DO
mfuROR
eA little orange for Tennessee,
a little maroon for Mississippi
State... ”
“C’mon, Bear,” Dan interrupt-
ed, “who’s the artist who paint-
ed it? I know you all wash the
helmets after every game.”
“Goddammit,” Bryant exclaimed,
“it works on recruits!”
Texas Christian head coach
Gary Patterson said, “Dan can be
my biggest critic, but that’s
all right, because he loves TCU.
There might be somebody out there
who knows a lot of football, but
I don’t think there’s anybody
out there who knows as much
about the history, not only of
TCU but of all college football,
as what Dan Jenkins does.”
After the Horned Frogs won the
2011 Rose Bowl to complete a
perfect season, Dan was shocked
to receive a championship ring
engraved Jenkins. The press box
at TCU’s Amon G. Carter Stadium
also bears his name.
Old Baltimore Colts special
teamer Alex Hawkins, known as
Captain Who? (“Gentlemen, this
is Captain Unitas, Captain
Marchetti and... ”) had
mounted on his living-room wall
framed photographs of Johnny
Unitas, Gino Marchetti, Alan
Ameche, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan
... and Jenkins, smoking a
cigarette in front of P.J.
Clarke’s in New York. “What’s
Jenkins doing there?” a visitor
asked with a chuckle. “I don’t
know,” Hawkins said. “I guess
because just looking at him
makes me happy.”
After his transfer to Sports
Illustrated (and, in the
normal course of prosperity,
Park Avenue, don’t you know),
Dan threw much of his Scotch-
and-water trade to Elaine’s
(directions to the bathroom:
take a right at Michael
Caine) and Toots Shor’s (“the
joint is quieter without the
proprietor”), but Clarke’s
was his home field. It was in
Clarke’s where Howard Da Silva
poured drinks for Ray Milland
in the movie “The Lost Weekend,”
and where, according to legend,
with a publishing windfall,
Jenkins bought a house in Kauai
over the telephone. “That’s not
exactly true,” Bud Shrake said,“but it’s not completely false,
either.”
Shrake and Jenkins had the
same refined sense of mischief.
“We’ve hired a new ringside
photographer [for a championship
fight at the Garden],” they told
fabled SI managing editor Andre
Laguerre. “Who?” Laguerre asked.
“Frank Sinatra!”
Bud and Dan co-wrote a
screenplay for Eddie Murphy’s“Beverly Hills Cop II” but
were fired because it was too
funny. “You know,” Jenkins told
the producer, “that’s kind of
what we were shooting for.”
“You don’t have to be funny,”
the man said. “Eddie be funny.”
For the next 20 years, the co-
conspirators looked across rooms
at each other, pronounced
“Eddie be funny,” and howled.
Just behind golf and college
football, Jenkins loved the
movies (he was practically
first in line to worship Meryl
Streep). The film he prized the
most, even above “Casablanca,”
was “The Americanization
of Emily,” which would bemore surprising if everyone
associated with that picture,
from writer Paddy Chayefsky
to actors James Garner, Julie
Andrews, Melvyn Douglas and
James Coburn, didn’t consider it
their proudest work.
Throughout “Emily,” people
keep telling Garner’s character,
“The balloon’s going up any
day now,” referring to D-Day.
“What balloon?” he always
answers absently. But when a
sportswriter came upon Garner in
the Bel-Air Country Club grill
and said to him, “The balloon’sJENKINS and WILLIE NELSON
co-wrote a song for BAJA
OKLAHOMA, though they were
never in the same room.
***
80 / GD / 5.19
Jenkins was inducted into the
World Golf Hall of Fame in 2012.
----------------------------