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

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