Dan Jenkins Obit

This will be the second obit I’ve written in my life. The first was the one I wrote on behalf of my father.

It saddened me to observe the passing of legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins this morning. He didn’t die at the age of 89. No, that didn’t happen here. Dan Jenkins will merely move along and pop up somewhere else in the cosmos as one of the funniest novelists and sports writers of the ages.

And yet, as I write this, I realize Dan Jenkins wasn’t just a golf writer at Golf Digest. He was a writer who would write on any subject or any sport and do it with a deftness of keyboard or typewriter which always left me ready to read his next book or article before it was already written.

Dan Jenkins was god-like to me. He got me in trouble in my 11th grade American Lit class when I was supposed to be reading The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn during a class reading session. Not me. I had a copy of Jenkins’ pro football novel Semi-Tough hidden behind the assigned book. My teacher, a tough seventy-year old named Juanita Elijah, came down my aisle and discovered what I was up to. She was a tough no nonsense national teacher of the year winner and you didn’t do things like this in her class. She took my book away from me and told me she was going to drop my semester grade at least one letter grade.

A week later, she approached me after class when no one was around. She handed me the book and said, “Michael, I’m not going to drop your grade. I enjoyed the book.” She correctly figured at least I was reading on my own… period….even if the characters were Billy Clyde Puckett, Shake Tiller and Barbara Jane Bookman instead of an old man battling a fish on the open sea. Hence there and then…Dan Jenkins and Juanita Elijah fostered my love of reading.

In his prime at Sports Illustrated, Jenkins was the guy who covered the Super Bowl, the Final Four, and the Masters. These were his events to write about in an age of sports which seems almost laughably innocent compared to what we witness in the present day.

His writing style was a combination of keen insight paired with a subtle sense of humor which at times could leave you laughing hysterically.

Maybe it was the fact Dan Jenkins was a Texas guy who was born in Fort Worth and attended TCU back in the day when the Horn Frogs were one of the college football elites which drew me to his writing. Jenkins was one of these guys with a slow Texas drawl with the insights of a Harvard PhD. He never wanted to let you know just how smart he was, but if you kept reading his work you came to understand how smart he was.

He wrote books. Both novels and non-fiction. Four of his novels will always rank in my heart where I store places for pieces of writing I hold close to my soul.

He wrote about the side of the NFL we never knew about in Semi-Tough. He wrote about the U.S. Open golf tournament in Dead Solid Perfect when an unknown from Ft. Worth named Kenny Lee made it thru the qualifying rounds to win the Open. He wrote about surviving cancer with someone you love in Life It’s Own Self. And he wrote about what it’s like to live in a place like Texas in Baja Oklahoma.

Maybe in retrospect, it was the Texas touch in Jenkins which made a kid living in Oklahoma love him so.

He’s moved along. But I hope in this age of the 24/7 news cycle a reader here and there will still find Jenkins relevant in our current state of mind.

I love Dan Jenkins.

This is Dan’s daughter… Sally Jenkins. She’s an accomplished writer in her own right. She’s a sports columnist for the Washington Post and like her father, she’s quite a writer. I’ve read three of her books… It’s Not About the Bike: The Lance Armstrong Story, The State of Jones (non-fiction Civil War historical), and The Pat Summit Story. You see, I just can’t get enough of hoops and history…two of my passions. Here’s Sally discussing the book she wrote about legendary coach Pat Summit of Tennessee.