Dan Jenkins slipped the surly bonds of this realm on Thursday, dying at age 89, but he left behind a legacy as one of golf’s preeminent writers in history as well gifting literature and pop culture the zany and eccentric, from Cecil the Parachute to Billy Clyde Puckett and cousin Kenny Lee Puckett, and Juanita Hutchins.
He was, in short, the humminest sumbitch who ever pounded on a laptop keyboard.
At Sports Illustrated, Jenkins was the publication’s lead college football writer, covering that sport’s biggest names and teams with hundreds of columns later compiled into a book titled Saturday’s America.
Jenkins authored 25 books, including Sports Makes You Type Faster, his last, published last year.
Awards bestowed on him included the Red Smith Award, the Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism, the ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing.
The press box at TCU’s Amon G. Carter Stadium is named in his honor.
Jenkins, a TCU alum, was also a member of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame, and received the lifetime achievement award in sports journalism from the PGA of America.
In 2012, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, only the sixth media member to receive such a distinction.
“Being from Fort Worth, I would follow Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson anywhere,” Jenkins said at the time. “Since they’re in there, I’m happy to be the third guy from Fort Worth so included.”
More recently, he donated his papers to UT Austin, which also honored him and his award-winning career.
In all, he covered more than 220 major golf championships, beginning with the 1951 U.S. Open at Oakland Hills, won by his good friend and fellow Fort Worthian Ben Hogan, who shot a final-round 67.
That round, Jenkins would insist over the next seven decades, was one of the greatest rounds he had ever seen.
When it was all said and done, he had covered all the greats, from Hogan and Nelson to Palmer, Nicklaus, Mickelson, to, perhaps, Jordan Spieth. (Time will tell the tale.)
And, yes, Tiger, too, who was not a fan.
The feeling was mutual.
In an email to this writer last summer, he described Tiger’s new “good guy” persona in the aftermath of scandal as “phony.”
Jenkins’ career began at Paschal High School in Fort Worth, writing for the Paschal Pantherette. His classmate and newspaper colleague was Bud Shrake.
It’s still difficult to wrap the head around two guys of such immense talent being on one high school newspaper staff. How fun British lit must have been.
The beginnings of his career as a professional writer began when someone sent Fort Worth Press sports editor Blackie Sherrod a piece of satire Jenkins had written for the Pantherette.
“He thought it was funny and offered me a job,” Jenkins said.
If the Paschal staff was good, the Press sports staff incomprehensible, eventually becoming Sherrod, Jenkins, Shrake, Jerre Todd, another Paschal and TCU pal, and Gary Cartwright.
Of Shrake, Jenkins recalled Sherrod asking: “What am I supposed to like about him?”
Wrote Jenkins in his autobiography: “‘He’s a natural writer, and he doesn’t like sports that much.’ When Bud came to the office for an interview Blackie asked him which sports he liked best.
“‘I’m torn between croquet and polo,’ Bud said. That did it.”
Jenkins said years later to this writer that he wanted to be a sportswriter because he loved it.
“Most people hate their jobs,” he said. “I’ve never had a bad day. There has never been a day when I didn’t want to go to work.”
From the Press, Jenkins went on to the Dallas Times Herald, Sports Illustrated, Playboy and Golf Digest.
To Jenkins, Hogan was the greatest player ever, the greatest shotmaker and course strategist.
“I never saw anybody hit as many controlled shots as accurately as he did.”
As a competitor, Jenkins judged Hogan and Nicklaus 1 and 1A.
While he covered the last 20 years of Hogan’s historic career, Jenkins and the Hawk were also good friends, a friendship started in the late 1940s. Jenkins, then a player at TCU, met Hogan on a Colonial practice green. Colonial was TCU’s home course.
Hogan took a special interest in him, eventually even offering to help him get a professional golf career off the ground.
According to Jenkins in his autobiography His Ownself, Hogan told him: “If you will work with me three days a week for the next three months – and do everything I tell you to do – you can become good enough to compete in the National Amateur.”
Jenkins recalled “stammering and stuttering” in response.
“I said, ‘Ben, that’s … that’s really … flattering … and I appreciate the offer … but I’m not that serious a golfer … I mean, I love the game … but all I want to be is a good sportswriter.”
“Ben looked at me like I’d committed treason. He held that cold stare on me for what seemed like a week. I wasn’t sure whether to expect a knife wound or a bullet in the forehead.
“Finally, he relaxed, sat back, and said, ‘Well … keep working at it.’”
* * * * *
Dan Jenkins was born and raised in his beloved Fort Worth.
Dying here … he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Jenkins was born to Elzie Thomas “Bud” Jenkins Jr. and Catherine Louise O’Hern on Dec. 2, 1929.
His parents were married only briefly.
Jenkins was raised by his paternal grandparents. He didn’t recall ever living with his parents, though he said he must have for at least a bit.
