Dan Jenkins, 1928 – 2019
[guest post by JVW]
Daniel Thomas Jenkins, the best sportswriter since, oh, probably Samuel, died last night at the age of 90 (or 89; it’s kind of awesome that no one appears to be exactly sure in which precise year he was born).
This is a really hard obituary to write. I’ve been working it out in my mind (and, in honor of the subject, I got semi-drunk), but I still can’t figure out how to write this. I could lay out all of the reasons why I think he is one of the greatest sporting observers of the last century, with lots of quotes from his articles, columns, novels, and other works; I could focus upon a few select pieces that really meant a lot to me as a reader, removed as I am by a full generation; or I could write about the impact he had on writing, being a contemporary of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and the other progenitors of what came to be known as the New Journalism in which the reporter became an important part of the story. But I’m not going to try to explain any of that. The man’s writing speaks for itself, and if you have never taken the plunge then now is the almost perfect time, if sadly a bit late.
Let me try to provide the briefest of sketches, without losing myself in the minutiae of his fascinating life. A son of Texas, raised in early-Depression Fort Worth, Jenkins grew up as a golf stud (if you are to read but one piece of his, this remembrance of his early golf days is as good as any); attended hometown Texas Christian University during the years when Doak Walker, whom Jenkins always maintained was the greatest college football player of all-time, was across town at SMU; and turned-down the opportunity to pursue a professional golf career under the tutelage of the great Ben Hogan, who like Jenkins finished in second-place at the Fort Worth amateur championships (Jenkins played for the TCU golf squad as an undergraduate). Instead, Jenkins took his writing talents to small local newspapers — sometimes hilariously writing under a pseudonym to mask the paucity of the paper’s actual staff — before landing a gig at Sports Illustrated in 1962 where he would spend the next 22 years.
Jenkins’ ability as a golf writer is celebrated and easily accessible. But for my money, his best material focused on college football, America’s greatest sport. I’m sorry to see that it’s now so dammed expensive, but Saturday’s America is simply the finest book ever written about college football. If you can find it at a better price in a used bookstore, by all means I encourage you to buy it.
Those who aren’t so familiar with Jenkins as a sportswriter might recognize him more readily as fiction writer. He wrote novels mostly in football and golf, but I’m a huge fan of two books he wrote outside of the canon: Fast Copy, which is a fantastic murder mystery set in Depression-era Fort Worth; and, especially, Baja Oklahoma, the first novel of his that I read and the one which made me a lifelong fan. Jenkins was a Texan through and through, though his wry humor — hilarious forty years ago — is sadly archaic in these more sensitive times.
It’s always a pleasant and welcome surprise when the greats get a final act at the end of their lives, and when Golf Digest magazine hired Jenkins at the end of his life they got a veteran writer whose observational powers and wit were the equal of men one-third of his age. His Twitter account became must-read commentary during a golf major, suggesting his wit remained sharp and focused, skewering the content most deservedly. Sadly, some of his most recent tweets were memorials to friends who had passed on, poignant now that he too has gone on to his eternal reward.
I’ll tread lightly in this mostly nonpartisan salute, but Jay Nordlinger at National Review Online has a nice remembrance which suggests that his values were quite traditional and welcome to most of us on this blog. He leaves behind his wife June, and three children, including his daughter Sally, who has gone on to a celebrated sportswriting career of her own. He’s as good as we could expect, and based upon how thing are now we won’t see the likes of him again anytime soon.
– JVW
CODA: Baja Oklahoma was eventually made into a relatively weak TV movie, but one thing they did get right was the final scene where the barmaid protagonist who is trying to be a songwriter gets her big break.
– sicut etiam supra
