naturedly that the reader must marvel at the knowledge displayed while trying not to fall out of his hammock laughing."

Saturday's America is a similar collection, but about college football. Jenkins comments on the famous personalities, teams, and rivalries, questioning such mainstays of football lore as the football movie and the Heisman Trophy. The people he meets range from a high school prospect harassed by college recruiters to a group of dedicated Texans for whom a "football weekend" means driving hundreds of miles to attend four different games. In King's opinion, Jenkins offers his readers more than great sportswriting. "There is social commentary in Jenkins' work," King wrote, "delightful airings of the latest cultural absurdities, and some of the funniest one-liners since [comedians] Mel Brooks or Woody Allen sat down to tickle the typewriter."

With no commitment from an agent or a publisher, Jenkins wrote his first novel, Semi-Tough. "It was the first raunchy sports book," in Blount's words, and its success rocketed Jenkins to fame and fortune. Set during the week before a Super Bowl game, the novel parodies a popular commodity in sportswriting, the athlete's diary. The narrator is Billy Clyde Puckett, a football star from Texas who plays for the New York Giants. Billy Clyde and his teammates are uninhibited and unrefined, and they spend their time drinking, chasing women, and making racist jokes about black football players. However, Billy Clyde is more than just a wild country boy, as David Halberstam pointed out in the New York Times Book Review—he is a "country slicker," whose glamorous, well-paid job gives him unusual access to the social elites of both Texas and New York City. By viewing life through Billy Clyde's eyes, Jenkins can mock Texas oil millionaires, homecoming queens, and trendy New York restaurants. Not much happens in Semi-Tough, but everyone talks a great deal—including Billy Clyde, who speaks his diary into a tape recorder. "The style throughout is essentially black-white-rural-Southern, our richest national language," Halberstam observed, and "Jenkins has a marvelous command of it." "Even veteran Jenkins readers will be amazed at the achievement of his first novel," sportswriter Pete Axthelm wrote in Newsweek, and King noted in Life that "if you have the stomach for belly laughs, semi-tough language and spoofing just about everything in modern America, this book should be your stick of tea."

The freewheeling comedy continues in Jenkins's later novels. Dead Solid Perfect views professional golf through the eyes of Billy Clyde's uncle, Kenny Puckett. Limo, written with a friend from Texas, Edwin Shrake, records the misadventures of a television network program director. Baja Oklahoma (meaning "Lower Oklahoma," that is, Texas) focuses on a small-town waitress who fulfills her dream of becoming a country music star.

Reviewers often say that Jenkins bases his writing on vivid language: Texas slang, colorful insults, and, most notably, the comic one-liner. He concentrates on language so much, some suggest, that his books are episodic and lack the plot and character development many readers expect in a novel. Jenkins fans, however, do not consider his idiosyncrasies to be flaws. Citing the author's caricature of the Super Bowl in Semi-Tough, King asked readers of Life magazine: "In all these exaggerations, who does not recognize huge lumps of truth?" Asked about his prose style, Jenkins told Mansfield: "I'm not committed to boring people. I'm not committed to long, drawn-out boring soliloquies. I basically write books that I want to read."

A number of reviewers have been offended by the rough manner of Jenkins's characters, particularly the disrespect they show toward blacks and women. In New Statesman, for instance, Brian Glanville suggested that Jenkins identifies personally with Billy Clyde and that he holds up the players' bigotry and crudeness for admiration rather than ridicule. Jenkins's many defenders suggest that humor is irreverent by its very nature, and so cannot respect anyone's sensibilities. As Axthelm explained, Semi-Tough "treats blacks no more disrespectfully than it treats women, Texans, businessmen, coaches, referees … and anyone else who happens to take the game of pro football too seriously." In Modern Fiction Studies, David L. Vanderwerken compared Jenkins to such renowned comic writers as Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, and Lenny Bruce, all of whom, he noted, "have been accused of grossness and viciousness." He reminded readers that "the voice of American satire is a voice of outrage expressed outrageously."

Won over by the liveliness of Jenkins's humor, some reviewers admitted to liking his work despite their better judgment. "I am living proof," wrote Carolyn Banks in the Washington Post Book World, "that even a feminist can love Billy Clyde, who, if he were real, would have to be served with an apple in his mouth." Similarly, William C. Woods in the New Republic read Dead Solid Perfect with "grudging delight." He commented: "The people are so weird, the jokes so vile, the dialogue so infected with vindictive humor, and the whole mood of the book so animated by feverish indifference to the 'rules' of storytelling that … you wonder whether Dan Jenkins' casual and contemptuous way of writing fiction isn't a valid new voice, so reactionary as to be truly avant-garde."