“They were uniquely who they were, and I’ve never thought they ‘deserted’ me. For one reason or another, they just weren’t around. That was OK.”
As it turned out, Jenkins recalled, he had the “better deal anyway.”
He remembered only warm memories of his upbringing, being raised in the home “by a self-sacrificing grandmother and granddad.”
His grandfather was a federal marshal at the U.S. courthouse in downtown Fort Worth.
“I was spoiled rotten from every angle. A baby Lab couldn’t have had it better.”
Everybody said Bud Jenkins, Jenkins wrote, was a natural-born salesman.
“They also said he might sell more furniture if he played less golf. There’s a good chance my mother said that before anyone else. Maybe that’s why my dad took a quick powder in their marriage, him being, from all reports, a no-heat kind of guy.”
Jenkins said he didn’t ever recall seeing his father until the fall of 1935, well after his parents had divorced. His dad had returned to Fort Worth from California, “which was where he had taken a powder to.”
“The reason Bud Jenkins had dropped in from California was that Slingin’ Sammy Baugh was slinging touchdown passes for the TCU Horned Frogs and my dad wasn’t about to miss the two biggest games of the season.”
Those games were TCU vs. Rice and TCU vs. SMU.
His grandmother insisted that he take young Jenkins. “You’re not going to those games without taking this little boy with you. He’ll remember it the rest of his life.”
Her prediction proved prophetic.
At the event naming the press box at TCU’s Amon G. Carter Stadium after him in 2017, Jenkins recalled the 1935 game between SMU and TCU as if it happened yesterday: “My dad and his friends sat in the stadium for about an hour after the game while they drank what they told me was cough medicine. And wished incurable diseases on anybody who lived in Dallas.
“I can’t even tell you how many TCU games I saw. I feel a pride of ownership around this place.”
He liked to say that he was among the last to have seen both Baugh and Davey O’Brien play at TCU. “I won’t say it warped me, but it did have a lot with me wanting to be a sportswriter someday.”
In addition to Baugh and O’Brien, movies, too, stirred his imagination about journalism.
“Clark Gable was always running around with a press card in his hatband,” Jenkins once said, “and it looked like he was having a lot of fun.”
As an even younger boy, Jenkins began retyping newspaper sports stories out of the Star-Telegram and Press with a typewriter his aunt provided.
It was the beginning of fulfilling his destiny.
* * * * *
During the year 2014, Sports Illustrated‘s 60th anniversary, the magazine republished 60 of the best stories ever to run in the magazine.
Among them was “The Glory Game at Goat Hills” by Jenkins, which first appeared in the Aug. 16, 1965 issue.
The story told of a golf game and the crew – make that characters – who met at Worth Hills Golf Course (now where the TCU baseball and soccer fields and track stadium sits, along with fraternity and sorority row) every day to play golf and gamble.
It was a gambling game that went on in some fashion or another, involving from two to 20 players, almost every day of every year. The game survived not just my own shaft-bending, divot-stomping presence, but heat, rain, snow, war, tornadoes, jobs, studies, illness, divorces, birth, death and considerations of infinity. If there were certain days when it seemed the game might help pay part of my tuition through Texas Christian University — a jumble of yellow-brick buildings across the street from the course — there were others when it seemed certain to guarantee a lifetime of indebtedness. Either way you were trapped, incessantly drawn to the Hills, like Durrell to Alexandria.
In the game were Tiny, Easy Reid, Magoo, Foot the Free, Grease Repellent, Ernie, Matty, Rush, Little Joe, Weldon the Oath, Jerry, John the Band-Aid and Moron Tom.
And, of course, Cecil the Parachute.
We called him Cecil the Parachute, because he fell down a lot. He would attack the golf ball with a whining, leaping half-turn—more of a calisthenic than a swing, really—and occasionally, in his spectacular struggles for extra distance, he would soar right off the end of elevated tees.
He was a slim, bony, red-faced little man, who wore crepe-soled shoes and heavily starched shirts that crackled like crunched glass. When he was earthbound Cecil drove a delivery truck for a cooky factory, Grandma’s Cookies, and he always parked it—hid it, rather—behind a tall hedge near the clubhouse. When the truck was there, out of sight of passing cars (or of cooky-company dispatchers snooping on cooky-truck drivers), you could be pretty sure that not only was Cecil out on the course but so were … .
There was also the very good chance that all of us would be in one hollering, protesting, club-slinging fifteensome. Anyhow, when Cecil the Parachute had the truck hidden you knew for sure that the game was on.
The game was not the kind of golf that Gene Sarazen or any of his stodgy friends ever would have approved of. But it was, nevertheless, the kind we played for about 15 years, from the mid- 40s to the late ’50s, at a windy, dusty, indifferently mowed, stone-hard, broomstick-flagged, practically treeless, residentially surrounded public course named Worth Hills in Fort Worth, Texas. Goat Hills, we called it, not too originally.
