Dan Jenkins was an American sportswriter and novelist known for work on golf and football. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, attended Texas Christian University, and played college golf. His journalism career included the Fort Worth Press, Sports Illustrated, and Golf Digest. His books range from reported collections and memoir to comic novels about professional and college sports.
Jenkins repeatedly returned to golf and football while also writing fiction about Texas, newspaper work, and other subjects. Semi-Tough introduced characters who reappeared in later books, while the Bobby Joe Grooves novels examine professional golf through another fictional career. His nonfiction includes collected tournament reporting and an account of his own life in sportswriting.
Dan Jenkins Books
| Book | Year | Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| SATURDAY'S AMERICA A Chronic Outrage and Giddy Passion of College Football | 1970 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Semi-Tough | 1972 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Dead Solid Perfect | 1974 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Limo | 1976 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Fairways and Greens | 1980 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Baja Oklahoma | 1982 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Life its Ownself | 1984 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| American Football | 1986 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Fast Copy (Texas Tradition Series) | 1988 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate | 1988 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| You Call it Sports, but I Say it's a Jungle Out There | 1989 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| You Gotta Play Hurt | 1991 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Bubba Talks | 1993 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Best American Sports Writing 1995 | 1995 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Rude Behavior | 1998 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| I'll Tell You One Thing | 1999 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist | 2001 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Slim and None | 2005 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Texas Christian University Football Vault | 2008 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Franchise Babe | 2008 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Jenkins at the Majors | 2009 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| His Ownself | 2014 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Unplayable Lies | 2015 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Stick a Fork in Me | 2017 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Sports Makes You Type Faster | 2018 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
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Golf Books
The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist: Professional golfer Bobby Joe Grooves pursues competitive recognition in a tour environment shaped by sponsorship, image, and money. His ambition to reach the Ryder Cup team provides direction for the story. Jenkins uses the outspoken Texan’s career and surroundings to satirize professional golf while describing the distance between a player’s aspirations and the obstacles in his way.
Slim and None: Bobby Joe Grooves returns at age forty-four, still seeking a major championship and aware that the opportunity may be narrowing. The novel follows him through professional golf’s leading events as personal and competitive pressures accumulate. Knowledge of the sport’s history intensifies his concern about time, giving the comic account a central question about ambition and an uncertain career.
Dead Solid Perfect: This golf novel follows touring professional Kenny Lee Puckett through the competitive and personal circumstances of life on the PGA Tour. Jenkins uses the character’s career to explore the behavior, relationships, and ambitions surrounding professional golf. The book presents the tour through comic fiction, placing events away from the course alongside the pursuit of success in tournaments.
The Franchise Babe: Golf writer Jack Brannon turns his attention from the men’s tour to a young player on the LPGA circuit. His reporting assignment becomes entangled with the personalities and expectations surrounding a rising professional. Jenkins uses the fictional journalist and golfer to satirize the business of sports coverage as well as the competitive world being covered.
Fairways and Greens: This collection gathers Jenkins’s writing about golf, combining reports on major events with observations about players, courses, and the culture of the game. The material reflects both his professional reporting and his experience as a golfer. Historical moments and comic pieces appear together, giving the book a broader scope than a single tournament account or player biography.
The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate: Jenkins examines golf through humor and the recurring frustrations that accompany playing it. The book treats the sport as an activity capable of inspiring both affection and exasperation. His attention to golfers and their predicaments connects the experiences of ordinary play with a comic understanding of why people remain devoted to a game they cannot fully control.
Jenkins at the Majors: Sixty Years of the World's Best Golf Writing, from Hogan to Tiger: Jenkins selects accounts from his long career covering golf’s major championships. The collection revisits important victories, defeats, and performances involving players from different generations. It also records a journalist’s experience of watching the game change. The tournament stories therefore serve both as golf history and as a record of an extended career in sports reporting.
Unplayable Lies: Jenkins gathers golf essays that combine new material with reworked magazine pieces. The collection considers the game through criticism, opinion, and humor rather than presenting a continuous tournament history. Players, habits, and changes in golf provide recurring subjects, reflecting an author whose long involvement with the sport gave him material for both affection and complaint.
Football Books
Semi-Tough: Professional football player Billy Clyde Puckett prepares for a Super Bowl while also taking on a writing assignment about the experience. Jenkins uses the player’s perspective to satirize the personalities and behavior surrounding the sport. The novel combines competition with relationships and off-field excess, introducing characters whose lives continue in later books by the author.
Life its Ownself: This continuation of the world introduced in Semi-Tough follows Billy Clyde Puckett after injury changes his professional role. His work in television and his relationships with Barbara Jane and Shake Tiller provide the setting for another comic examination of sports and its surrounding culture. The characters’ careers and personal entanglements continue beyond the original novel’s championship setting.
Rude Behavior: Billy Clyde Puckett becomes a general manager and part-owner of a new professional football team, the West Texas Tornadoes. His responsibilities bring the business of the sport into contact with the familiar characters from earlier novels. Relationships, ownership, and competing ambitions supply a comic account of the complications that continue after a player’s time on the field.
Stick a Fork in Me: Athletic director Pete Wallace prepares to retire after years of developing the sports program at Western Ohio University. While waiting for the arrangements to be approved, he recalls his career and the people he encountered. The novel uses his perspective to satirize college athletics, administrative pressures, personal rivalries, and the demands of sustaining a major sports operation.
I'll Tell You One Thing: The Untold Truth About Texas, America & College Football, With Pictures to Prove It: Jenkins combines fictional characters and discussion of college football in a Texas-centered account that mixes invented situations with sporting history and opinion. A gathering around an important game provides the setting. The book draws on the familiar world of his novels while considering Texas players, regional identity, and the place of football in that culture.
Multi-sport Books
You Call it Sports, but I Say it's a Jungle Out There: This collection brings together more than seventy-five stories, profiles, and columns from Jenkins’s sportswriting career. The subjects extend across sports rather than remaining within a single game or tournament. Reporting and comic commentary appear together, offering a view of the athletes, institutions, and behavior that attracted his attention over an extended period as a journalist.
The Best American Sports Writing 1995: Edited by Jenkins with series editor Glenn Stout, this annual anthology selects sports journalism from American and Canadian newspapers and magazines. The volume includes twenty-five pieces addressing different sports and participants. It is a collection of work by multiple writers, and Jenkins’s editorial role should be distinguished from authorship of all the individual articles it contains.
His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir: Jenkins recounts his life from a Texas childhood through newspaper work and a prominent career in sports magazines. The memoir includes the people and sporting experiences that shaped his writing. Personal recollection connects the local journalism of his early years with the larger professional world in which he later covered major competitions and developed his distinctive comic voice.
Sports Makes You Type Faster: The Entire World of Sports by One of America's Most Famous Sportswriters: This collection brings together essays about a wide range of sports and the people around them. Jenkins directs his criticism and humor toward players, owners, supporters, and professional organizations. The pieces reflect his long reporting career while addressing the behavior and institutions surrounding competition, extending the bibliography beyond his better-known golf and football novels.