In 1977, Semi-Tough was adapted for a major motion picture. Shortly thereafter the book became the basis of a television series, and Jenkins, to his great frustration, was invited to participate. He wrote six scripts, none of which were produced, and the program was canceled after less than one month on the air. The experience encouraged Jenkins to write Life Its Ownself: The Semi-Tougher Adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett and Them, a sequel to Semi-Tough that adds extensive lampoons of the media world to the targets of its predecessor. Billy Clyde, sidelined by a knee injury, quits professional football to become a television sports commentator. He endures the jargon of network executives and sports celebrities while his wife stars in a situation comedy about a woman who bravely runs a restaurant while succumbing to an unspecified illness. Meanwhile, professional football disintegrates as players strike for free agency by making their game as inept and boring as possible. The book, which returned Jenkins to the best-seller lists, was acknowledged by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times for its "outrageous inventiveness." Life Its Ownself "needs no more life pumped into it," the critic asserted, because "it's got a superabundance."

In 1984, after twenty-two years and more than 500 articles for Sports Illustrated, Jenkins angrily left the magazine. As he told Mansfield, he and the managing editor "had a big difference about the quality of my golf writing." Jenkins continued: "Since I knew a whole lot more about it than he did and since I had as much journalistic experience as he did … I didn't think I oughta take that." Instead, he began writing for Golf Digest and became a monthly columnist for Playboy, where, in Vanderwerken's opinion, Jenkins's bosses put him on "a very loose editorial leash" and Jenkins "certainly has unleashed himself." He attacked such social ills as the affectations of 1980s cuisine, but he reserved special venom for two of the biggest institutions in American football, the National Football League (NFL) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). He lambasted the NFL's version of the professional game, contending that the play is brutal and ridiculous at the same time, greatly inferior to college football. On the other hand, he repeatedly criticized the NCAA, college football's governing body, for its hypocrisy. Jenkins was outraged that the NCAA would penalize college athletes, many of whom grew up in poverty, for surreptitiously accepting money while the colleges openly make multimillion-dollar profits from the athletes' work. In such columns, Vanderwerken wrote, Jenkins is "outrageously and unabashedly prejudiced, jaundiced, eccentric, ornery, taking well-aimed slapshots at all sorts of tomfoolery across the spectrum of contemporary sport." As with any satirist, the critic suggested, Jenkins speaks to the world's "good people"—whoever finds pretension the most unforgivable human failing.

While continuing to write on golf for Golf Digest, Jenkins also produced more golf-themed novels. Both The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist and Slim and None: A Novel focus on somewhat successful professional golfer Bobby Joe Grooves. In the first book, Bobby Joe is trying to win his way onto the Ryder Cup team, while defeating an adversary on tour, Nuke Thorssun. In Slim and None, Bobby Joe has just divorced his third wife and has a love interest in the beautiful mother of highly touted up-and-coming golfer, Scott Pritchard. The young golfer is Bobby Joe's competition in a major tournament. Continuing to draw on his insider knowledge of professional golf and its history, Jenkins also inserts his Texas roots and colorful language into both texts. Reviewing The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist a critic in Publishers Weekly stated, "this goofy encyclopedia of golf shines with rays of simple truth."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 241: American Sportswriters and Writers on Sport, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Golf Digest, June, 2001, Guy Yocom, "His Ownself: Dan Jenkins on Pros, Presidents, and When a Funny Line becomes a Cheap Shot," interview with Dan Jenkins, p. 156.

Harper's, Larry L. King, review of Saturday's America, p. 95.

Life, September 29, 1972, Larry L. King, review of Semi-Tough, p. 25.

Modern Fiction Studies, spring, 1987, David L. Vanderwerken, "Dan Jenkins' Needle," p. 125.

New Republic, December 28, 1974, William C. Woods, review of Dead Solid Perfect, p. 30.

New Statesman, November 29, 1974, Brian Glanville, review of Semi-Tough, p. 792.

Newsweek, September 18, 1972, Pete Axthelm, review of Semi-Tough, p. 107.

New York Times, October 18, 1984, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Life Its Ownself: The Semi-Tougher Adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett and Them, p. C25.

New York Times Book Review, June 7, 1970, Rex Lardner, review of The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate, p. 8; September 17, 1972, David Halberstam, review of Semi-Tough, p. 2.

People, December 3, 1984, Sarah Ballard, "Laughter Is the Key Ingredient in Dan and June Jenkins' Recipe for Handling Life Its Ownself," p. 141.

Publishers Weekly, July 9, 2001, review of The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist, p. 43.

Washington Post, November 10, 1984, Stephanie Mansfield, "Dan Jenkins, All Tough; On Jocks, Women, Writing, and Life Its Ownself," p. D1.

Washington Post Book World, October 7, 1984, Carolyn Banks, review of Life Its Ownself, p. 3.