The old scrivener stood above the putting green as if ready to dive into a pool of sensory memory … Whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing. Dan Jenkins was at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth the other day. Here’s some stuff he might have sensed. Distant train brakes, screeching. Mantis-like transmission towers, dotting the horizon. A complete lack of non-golf vegetation, thanks to the Texas winter. As Jenkins once wrote, “The scrub oaks looked like twisted wrought iron, and everybody’s front yard had turned the color of a corn tortilla.”
Jenkins is an 84-year-old golf writer of antiromantic disposition. He has a helmet of white hair and a squint that suggests cheerful orneriness. He had begun the afternoon in the Colonial dining room, where the club had put his World Golf Hall of Fame blazer in a glass case.
“Which I wasn’t going to wear anyway,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins walked from the lunchroom to the terrace. He noted Colonial’s exercise room. “Which I’m against,” he said. Jenkins noted the new tennis center. “Tennis doesn’t deserve this,” he said. Then he came to the edge of the terrace, where he could look down onto the putting green.
Jenkins told of an encounter that happened at about this spot in 1949. Before he got famous writing for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, before he became the writer Palmer and Nicklaus confided in, Jenkins was a 20-year-old cub reporter at the Fort Worth Press. Down on the putting green, he spotted Ben Hogan — just the greatest golfer in the world. A golfer nine months removed from the car accident that nearly took his life. A golfer with a don’t-screw-with-me stare that could separate Fort Worth’s mounted cops from their horses.
Jenkins steeled his nerves, walked over, and introduced himself. A divine yellow light enveloped Jenkins and Hogan, as if they’d gotten lost in Jack Nicklaus’s hair … whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing.
Dan Jenkins didn’t allow that kind of writing. The miracle of Jenkins is that he became the best golf writer ever by disabusing the sport of its literary pretensions. It’s as if Hunter Thompson had become the dean of racing writers. In a new memoir, His Ownself, Jenkins sketches out what we might call his issue positions. For being funny. For picking on golfers who deserve it. Against magical realism. Against turning the Eisenhower Cabin into the Shrine at Compostela. Against Tiger Woods, famously. If Sports Illustrated of the ’60s and ’70s thickened the sportswriter’s thesaurus, Jenkins was the guy insisting his words be precise and potent and unflowery. (...)
Here’s what it was like to watch Dan Jenkins get sweet, delicious revenge. You might remember this. It had been bubbling. When Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour, in 1996, it wasn’t enough to say he could be the greatest golfer ever. “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity … ” Earl Woods told Sports Illustrated. “He is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations.”
Jenkins wasn’t walking into that sand trap. But Woods did pique his interest. Woods had scored a phone call with Ben Hogan before he died in 1997 and soaked up wisdom from the old master. Jenkins saw a potential golf-history nut. In the early 2000s, Golf Digest reached out to Woods’s agent to set up an off-the-record dinner. Like the ones he’d had with Palmer and Hogan.
The answer came back from the Woods camp: “We have nothing to gain.”
Jenkins spent the next decade in what the Brits would call the shadow government. He gave Woods credit for his wins. He once allowed that Woods was a better shotmaker than even Hogan. But he poked at the excesses of Tigermania. In Golf Digest, Jenkins wrote up an imaginary press conference in which Mark O’Meara, who’d barnacled himself to Woods, began his answers with, “Tiger and me were discussing it earlier … ”
In 2001, Jenkins told the magazine, “Only two things can stop Tiger — injury or a bad marriage.” To quote a Fort Worth overheard, he was both right.
In 2010, Woods compared his injury comeback to Hogan’s. “Hogan nearly died,” Jenkins remarked. “All Tiger did was damn near get syphilis.” It wasn’t that Jenkins thought Woods had become evil. That would turn Earl Woods’s hook into a slice. No, Jenkins’s revelation was simpler. “He is a hell of a talent,” Jenkins told me. “He just happens to be an asshole.” To hear Jenkins tell it, the subtle russet peddlers who had turned golf into a religion and given Augusta National cathedral status had also erroneously granted Tiger a soul.
