Dan Jenkins

Dan Jenkins received the Red Smith Award in 2013, a year after the World Golf Hall of Fame and PEN America had both honored him, which suggests the field spent that decade catching up on what it owed. He was eighty-four. He kept writing for six more years, in Golf Digest and on Twitter, where a man born in 1928 ran one of the funniest accounts in sports and covered majors in 140-character bursts that were better than most people's columns.

He is one of the few recipients equally known for journalism and for books. Semi-Tough sold enough copies, and put enough Burt Reynolds on screen, to give him a second reputation as a comic novelist. But the magazine work came first, and the award was for it. Larry King called him the quintessential Sports Illustrated writer and the best sportswriter in America, and the second half of that was not a minority opinion.

Daniel Thomas Jenkins was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on December 2, 1928, went to R. L. Paschal High School, and enrolled at Texas Christian University, where he played on the varsity golf team and captained it in the early 1950s. Through golf he met Ben Hogan, Fort Worth's own and the best player in the world at the time. The friendship lasted the rest of Hogan's life and put Jenkins closer to the game's inner rooms than any writer of his generation. He graduated from TCU in 1953.

He started at the Fort Worth Press and moved to the Dallas Times Herald, Texas papers where the sports section was the reason many people bought the paper at all. He married June Burrage in 1959. They had three children; one of them, Sally Jenkins, became a sports columnist for The Washington Post and a considerable writer in her own right, which makes the Jenkins household one of the few to produce two of the country's best sportswriters at one dinner table.

Sports Illustrated hired him in the early 1960s, roughly a decade after he left TCU, and he spent more than twenty years there covering golf and college football. TCU's count puts the output at about 500 stories for the magazine. He wrote its accounts of the college football 'Games of the Century' of 1966, 1967, 1969 and 1971, and his golf pieces from Augusta and the Opens became the standard other magazine writers were measured against, partly because he could be funny in a paragraph that was also reporting.

Sixty-eight Masters and sixty-three U.S. Opens, most of them from the same seat.

He left the magazine in 1985 to write books full-time and took a monthly column at Golf Digest, which he kept for the rest of his life. The move did not slow the coverage. The Masters count reached sixty-eight, the U.S. Opens sixty-three, and he was still credentialed at Augusta in his ninetieth year.

The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate (1970) collected his golf writing. Then came Semi-Tough (1972), a comic novel about a New York Giants running back in the week before the Super Bowl, told in the running back's own voice. It was a bestseller and became a 1977 film with Burt Reynolds. Dead Solid Perfect (1974), about a journeyman on the golf tour, and Baja Oklahoma (1981) were also adapted for the screen. Life Its Ownself (1984) returned to the Semi-Tough characters.

The novels are profane, Texan and very fast, and they gave a generation of sportswriters permission to write the way the locker room actually sounded. His memoir, His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir, appeared in 2014. The last book, The Reunion at Herb's Cafe, was published in 2019, the year he died. The total came to twenty-four.

• Texas Golf Hall of Fame, Distinguished Service, 1993
• PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, 2012
• World Golf Hall of Fame, Lifetime Achievement, 2012
• Red Smith Award, Associated Press Sports Editors, 2013
• Old Tom Morris Award, Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, 2015
• Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism, 2017
• Press box at TCU's Amon G. Carter Stadium named for him, 2017

The World Golf Hall of Fame induction in 2012 put a writer among the players, which the game does not do often. The University of Texas at Austin's Moody College now oversees an annual Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting, so the name goes on being attached to the work. He died in Fort Worth on March 7, 2019, at ninety, a month before the Masters. It would have been his sixty-ninth.