6 golfdigest.com | may 2019IllustratIon: ron barrettWe were all lucky to knowDan Jenkins.Editor’s Letter
This American Originalby jerry tarde
Chairman and Editor-in-ChiefDavid Marr and Alistair Cooke
and George Plimpton hung out
at our house and came to our
parties. So did class and style.
“Dan is irreplaceable as a
writer, wit, friend,” Tom Brokaw
emailed me. “For all his celeb-
rity, Dan was the old-school
sports scribe—filled with lore,
always approachable, always
original, never took himself too
seriously. God bless this Ameri-
can original.”
Dan lived in a penthouse in
New York on “Park Street,” as he
called it; then in a mansion on
Ponte Vedra Beach, and finally
moved back to the ancestral
home near his beloved TCU in
Fort Worth, where he passed
away at 90 on March 7.
“I tend to go to major cham-
pionships the way Dorothy
Kilgallen used to go to murder
trials,” Jenkins wrote in Golf
Digest in 1986. “I don’t cover
tournaments anymore. I pre-
side over them.” He ended
up presiding over 232 majors
in all—68 Masters, 56 PGAs,
63 U.S. Opens and 45 British
Opens—a record that will never
be matched. He was the most
influential sports writer since
Homer. And when it comes to
lovers of the game, that rattling
you hear is all of us moving up a
notch in the world ranking.
Who else but Jenkins would
be sitting in the press dining
lounge at a Ryder Cup when the
door flings open and the presi-I
at British Opens. Our rental
homes—not quite the “stately
mansions” described in the
R&A brochure—often took the
brunt of his hilarious wrath,
like the time our bath towels
were the size and thread count
of handkerchiefs. Another year
he got locked out and practi-
cally broke his neck climbing
through a window in the loo.
One owner complained daily
that someone was smoking in
his no-smoking house. “I’ll stop
smoking,” Jenkins said, “when
you put in the bathroom you
owe us.”
He had sworn off play-
ing golf for a decade when he
joined Golf Digest and took
up the game again to find his
scratch handicap had turned
into a useful 10. Some of my
favorite rounds were played in
the company of Dan, Peter Do-
bereiner, Nick Seitz, Bob Drum
and Charley Price at places like
TPC Sawgrass, Pinehurst No. 2
and Pine Valley. We played
“Dan’s Rules” like hit-till-yer-
happy off the first tee and “one
free throw a side,” which meant
you could pick up your ball
once per nine holes and toss it
toward the hole without count-
ing a stroke—out of bunkers,
behind trees, etc. I remember
Jenkins throwing his ball from
a hazard into the cup at Pine
Valley’s sixth green when the
club dictator, Ernie Ransome,
came running out of his house
to ask what the hell he was do-
ing. “Just exercising my free
throw,” Dan explained.
Jenkins’ last golf was in the
summer of 2011 at Burning Tree
Club in Bethesda, Md., while
following executive editor
Mike O’Malley and me around
in a cart. When we reached
the fifth green, Dan got out of
the cart, borrowed a putter,
dropped a ball on the back of
the green. The hole was about
40 feet away on the front. He
stroked it, double-breaking,
into the center.
“That’s it,” he said, “my last
hole.”
And for this American origi-
nal, it was.grew up reading Dan Jenkins, and it shaped my life. His
way with words led me and many others to a career in sports
journalism. He taught us how to talk golf, write golf, drink golf,
smoke golf. Mostly he taught us how to be funny, and if you can’t be
funny, be fast, but preferably be both. ▶ One of the luckiest days of my
career was walking into a Manhattan restaurant called Juanita’s in
the fall of 1984 and walking out with Jenkins as a contributing editor.
He owned the place, just like he owned golf writing. With Dan on our
staff, Golf Digest attracted the best and smartest talent to our pages.▶ the master Dan Jenkins
at the old media center at
Augusta National in 2016,
one of his 68 consecutive
Masters, starting in 1951.“Guilty,” Dan replied.
“You wrote somethin’ fun-
ny—now what was it?”
Or the time an old acquain-
tance claimed the bar stool next
to Jenkins.
“Shut up, Louise,” he said.
“But, Dan, I haven’t said
anything,”
“Just savin’ time,” he said.
After Greg Norman’s col-
lapse in the 1996 Masters, when
Norman said if he’d wanted to
be a brain surgeon and taken
the time to study medicine, ol’
Greg could have done it: “May-
be so,” wrote Jenkins, “but he
wouldn’t operate on this cow-
boy—not on Sundays, anyhow.”
He tried out that line first in a
Marriott bar.
Dan had a Texas sense of
fairness that seemed to surfacedent and first lady, George H.W.
and Barbara Bush, rush over to
give him a hug. “I bet the King
of England never stopped by to
see Bernard Darwin,” said his
wingman Bev Norwood.
You’ll read elsewhere (on
page 74) about Dan’s genius as a
writer, but as great as he was,
I preferred the genius of his
company. “I like people who
like me,” he was prone to say,
except when “rally-killers and
point-missers” interrupted the
flow of one-liners in hotel bars.
“Hey, I know you,” said one
fan. “You’re Dan Jenkins.”Photograph by Dom Furore