When Dan Jenkins was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, only the third writer to be so honored, he said he'd been covering sports, especially golf, "for the last 60 years, and I guess I'll keep doing it until I topple over." First, though, he needed to write his autobiography. His Ownself is pure Jenkins: lively, sarcastic, funny, chock-full of stories and anecdotes and opinions, lots of them. He's old school--bars, smokes and dames; it's all nostalgic, the past a "kindler, gentle day."
Jenkins grew up in Fort Worth, Tex., during the Depression, but his family did well and he was insulated from it: "Sometimes, I envy my own childhood." He cut his writing teeth on the likes of Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. He's written primarily for newspapers, along with Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest. Of his successful football novel, Semi-Tough, he says, "I had the title before I had the novel." He's from the Howard Cosell school of sports journalism--say it like it is. Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer are more important to him than Tiger Woods; he labels the comparison of Woods's "comeback" to Hogan's as "nonsense." Babe Zaharias, the "greatest female athlete in history," could tell as many "unprintable jokes as Sam Snead." Tennis anyone? Jenkins yearns for the years when Wimbledon was alive and well, the days of McEnroe vs. Borg or Navratilova vs. Evert--"before tennis died, in other words." His "semi-memoir" is great fun for sports fans. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher