Six decades of classic stories on the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA Championship by the legendary Dan Jenkins
Dan Jenkins has long been considered one of the premier sportswriters in America. Honored and imitated by generations of his peers, Jenkins's wit, fearlessness, and inimitable style set the tone for "Sports Illustrated" during his years there and are in full display in classic novels like "Semi-Tough" and "Dead Solid Perfect." But it is his golf journalism--for the" Fort Worth Press," "Dallas Times-Herald," "Sports Illustrated, " and in recent years, "Golf Digest"--that sets him above and apart.
In this masterful collection, Jenkins has selected the best of his original dispatches from the past sixty years--from Ben Hogan's great final-round 67 to win the 1951 U.S. Open at torturous Oakland Hills to Tiger Woods's grimacing playoff win against Rocco Mediate fifty-eight years later--all written with his colorful humor and unmatched insight. His wry reportage on golf's most iconic players, thrilling finishes, historic moments, and heartbreaking collapses have brought legions of fans intimately close to the action and the larger-than-life personalities of the game. The stories in "Jenkins at the Majors" remain as vivid and thrilling as the days he wrote them, including:
- Ben Hogan besting Sam Snead in an epic battle in the 1953 U.S. Open at Oakmont
- The legendary 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, where three eras clashed as Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan, and Jack Nicklaus battled it out in the final round
- Greg Norman's cringe-worthy collapse at the 1996 Masters
- Tiger Woods's record-shattering victory in the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach
Jenkins was there, immortalizing these and many other great moments in golf history--under deadline, no less--with his signature style and encyclopedic knowledge of the game in this nostalgic and highly entertaining ride. A must-read for every golf fan.

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.
So it's off to the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and the rest of the PGA Tour for Bobby Joe, who's leaving behind the prospect of a third ex-wife. On the golf courses he'll face familiar competitors such as Knut Thorssun and Cheetah Farmer, but the rival who may loom the largest is the game's newest child star, nineteen-year-old Scott Pritchard. His talents are the talk of the Tour--so is his arrogance--and so, by the way, is his stunning mom, Gwendolyn, a shapely adorable woman who captures Bobby Joe's full attention and threatens not to let go.
Long revered by his peers as one of the world's best sportswriters, and beloved by readers for such classics as "Semi-Tough" and "Dead Solid Perfect," Dan Jenkins is at the top of his form in "Slim and None." It's packed with authentic insider gems about each of the majors and hilarious sketches of many of the characters--touring pros, officials, media, agents, caddies, and ladies--who inhabit this outrageous and endearing world of sports.

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.

Dan Jenkins virtually invented the golf novel with Dead Solid Perfect, his rollicking account of the life and times of touring pro Kenny Lee Puckett. After thirty years of waiting for the follow-up, Jenkins returns to the world of big-time golf in The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist and finds a world where endorsements and course fashion matter more than the side bet. His hero, Bobby Joe Grooves, is a hell-raising two-iron-wielding rogue trying to turn his one annual tournament win and considerable Texas charm into a spot on the Ryder Cup team. Standing between Bobby Joe and his little spot of golf heaven are two ex-wives, a girlfriend, various pious PGA officials, and his embarrassing lack of a career major. A book that will teach you more about golf history than any weepy sunset-over-the-eighteenth-green retrospective, The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist is an uproarious portrait of what it’s really like to play on the PGA Tour. It’s vintage Dan Jenkins.

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 his friendship and the rounds played with Ben Hogan, to the stories swapped with New York's elite, to the corporate expense accounts abused, Dan lets loose on his experiences in journalism, sports, and showbiz. An honest, one-of-a-kind look at politics, hypocrites, political correctness, the past, the present, Hollywood, money, and athletes, this is a sports fan's dream book. It's a touching, laugh-out-loud tribute to the romanticism of sportswriting and the glory days of sports, told straight from the mouth of the man who saw it all his ownself.

"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.