Dan Jenkins' latest book chronicles a half-century of the Masters and more | 2022 Masters Skip to main content
Breaking news
 
R4   
2 Rory McIlroy   -7 F
T3 Cameron Smith   -5 F
T3 Shane Lowry   -5 F
    Full Leaderboard
Posted April 9, 2014, 11:18 pm
BY |

Dan Jenkins' latest book chronicles a half-century of the Masters and more

  • Article Photos
    Dan Jenkins' latest book chronicles a half-century of the Masters and more
    Photos description
    Dan Jenkins, seen in 1962, is covering his 221st major. The Golf Digest writer was named to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2012.
  • Article Photos
    Dan Jenkins' latest book chronicles a half-century of the Masters and more
    Photos description
    Dan Jenkins has been to 64 Masters Tournaments.
  • Article Photos
    Dan Jenkins' latest book chronicles a half-century of the Masters and more
    Photos description
    Dan Jenkins, His Ownself, Friday, March 21, 2014, in Augusta, Georgia. xxxxxxx

Dan Jenkins has covered so many Masters Tournaments as a sports writer – this is his 64th in a row – that he is on his third media center, or “press room,” as he likes to refer to it.

One of his regrets, which he notes in his book His Ownself (Doubleday, 2014), is that he wasn’t around in the 1930s when the clubhouse’s wraparound balcony served as the press room. His first press room, when he covered the Masters in 1951 for the Fort Worth Press, he notes, consisted of a tent with a flap.

The 84-year-old Texan tells these and many other Masters-related stories in the book he subtitled A Semi-Memoir, a takeoff on his most famous (and first) novel, 1972’s Semi-Tough. The book’s title is a tip of the hat to Jenkins’ 1985 novel, Life Its Ownself, a sequel to Semi-Tough.

Jenkins, with his humorous and sometimes sarcastic style, needs no introduction to anyone who has followed sportswriting since his days at Sports Illustrated, where he started in 1962. He was best known for covering golf and college football (hence the book’s cover, where a driver is hitting a football). He stayed there for 24 years and has written for Golf Digest ever since. In between, he has written 21 books, was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2012 and was named the winner of the Red Smith Award, the highest honor in his profession, in 2013.

He’s also set a record that he says will never be broken: This will be the 221st major championship he’s covered.

Jenkins has been around Au­gus­ta National Golf Club so long that he’s covered the tournament through all six chairmen, starting with Clifford Roberts.

“When I lump those years together, they become a maze of pimento cheese sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, and country ham and red-eye gravy for breakfast upstairs in the main clubhouse” is how he writes of his “romance with the dogwood” at Augusta National.

Jenkins writes that the Mas­ters became a major championship in its second year of existence “five minutes after Gene Sa­razen made that double eagle in 1935.”

In truth, it became what was known as a “bonus tournament” in those days, which led it to becoming a major. “Winning a bonus tournament not only meant bigger prize money, but larger paydays for exhibitions, clinics, outings and magazine ads,” Jenkins writes.

Because the inaugural Masters in 1934 was not a “bonus tournament” yet, Sarazen skipped it to play in an exhibition overseas.

In his book, Jenkins rails against two of his favorite topics these days: political correctness in society and greed in sports. Jenkins has gotten into hot water for what some have termed politically incorrect tweets for Golf Digest. He’s had to scale back there, but you can’t stop him from throwing in a few in his own book.

Fans of Jenkins know of his friendship with fellow Fort Worth resident Ben Hogan. They met at Colonial Country Club
in 1949, seven months after Ho­gan almost died when a bus ran into his car.

At the time, Jenkins was the golf writer for the Fort Worth Press and a member of the Texas Christian golf team. They ended up playing “30 more” rounds of golf together, Jenkins writes.

Jenkins devotes two chapters to Hogan, who won nine major championships, six of them after the car crash. Two of those majors came in the Masters, in 1951 and 1953.

Among other things, Jenkins reveals that Hogan had his golf shoes made in London with an extra spike in each sole to give him better traction, and that Hogan was “much better friends” with Sam Snead than with Byron Nelson, Hogan’s Fort Worth rival. Despite their age difference, Jenkins and Hogan became such good friends that Hogan invited Jenkins to play with him in a benefit tournament that drew 3,000 spectators at Colonial.

When Jenkins told Hogan, “There has to be somebody better than me, Ben,” Hogan answered, “No, you’re who I want.”

Then there was this: Jenkins turned down an offer of free lessons for three months from Hogan, who said he could get Jenkins ready to play in the National Amateur (U.S. Amateur) in that time period.

Jenkins turned it down, for which he received a cold stare from the man the British called the Wee Iceman with these words: “Well … keep working at it.”

In turning down Hogan’s offer, Jenkins told his hero he wanted to concentrate on his career as a sports writer. That turned out to be a wise move.

FROM HIS NOTEBOOK

“What do you do if you’re Greg Norman in the 18th fairway of the Masters on Sunday and you’re trying to get Jack Nicklaus into a playoff? You hit a half-shank, push-fade, semi-slice 4-iron that guarantees the proper result for the history books. Oh, well, Greg Norman has always looked like the guy you send out to kill James Bond, not Jack Nicklaus.” – Dan Jenkins, in Golf Digest, after the 1986 Masters Tournament, which Nicklaus won at 46 to become the tournament’s oldest champion. Norman could have forced a playoff with Nicklaus with a par but made bogey on the final hole.

SCOTT MICHAUX'S Q&A WITH DAN JENKINS

Augusta Chronicle: Why is it a “semi” memoir? Will there be a sequel?

