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| Dan Jenkins | |
Dan Jenkins, "a sportswriter whose rollicking irreverence enlivened Sports Illustrated's pages for nearly 25 years and animated several novels, including Semi-Tough, a sendup of the steroidal appetites, attitudes and hype in pro football that became a classic of sports lit," died March 7, the New York Times reported. He was 90. Semi-Tough was ranked #7 on SI's 2002 list of the top 100 sports books of all time and was adapted into a 1978 movie starring Burt Reynolds as Billy Clyde Puckett.
Joining the magazine in 1962, Jenkins was one of a select group of writers, including Roy Blount Jr., Mark Kram and Frank Deford, recruited by managing editor André Laguerre, "who oversaw the magazine's emergence as a leader in literate, and occasionally literary, sports journalism as well as a powerhouse in the Time Inc. stable," the Times wrote, adding that his main beats were golf and college football, sports he grew up with in Fort Worth, Tex.
Jenkins's other books include His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir (2014), Dead Solid Perfect (1974), You Gotta Play Hurt (1991), and Baja Oklahoma (1981). The Times noted that none of his novels after the first had the same impact, "partly because the bawdy audacity that characterized Semi-Tough seemed less audacious in later books, and partly because the characters espousing the attitudes and employing the language favored by Billy Clyde and friends struck many readers as much less appealing as public attitudes changed," a "societal swivel" that Jenkins openly criticized.
In a tribute to her father, Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist for the Washington Post, wrote: "A new manuscript of a novel my father just finished is still open on his desk--he was working on it on his last day at home before he fell and broke his hip and the congestive heart failure had its final say, from all the bacon and cigarettes. The novel, titled The Reunion at Herb’s Café, tells readers where his major fictional characters ended up. (It will be published by TCU Press.) His most famous and true creation was Billy Clyde Puckett, a sort of composite of all the dashing NFLers he knew. I stood over the manuscript this morning in tears, then read a line and almost spit my coffee."