Jenkins - His ownself: a semi-memoir

Copyright 2014 by D & J Ventures, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Golf Digest for permission to reprint Nice (Not) Knowing You by Dan Jenkins. Reprinted by permission of Golf Digest.

Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Jacket images Shutterstock: golf club ifong; football Xtremest;
tee donskarpo; grass grzym; skywriting frescomovie
Insert photographs are courtesy of the author.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Jenkins, Dan.
His ownself : a semi-memoir / Dan Jenkins. First edition.
pages cm
1. Jenkins, Dan. 2. SportswritersUnited StatesBiography.
3. AuthorsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
GV742.42.J46A3 2014
070.449796092dc23
[B]
2013013822

ISBN 978-0-385-53225-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53226-6 (eBook)

v3.1_r1

Always for June Jenkins,
my dynamite lady, without
whom none of this would
have mattered much

They went to Elaines every night, then they came home and went to Europe.

Danny Jenkins, to a Texas friend when asked what it was like for him and his brother and sister to be raised in New York City with Dan and June Jenkins for parents

Contents

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT in my busiest years of writing for a living, I spent most of my free time in convivial bars. I didnt seek out the bars so much for the whiskey as I did for the atmosphere. A decent bar was a place where I could sip a cocktail, smoke a cigarette, have engrossing conversations with friends, and if there was music at all it was a jukebox with Sinatra and Judy and others on it with a regard for melodyin contrast to todays eruptions of Krakatoa. I could sit in comfort and eventually reach for a cheese stick or a deviled egg. Dinner at last.

There were a lot of bars like that. They were easy to find after Id licked another deadline forin order of my employmentthe Fort Worth Press, Dallas Times Herald, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Golf Digest.

Hotels provided such hangouts. Downtowns offered them. Neighborhoods had them. They provided a calmness and sanity to life, travel, deadlines, and those occasions when an editor might mistake a machete for a pencil.

Truthfully, I can say that in sixty-five years of covering sports and sidelining as a book author, my stuff hasnt been raped and plundered too much. There were a few times at Sports Illustrated in the New York days when Id feel that my stuff suffered cruel and unusual punishment. If an editor, for example, would insert faster than a speeding bullet in my copy, Id resist the urge to throw his pot plant overboard. Instead, Id take out my revenge by staying in another luxury hotel on the road.

Say it was the Beverly Hills. Id reserve a cabana by the pool, relax over a cocktail, have a McCarthy Salad, and watch the fat music mogul in thongs and dark glasses yell at people on the phone.

Those were the days when it was almost impossible to abuse an SI expense account because the magazine was wallowing in coin. It enabled me to avoid discomfort and inconvenience.

IT WAS IN A BAR THAT I reconnected with the incomparable June Burrage, girl of my dreams since high school. The bar in Fort Worth was the Key Club in the Western Hills Hotel, and we dined later in the Branding Room. We were both between pictures.

After dinner I took out my gold Dunhill, lit her cigarette, stared into her eyes, and said, Ive got Texas with nine and a half over Syracuse in the Cotton Bowlwhat do you think?

She said, Can I go?

We should have married years earlier, but life got in the way. I made two earlier mistakes in the marriage game.

My first was Pattie, the high school girlfriend. We were married for, oh, thirty minutes, maybe forty-five. Just long enough for both of us to realize it was financially irresponsible.

The second was less of a marriage than two people finding themselves trapped in an Edward Albee play. Joan was a young English professor at TCU and she happened to come from a wealthy family, which made her twice as smart as me.

Both divorces were almost the same thing as affable. No kids or money involved. Each split fell into the category of You Take the Books, Ill Take the Records.

Flashback. Its 1997 at the Ryder Cup in Valderrama, Spain. I was in the press lounge, which could pass for a bar, when I was told that a lady from America was at the door and wanted to say hello. I went out and found a slender woman in dark glasses and graying hair.

Im sorry, I said. Do we know each other?

She said, Im Joan, you asshole.

Christ, I hadnt seen her in forty years.

I said, It is you! What are you doing here? You used to hate golf. You used to throw clock radios at golf.

Nice seeing you, too, she smiled.

We laughed and visited for twenty minutes about life itself, then she went back to Austin, Texas, and I went back to acting interested in Spain.

June married at nineteen in her folly of youth, and it didnt last for whatever reason, or reasons, some marriages dont last.

The fact is, Ive been the luckiest sumbitch ever allowed to make a living as a writer. Luckier still that June and I found each other. Weve produced three wonderful kidsSally, Marty, and Danny. We enjoy great friends from high school, college, journalism, and sports. Were still laughing and loving our way through life after fifty-four years together.

Its hardly news that theres trouble, strife, and entanglements in everybodys life. But when messy things happen, I tend to fall back on the words of Billy Clyde Puckett.

Billy Clyde didnt go to Harvard, but he was still deep enough to say: Laughter is the only thing that cuts trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.