In a column, Jenkins withdrew the dinner invitation. “Now it’s too late,” he wrote. “I’m busy.”
Jenkins is an 84-year-old golf writer of antiromantic disposition. He has a helmet of white hair and a squint that suggests cheerful orneriness. He had begun the afternoon in the Colonial dining room, where the club had put his World Golf Hall of Fame blazer in a glass case.“Which I wasn’t going to wear anyway,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins walked from the lunchroom to the terrace. He noted Colonial’s exercise room. “Which I’m against,” he said. Jenkins noted the new tennis center. “Tennis doesn’t deserve this,” he said. Then he came to the edge of the terrace, where he could look down onto the putting green.
Jenkins told of an encounter that happened at about this spot in 1949. Before he got famous writing for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, before he became the writer Palmer and Nicklaus confided in, Jenkins was a 20-year-old cub reporter at the Fort Worth Press. Down on the putting green, he spotted Ben Hogan — just the greatest golfer in the world. A golfer nine months removed from the car accident that nearly took his life. A golfer with a don’t-screw-with-me stare that could separate Fort Worth’s mounted cops from their horses.
Jenkins steeled his nerves, walked over, and introduced himself. A divine yellow light enveloped Jenkins and Hogan, as if they’d gotten lost in Jack Nicklaus’s hair … whoops. Sorry. We’re not doing that kind of golf writing.
Dan Jenkins didn’t allow that kind of writing. The miracle of Jenkins is that he became the best golf writer ever by disabusing the sport of its literary pretensions. It’s as if Hunter Thompson had become the dean of racing writers. In a new memoir, His Ownself, Jenkins sketches out what we might call his issue positions. For being funny. For picking on golfers who deserve it. Against magical realism. Against turning the Eisenhower Cabin into the Shrine at Compostela. Against Tiger Woods, famously. If Sports Illustrated of the ’60s and ’70s thickened the sportswriter’s thesaurus, Jenkins was the guy insisting his words be precise and potent and unflowery. (...)
Here’s what it was like to watch Dan Jenkins get sweet, delicious revenge. You might remember this. It had been bubbling. When Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour, in 1996, it wasn’t enough to say he could be the greatest golfer ever. “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity … ” Earl Woods told Sports Illustrated. “He is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations.”
Jenkins wasn’t walking into that sand trap. But Woods did pique his interest. Woods had scored a phone call with Ben Hogan before he died in 1997 and soaked up wisdom from the old master. Jenkins saw a potential golf-history nut. In the early 2000s, Golf Digest reached out to Woods’s agent to set up an off-the-record dinner. Like the ones he’d had with Palmer and Hogan.
The answer came back from the Woods camp: “We have nothing to gain.”
Jenkins spent the next decade in what the Brits would call the shadow government. He gave Woods credit for his wins. He once allowed that Woods was a better shotmaker than even Hogan. But he poked at the excesses of Tigermania. In Golf Digest, Jenkins wrote up an imaginary press conference in which Mark O’Meara, who’d barnacled himself to Woods, began his answers with, “Tiger and me were discussing it earlier … ”
In 2001, Jenkins told the magazine, “Only two things can stop Tiger — injury or a bad marriage.” To quote a Fort Worth overheard, he was both right.
In 2010, Woods compared his injury comeback to Hogan’s. “Hogan nearly died,” Jenkins remarked. “All Tiger did was damn near get syphilis.” It wasn’t that Jenkins thought Woods had become evil. That would turn Earl Woods’s hook into a slice. No, Jenkins’s revelation was simpler. “He is a hell of a talent,” Jenkins told me. “He just happens to be an asshole.” To hear Jenkins tell it, the subtle russet peddlers who had turned golf into a religion and given Augusta National cathedral status had also erroneously granted Tiger a soul.
In a column, Jenkins withdrew the dinner invitation. “Now it’s too late,” he wrote. “I’m busy.”
by Bryan Curtis, Grantland | Read more:
Image: uncredited