Jenkins: Because of Semi-Tough. To me, it was a journalism memoir, and the publisher said we had to get “Semi” in the title. Anybody who remembers that is dead now. There won’t be a sequel. I thought I’d never write a book like that, and I wouldn’t want to write another one. It’s hard to keep yourself out of it when it’s about you.

AC: How long did it take and how hard was it to write the story of your life?

Jenkins: It was hard because everything had to be accurate. With fiction, you can make it up. I cut about a fourth out of it. It was too long. I called my editor up in New York and said, “I’ve got a hundred pages and I’m not out of high school yet.” I just went a little bit too long about almost everything. I just tightened it. I wanted it to be about 300 pages. They held it down to about 255. At the end I thought, “Hell, this is too short.” I left out a lot of good stuff and already written another book. It’s strictly golf. Half is stuff that’s original that I wanted to say about golf, and then the other half is stuff I’d written for (Golf) Digest that I rewrote and expanded or trimmed, and they’re hardly recognizable from when they ran. It sort of blends comedy and history. It’s called Unplayable Lies. Won’t be out for another year. That’s what keeps me off the streets.

AC: Ben Hogan offered to teach you to play golf, but you turned him down. Why?

Jenkins: He said if you work with me three days a week for the next three months and do everything I tell you to do and be on time, you can be good enough to enter the national open. And I said, “Ben, I’m really flattered. I just want to be a sports writer.” He looked at me like I’d stabbed him in the heart. How do you turn down Ben Hogan? Then he sat back and kind of smiled and said, “Well, keep workin’ at it.”

 AC: Why was the tug of being a sports writer so strong for you?

Jenkins: That’s all I ever wanted to do. I wanted to be a newspaperman and mainly a sports writer. I was born into a sports family. Sports was big in Fort Worth, especially golf and especially football. Those were the two things I loved. If it hadn’t been for Ben Hogan, I’d still be working at the Fort Worth Press. I had him at his peak and played a lot of golf with him. It was great fun. I was privileged of the access, and he was never anything but nice to me. And we had a semi-friendship. At one time he flirted with asking me to write his book. He caught me at a very bad time. I was writing Semi-Tough. I didn’t have time. I wish I’d done it. Would have been better than all the other (stuff) people have written.

AC: How do you remember all these stories, and how hard was it to jog your memory going back to your childhood?

Jenkins: You discard the bad ones. I flew up here yesterday and Charles Barkley was on the plane. For some reason he came over and said hello to me. He’s into golfing. I said, “Charles, you’re really great on TV and I mean it.” The funniest thing he ever said on camera was when whoever he was talking to said, “That’s going to be on their bulletin board.” Charles said, “I played in the NBA 12 years and ain’t nobody read a bulletin board yet.” I remember things like that. I try to remember the good stuff. I hope I said somewhere in the book, the hardest thing to learn is what to leave out.

AC: Can you imagine starting your career now instead of the era you’ve come up through?

Jenkins: It could never be that much fun. Not like the old days when everybody was smoking and drinking and hanging out. As a profession, sports writing as a group is stronger at the bottom now. Some of them will get up to where they want to be if they keep working at it and don’t worry about money.

AC: You’ve been to the Mas­ters 64 times and said this is your favorite event. What is it that makes it the most special?

Jenkins: They’ve always tried the hardest. I was here for the (press) tent, the first Quon­set hut, the second Quon­set hut and now this. Where’s the press room going to be when I’m here for the last time? Whatever they do do, I hope they have an escalator.

AC: What’s your favorite thing about the Masters?

Jenkins: The sameness. The reliability. The beauty. The history. And go do better than a tournament that starts with (Bobby) Jones, then goes up through Hogan, Nelson, Snead, Jack, Arnold, Gary, Phil, Tiger … I mean, what a ride. No other major has that. They don’t have that list of winners. The Masters was very smart in the beginning, and I don’t know whether it was Cliff or Bob Jones, they didn’t let anybody in who wasn’t somebody. There were no nobodies until Hord Hardin took the money list. They should have kept it that way. They could have gotten away with it. Hord himself said it was a mistake.

AC: You once said Sam Snead was the greatest golfer who never died, competing into his 60s. You’ve been able to stay relevant for seven decades. What’s the secret to longevity in journalism?

Jenkins: People keep paying me to do things. I was a workaholic. It’s my temperament. Have deadline, will travel. I just loved it. Here I am it’s my 64th year and people kept paying me to go. Why not?

 AC: Your skills have transferred from newspapers to magazines to books to Twitter. You like one medium more than others?

Jenkins: With a couple of movies thrown in. The most fun I ever had was in newspapers. Every day. I couldn’t wait to be in the newsroom. It was just great fun. I’ve always said my heroes were always the sports writers more than the athletes. Nothing like the inside, cynical humor of journalism.

 AC: During the 1964 Mast­ers, The Augusta Chronicle devoted a 22-inch editorial page column to criticizing you for something you wrote about the Bon Air Hotel. What happened?

Jenkins: I stayed there probably six times. Every­thing I wrote was true, and we got sued and we won. I’m a Supreme Court decision. It really was true. You’d put some shoes outside the door to get them shined, you never saw them again. The water might come out orange. It was just pitiful. It was hilarious and part of the fun. We were young then. It didn’t matter. You just liked being here. It was my second or third year at the magazine, and I kept telling these stories and they said you should write that. So I wrote it as a preview. Tiny was on the gate then, and the first thing that happened when I came back the next year I was handed a subpoena. They were going to turn it into an old folks home and they tried to argue that I damaged the sale. We had so many witnesses who said it was true that they couldn’t win. Cliff (Roberts) was there and called me over and said, “I wish you had talked to me; I could have told you some really great stories.”

 - Scott Michaux