Dan Jenkins, the poet laureate of Fort Worth and all things TCU, died Thursday night at the age of 89.
He had been in failing health, suffering from kidney failure, when he passed away at Fort Worth’s All Saints Hospital with his wife June and their children at his side.
His unmatched humor and gift of storytelling graced the pages of the Fort Worth Press, Dallas Times-Herald, Sports Illustrated, Playboy and Golf Digest for more than 60 years. He authored 25 books, 12 of them novels and three that became movies, introducing the world to such unforgettable characters as Billy Clyde Puckett, Big Ed Bookman and Bobby Joe Grooves.
The late Blackie Sherrod hired Jenkins, a product of Paschal High, to work at the Fort Worth Press when Dan was still a student at TCU. His rise as a golf writer coincided with the golden years of Fort Worth’s Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson.
At the intrepid age of 21, he found himself covering Hogan’s 1951 U.S. Open victory at Oakland Hills. In all, Jenkins wrote from 215 of golf’s major championships, covering the game’s greats from Hogan, Sam Snead and Jack Nicklaus to his often contentious relationship with Tiger Woods.
Jenkins’ needle for Woods remained sharp to the end. As Woods struggled to resurrect his career in 2015, Dan took to Twitter to “congratulate” him for shooting his age – Jenkins’ age, 85, not Tiger’s.
Jenkins and his staff-mates at the Press were like a Who’s Who of Texas sportswriting – Sherrod, Bud Shrake, Jerre Todd and Gary Cartwright. They shared a common gift – the Sunday morning football game story, in which they turned the previous day’s 60 minutes into a visceral experience from the first paragraph.
Jenkins once began a football story for Sports Illustrated lamenting the dying art of playing defense:
At a time when it seems to a great many of us that the whole world is either on strike, on fire, on dope, or on a sneezing jag because of all of the hair dangling in its face, it only stands to reason that the religion of college football should reflect some kind of fierce neurosis. And it does. With only half of the 1968 season gone, the computer can verify what the startled fan, the bewildered coach and the out-of-breath tackler have all been thinking. Briefly this: nobody can stop anybody. Or as Arkansas Coach Frank Broyles puts it, “There isn’t a defensive coach in America who can sleep at night without taking pills.”
It was Jenkins’ golf reporting for SI, though, that elevated him to the ranks of the country’s greatest sportswriters.
This was the way he began his story on the 1978 British Open when Nicklaus won on the Old Course at St. Andrews:
“As long as a man has to go for a walk on a golf course, there is hardly a better place than straight up the last fairway at St. Andrews, where one is surrounded by 500 years of history and embraced by the building of the old town itself. It is especially wonderful if you do it the way Jack Nicklaus does. Nicklaus made the walk again last week with 30,000 warmly sentimental Scots creating enough noise to have drowned out the roar of a squall howling in off the North Sea.”
He won countless awards in his career, and in 2012 Jenkins was named to the World Golf Hall of Fame, one of a select few writers to be so honored.
His devotion to his alma mater, TCU, was well-documented. Dan attributed this and his football acumen to his wife June.
“I married a homecoming queen, which means I know as much about college football as the next person, as long as the next person is not Darrell Royal or Bear Bryant,” he was fond of saying.
Dan and June had two sons, Marty and Danny, and a daughter Sally, an acclaimed sports columnist with the Washington Post.
In May of 2017, TCU named the press box at Amon G. Carter Stadium in his honor.
At the ribbon cutting ceremony, Jenkins said he was grateful because, “They could have sold the name to Taco Bell.”
“Awards are great,” Jenkins noted, “especially when you’re vertical to receive them.”