He added that “frankly, [he was] still over golfed from all those years at Goat Hills in Texas.”
Jenkins’ books have sold millions of copies.
In 1972, Jenkins published his first book, Semi-Tough, the best-selling novel about pro football through the lens of two fictional teammates from Paschal and TCU.
Hollywood cast Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson in the roles of Billy Clyde Puckett — “the humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football” — and Marvin “Shake” Tiller in the 1977 screenplay of the book.
“My running comes natural is the only way I can explain it,” Billy Clyde says. “It seems when I get the football in my arms I have a tendency to not get tackled so easy. I can’t truly make it very clear about my life-chosen craft. But what I’m getting at is that even today after five years in the NFL when our quarterback, Hose Manning, squats back of the center and hollers out a play like, ‘Red, Curfew, Fifty-three, Sureside, hut, hut, hut, then what I mean is, if I get the ball I have a serious tendency to turn into some kind of Red fuckin’ Grange.”
Jenkins’ imagination also discovered Billy Clyde’s cousin, Kenny Lee Puckett, the journeyman golfer who finds himself on the brink of a major championship. Randy Quaid — in between playing Cousin Eddie, Clark Griswold’s Vacation foil — got to job in the big-screen rendition of Dead Solid Perfect.
We were all better, more enlightened people for having met Cecil the Parachute, the Pucketts and Juanita Hutchins, his protagonist in Baja Oklahoma, the colorful bartender at Herb’s Cafe who serves ’em up for colorful regulars.
Here at PressBox DFW, we’re proud to call Jenkins “contributor.”
Last fall, Jenkins agreed to participate in a scenario dreamed up by PressBox DFW at the time of Reynolds’ death in September.
Billy Clyde’s last public appearance was at TCU, where he was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the TCU Letterman’s Association.
Jenkins not only agreed to reprise Billy Clyde for our Q&A format, he gladly agreed.
Here’s one question.
Jeremiah Donati was seen earlier carrying around a fundraising report card and reading How to Increase the Lifetime Value of a Donor, particularly one so intimately connected to Big Ed Bookman. He reportedly has plans for a “Billy Clyde Puckett something.” Care to elaborate? Yes, I care to ’laborate, like any other good retriever. I hear they want to name the east side of the football stadium for me. I said no way. I ain’t sat on the east side since I was in McLean Junior High. Besides that, I lugged the leather north-south, not sideways.
* * * * *
Jenkins’ influences were John Lardner and Red Smith, as well as humorists S.J. Perelman and Max Shulman.
Of Lardner, the son of Ring Jenkins believed him to be the greatest sportswriter who ever lived: “If you didn’t study him, you had no business being in the profession.”
The highly controversial Henry McLemore was another for Jenkins.
“When I was at the Press, Blackie told me to go read McLemore. I’ve never forgotten the impression he made on me with a lead he wrote from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. And I can still quote it. He said: ‘The Olympic marathon was run on Tuesday. It’s now Thursday and I’m waiting for the Americans to finish.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s how I want to do it.’
“I’ve always liked humor and comedy. And I’ve tried to bring a little of it to sports writing. I’ve always said, ‘Your first obligation is to be accurate. To be informed and be accurate. And then, if you can entertain, that’s a bonus.’ Your first obligation is not to entertain.”
Jenkins, of course, in his own right was a giant in the profession, an immense influence on many of us.
Jenkins struck up a rapport with this writer, too.
“John Henry!” he exclaimed at the book signing event last fall for (presumably) his last book, Sports Make You Type Faster.
He inscribed: “Newspapers were fun while they lasted, weren’t they?”
Emails were returned seemingly as soon as he read them.
Nothing was off limits with him. Politics, current events and the current state of the industry he so adored.
Holding back an opinion wasn’t in him. You always knew where he stood.
“I’m sad to watch my kind of journalism slowly dying and daily papers along with it,” he once wrote. “I loathe and despise fake news and social media and young people who care nothing about history.”
In another, he wrote to thank me for a review of Stick a Fork in Me, published in 2017.
Yo John:
Thanks for the great review. Duty beyond the call. It made my breakfast and lunch go down easier, but it couldn’t get me through more than the first 10 minutes of the Grammys.
Onward in English lit,
Dan Jenkins
In another, I asked him about a story asserting that sports writing had become a “liberal profession” with Donald Trump’s election the accelerant.
The author of the piece knew better than to “talk to me about this.”
“He really had to stretch to make this work. It’s all bullshit. Most sportswriters don’t have a political thought in their brain. They never read the opeds. Of course, in the sixties and seventies some thought it enhanced their career to be ‘social conscious.’”
There will never be another like Dan Jenkins as a storyteller or otherwise.
God rest his soul.