So much wisdom, in so much biting wit.
Dan Jenkins aimed his powers of observation with surgical precision, using humor as his scalpel, to reach bone and marrow and what mattered most. You can’t do that without getting under people’s skin. As one of the greatest sportswriters of all time, he wasn’t afraid to probe for what readers crave.
“All I’ve ever done is try to get at the truth of the matter,” Jenkins once said.
He did it with such conviction, in a distinctly crafted style that made his readers smile and his subjects cringe.
“I just take pride in being right,” he once said.
He did it with such unapologetic delight, in a beguiling style that will be sorely missed.
With Jenkins’ passing at 89, golf loses one of its greatest voices, but we have more than consolation in the genius work he leaves behind. His talent was too large to be contained in daily newspapers. He got his start at the Fort Worth (Texas) Press, in the city where he grew up, before making his way to Sports Illustrated and then Golf Digest. He was a best-selling author, but his talent was even too immense for books to contain. Hollywood turned his novels “Semi-Tough” and “Dead Solid Perfect” into movies.
“Dan invented modern sports writing,” said Ron Sirak, a former Associated Press golf writer who went on to work with Jenkins at Golf Digest. “He was the Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson of sports writing. He was the Gonzo golf writer. He wrote stories from the inside out, not the outside in.”
Though Jenkins was also an accomplished chronicler of college football, he seemed born to tell the story of golf. As a newspaperman in Fort Worth, he forged a bond with fellow Texans Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, gaining the legends’ trust. He went on to forge similarly strong bonds with Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and other greats of the game, with mutual respect helping him tell more of the game’s important stories from the inside out.
Even Palmer wasn’t spared Jenkins’ biting humor.
“I don’t suppose anybody’s ever enjoyed being who they are more than Arnold’s enjoyed being Arnold Palmer,” Jenkins said in 2001. “I’m fairly certain over the past 50 years he’s never had a single conversation about anything other than Arnold Palmer.”
Jenkins, though, conveyed exactly why.
“This is true, I think,” he once wrote. “He IS the most immeasurable of all golf champions. But this is not entirely true because of all that he has won, or because of that mysterious fury with which he has managed to rally himself. It is partly because of the nobility he has brought to losing. And more than anything, it is true because of the pure, unmixed joy he has brought to trying.
“He has been, after all, the doggedest victim of us all.”
Jenkins didn’t apologize for favoring Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus and other history making players. As a journalist, he saw it as rooting for the story, not the player.
“It made a better story,” he said. “The bigger the name, the bigger the story.”
Not everyone loved Jenkins’ probing wit. Today’s players weren’t Hogan or Palmer, and today’s game wasn’t the purer game he believed they played back then. Sometimes, today’s players paid for those sins.
“I loved it when David Ogrin called me a ‘hostile voice from a previous era,’” Jenkins said. “He nailed me.”
Tiger Woods’ felt the sting of Jenkins’ scalpel. They never connected, with Woods rebuffing Jenkins’ attempts to sit down and talk.
“The closest I ever got was this word from his agent: ‘We have nothing to gain,’” Jenkins wrote.
Jenkins joined the legends he covered when he was inducted to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2012.
“I’d follow Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson anywhere,” he said.
Jenkins, who covered 232 major championships, according to Golf Digest, was the first living sports writer to make into golf’s Hall of Fame. He joined Bernard Darwin and Hebert Warren Wind, who were inducted after their passing.
Walking through the Hall of Fame back then, Jenkins enjoyed seeing the figures of so many inductees he knew in more than name and deed.
“To justify my inclusion in this terrific society, I went back and looked at everybody who’s in it and did some statistics,” Jenkins said in his speech that night. “It turns out that I have known 95 of these people when they were living. I’ve written stories about 73 of them. I’ve had cocktails and drinks with 47 of them, and I played golf with 24 of them. So, I want somebody else to try and go up against that record.”
In his ’01 Golf Digest interview, Jenkins was asked what he would like on his tombstone.
“’Sorry if you couldn’t take a joke,’ that would be the first line,” he said. “Then I’d steal from my daughter (Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins) and add, ‘Hey, it was only a sports event—it wasn’t child birth.’”