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Opening pages:gOlf Digest ResOuRcecenteR •
illustRatiOn: JOhncuneO • Bush anD Jenkins: DOmfuROR
ea spoon (3-wood) and a putter.
At age 12, he reached the first
of 232 major championships,
the 1941 U.S. Open at Colonial
Country Club. It was magical.
Dan had never beheld bentgrass
greens before. They looked like
Ireland (or at least what he
thought Ireland should look
like). His home course, nine-
hole Katy Lake, didn’t even have
sand greens. They were made of
dark-brown cottonseed hulls,
oiled down or they’d blow away,
requiring raking before putting.
There’s a black-and-white
photograph from a practice round
at the ’41 Open. It features
Byron Nelson, Gene Sarazen,
Tommy Armour and defending-
champion Lawson Little (once
“the best amateur golfer who
wasn’t Bobby Jones”) walking
a fairway in the foreground.
In the background, wearing a
striped polo shirt and white
duck trousers with a ticket
lashed to his belt, Boy Jenkins
is trailing them. (This is the
only documented proof that he
was ever actually on the golfWhen his grandmother
found an old typewriter
in the attic, only
child Dan Jenkins of
Texas became a writer.
Word for word, he typed the war
dispatches and sports columns from
the Fort Worth papers, pretending to
be a newspaperman. But, eventually,
he changed the words, giving them
an edge, his own edge. # An aunt
named Inez owned a drugstore, a
repository of dreams. Luxuriating
in the store’s delicious aromas,
Dan set up camp at the out-of-town
newspapers stack. For a while, his
favorite lead was by Damon Runyon
from an account of Chicago mobster
Al Capone’s tax-evasion trial: “Al
Capone was quietly dressed when he
arrived at the courthouse
this morning except for
a hat of pearly white,
emblematic, no doubt,
of purity.”
Jenkins also admired James Thurber’s
take on one of Ohio State’s athletic
stars, Chic Harley: “If you never saw
Harley run with a football, words
cannot describe. It wasn’t like [Red]
Grange or [Tom] Harmon or anybody else.
It was kind of a cross between music
and cannon fire, and it brought your
heart up under your ears.”
But in time Jenkins switched
his allegiance to this opener
from John Lardner: “Stanley
Ketchel [the middleweight boxing
champion] was 24 years old when
he was fatally shot in the
back by the common-law husband
of the lady who was cooking
his breakfast.”
“That, in a sentence,” Dan
always said, “is the great
American novel.” And it had to be
“lady.”
His father was a scratch golfer,
but it was Aunt Inez who presented
Jenkins his original set of clubs,
ladies’ clubs: 2-, 5-, 7- and 9-irons,