Dan Jenkins 1928–2019

The journalist who cracked up sports fans

Though golf can be fanatically straitlaced, one of its most celebrated scribes was anything but. Dan Jenkins’ irreverent, snarky, and occasionally off-color coverage helped define the heyday of Sports Illustrated. He reported on 232 of golf’s four annual “majors” (a term he popularized), including every big tournament from 1969 to 2014, and teed up countless perfect put-downs. “Greg Norman,” he once wrote, “always looked like the guy you send out to kill James Bond, not Jack Nicklaus.” Jenkins also covered another childhood love for the magazine, college football, and his raucous 1972 gridiron novel Semi-Tough—made into a movie with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson five years later—is often ranked among the all-time great sports books. Fueled by Winston cigarettes and black coffee, he wrote more than 20 other sports books, which he produced with seemingly little effort. He followed a credo of his own making: “Type fast, get it done, and go to a bar.”

Jenkins was born in Fort Worth, where his salesman and gambler father “left the family when Dan was a toddler, though he showed up now and then to take his son to sporting events,” said The New York Times. Raised mainly by his paternal grandparents, he discovered a talent for writing when his grandma bought him a typewriter. He would type out a story from that day’s newspaper word for word, said The Washington Post, until one day he decided to improve an article. “I thought, ‘This guy’s an idiot, I can do better than this,’” Jenkins said. “It hasn’t stopped since.” He started writing for The Fort Worth Press while attending Texas Christian University, where he was captain of the golf team and practiced with his hometown hero, pro golfer Ben Hogan.

The writer joined Sports Illustrated in 1962 “and saw his stock rise alongside the magazine’s for two decades,” said Sports.Yahoo.com. His first piece for SI dealt with the terrors of putting. “The devoted golfer is an anguished soul,” he wrote, “who has learned a lot about putting just the way an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow.” Jenkins left SI in 1985 and became a regular columnist for Golf Digest; he was working on a new book shortly before his death. “I don’t believe in retirement,” he said in September. “Everybody who retires too early dies too early.” ■

March 15, 2019 THE WEEK