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Showing 1 - 16 of 16 matches in All Departments
Six decades of classic stories on the Masters, U.S. Open, British
Open, and PGA Championship by the legendary Dan Jenkins
And what a reunion it is! Dan Jenkins reunites many of the most memorable and irascible characters from his most memorable and hilarious novels - starting with Semi-Tough. Billy Clyde Puckett, Shake Tiller, T. J. Lambert, Barbara Jane Bookman, Big Ed Bookman, Slick Henderson, Juanita Hutchins, Doris Steadman - the list goes on, and they're all packin' heat. It all begins when Herb's CafE - modeled after a Fort Worth landmark renowned for its chicken- fried steak - goes up for sale after Herb's death and the establishment's disastrous sequel as a trendy restaurant featuring outrageous nouvelle cuisine. Tommy Earl Bruner buys the place, rehires most of the old staff, and invites all its former denizens to Fort Worth for a grand celebration. The uproarious outcome could only have been dreamed up by comic mastermind Dan Jenkins.
This Texas Traditions Series reprint takes us back to the Lone Star State during the Cold War at the beginning of the 1960s. The postwar generation is in a frenzy of high living and profligate spending. Big Texas oil is still subsidized by a federal depletion allowance and cattle still account for much of the state's wealth. But these longtime mainstays of Texas finance are giving way to transistors and computers. A new millionaire class is growing up around business mergers and electronic technology. The characters in Shrake's novel are caught in this brave new world in one way or another. Some are the princes of prosperity; others are victims of it. This is a world of lobbyists, merger lawyers, small-time politicos, sons of oil money, and the women who cheer them on or worry about their souls. In the opening section of the novel, we visit the Texas Gulf Coast and see the machinations of Sam Guthrie and Waddy Morris Jr. as they attempt to take over a rival technology company. Back in Dallas, idealistic attorney Ben Carpenter moves to thwart the Guthrie/Morris takeover. Then we move to Fort Worth and attend the drunken party given in honor of Ben Carpenter's thirtieth birthday. The party moved to Mexico on Cadmus Wilkins's bus where everyone has to confront his or her inner self. And some are found wanting. The several vignettes of the novel paint an accurate picture of Texas as it moves into the urban era and as its middle class began deserting the old verities and tasting what were once forbidden pleasures. Shrake is a first-rate stylist who knows how the upper half lives.
Introduced in Dan Jenkins's previous uproarious novel of the pro
golf tour, "The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist,"
Bobby Joe Grooves is now forty-four and still without a win in a
major championship. A student of golf lore, Bobby Joe is well aware
that only a small group of stars have ever won a major at his age
or older, and among them are such immortals as Nicklaus, Boros,
Irwin, and Trevino. It's now or never for Bobby Joe, and excuse him
for thinking that his chances are slim and none.
Made into a hilarious and timeless film starring Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson, and Jill Clayburgh, and recently named number seven on Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, Semi-Tough is Dan Jenkins's masterpiece and considered by many to be the funniest sports book ever written. The novel follows the outsize adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett, star halfback for the New York Giants, whose team has come to Los Angeles for an epic duel with the despised "dog-ass" Jets in the Super Bowl. But Billy Clyde is faced with a dual challenge: not only must he try to run over a bunch of malevolencies incarnate, but he has also been commissioned by a New York book publisher to keep a journal of the events leading up to, including, and following the game. Infused with Dan Jenkins's characteristic joie de vivre and replete with cigarettes, whiskey, and wild women, Semi-Tough is an uproarious romp through a lost era of professional sports that will have any armchair quarterback falling out of his or her recliner in hysterics on a semi-regular basis.
The best golf writer on the planet returns with his funniest book ever.
From Dan Jenkins--one of America's most respected and acclaimed sportswriters and author of the bestselling novels "Semi-Tough" and "Dead Solid Perfect"--comes a colorful, sentimental, hilarious, and cantankerous memoir about his lifelong journey through the world of sports. "Sometimes, I envy my own childhood," says Dan Jenkins. Many can
say that about Dan's whole life. In "His Ownself," we follow him
from his youth in Texas, where being a sports fan meant
understanding a lot about religion, heroes, and drinking; to his
first job at the "Fort Worth Press" working alongside all-time
journalistic greats like Blackie Sherrod and Bud Shrake; to the
glory days of "Sports Illustrated." One of a handful of writers to
establish "SI" as the most important sports magazine ever, Dan
refocused the magazine's college football coverage and covered the
game's greatest players and coaches. Beyond football, Dan is in the
conversation about the best golf writers of all time. Having
covered every Masters, U.S. Open, PGA, and British Open for the
past fifty years, he takes us behind the scenes to capture the
drama--as well as the humor--of these tournaments as he brings us
up close and personal with the likes of Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer,
Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods. "From the Hardcover edition."
This collection marks the return to print of John Lardner, one of America's press box giants, a classic stylist whose wry humor and tireless reporting helped elevate sportswriting to art. The brilliant W. C. Heinz called Lardner "the best of us." This book shows why. Lardner applied his singular touch not only to his era's icons-Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige-but to the scamps, eccentrics, hustlers, and con men in the shadow of sports. Whether in snappy columns or leisurely magazine pieces, Lardner held sport of every description up to the light, forever changing the way people wrote, read, and thought about their heroes, from superstars to scrappers. These forty-nine pieces represent sportswriting at the top of its game. Purchase the audio edition.
Dan Jenkins' second best-known novel, "Baja Oklahoma," features protagonist Juanita Hutchins, who can cuss and politically commentate with the best of Jenkins' male protagonists. Still convincingly female, though in no way dumb and girly, fortyish Juanita serves drinks to the colorful crew patronizing Herb's Cafe in South Fort Worth, worries herself sick over a hot-to-trot daughter proving too fond of drugs and the dealers who sell them, endures a hypochondriac mother whose whinings would justify murder, dates a fellow middle-ager whose connections with the oil industry are limited to dipstick duty at his filling station--and, by the way, she also hopes to become a singer-songwriter in the real country tradition of Bob Wills and Willie Nelson. That Juanita is way too old to remain a kid with a crazy dream doesn't matter much to her. In between handing out longneck beers to customer-acquaintances battling hot flashes and deciding when boyfriend Slick is finally going to get lucky, Juanita keeps jotting down lyrics reflective of hard-won wisdom and setting them to music composed on her beloved Martin guitar. Too many of her early songwriting results are one-dimensional or derivative, but finally she hits on something both original and heartfelt: a tribute to her beloved home state, warts and all.
Among the provocative social phenomena of our time, few have caught the public fancy as profoundly as that quintessentially American species known as Bubba. The conventional notion of Bubba is a Southern redneck who thinks a rented movie and a six-pack are quality entertainment. According to Dan Jenkins, this historical view has been advanced largely by "effete Easterners and West Coast ponytails who claim to like trout pizza and fat novels written by some kind of Ecuadorian". Granted, says Jenkins, there is more than one Bubba from Georgia who has spray-painted his girl's name on an overpass. But there is also more than one Bubba from Chicago who will do his Christmas shopping at Graceland. Bubba, Jenkins concludes, is a state of mind, and he proceeds to let Bubba define himself by speaking on topics ranging from beer to ballet, from haircuts to the homeless.
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