(Jeff Roberson/AP)

A tribute to Dan Jenkins from his daughter, columnist Sally Jenkins

By Sally Jenkins
Editor’s note: In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature and journalism we’ve ever published.

There are two sacred days on the annual golf calendar: Masters Sunday, which falls on the second Sunday of April, and Father’s Day, on the same day as the final round of the U.S. Open. Everything is turned upside down this year, with the Masters in November and Father’s Day without the Open. Both golf holidays have been linked in my mind because I spent about 35 years observing them on a barstool next to Dan Jenkins.

So as Father’s Day approaches, it seems appropriate to call on his talented daughter, Washington Post columnist and best-selling author Sally Jenkins to give us a little Dan. In the eulogy at his memorial service in Fort Worth last year, Sally remembered his writing: “It had the effortless vault and jauntiness of the music he loved: classic Texas swing. It’s interesting that our father wrote every bit as well and impressively about music as he did about sports, and so much of that tunefulness slipped into his prose. Here is the beginning of his game story on perhaps the greatest college football game ever played, the 1971 meeting between Nebraska and Oklahoma:

“In the land of the pickup truck and cream gravy for breakfast, down where the wind can blow through the walls of a diner and into the grieving lyrics of a country song on a jukebox—down there in dirt-kicking territory they played a football game on Thanksgiving Day that was mainly for the quarterbacks on the field and for self-styled gridiron intellectuals everywhere.”

Sally concluded her eulogy with as good a line as any father could imagine being said about him by his daughter: “When a man like our father goes, it’s an outsized loss. It’s like 100 men have left the room.”

In May 2005, Sally wrote the following story on the occasion of Dan being honoured by the Golf Writers Association of America as the winner of the William D. Richardson Award for consistently outstanding contributions to golf. Note to Dan: Sally her Ownself was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, as The Washington Post reported earlier this year, “for the breadth and vigour of her writing, which in 2019 was characteristically fearless and forthright.”

Happy Father’s Day. —Jerry Tarde

* * *

My father is, sadly, a fraud. There is the public account of him, and then there is my private one, and the two don’t agree at all. For instance, there is the Dan Jenkins who pretends he’d sooner burn small children with cigarettes than pat them on the head, and then there is the adoring, lenient father I know. There is the guy whose profane wit can force a sharp intake of breath, and there is the husband who has been devotedly married for more than 40 years. There is the cavalier veranda lounger who never seemed to take a note, and then there is the writer I’ve witnessed at home, who works with unswerving concentration.

My brothers and I might be the only people, apart from my mother, who know him for the suave faker he really is. At some point, your childhood becomes your own property, and you see it for what it was. While you were a child, it belonged to your parents, and they cast it in their terms.

“You’re having a happy childhood,” my father told me.

“I am?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

My father speared another forkful of Raviolios from my plate and ate them. It was a nightly ritual for him to sit with me and my two brothers and share our supper before he and my mother went out for the evening. On Monday nights we ate Raviolios and they went to P.J. Clarke’s. On Tuesday we had fish sticks and they went to Elaine’s. And so on. The phone numbers of the restaurants were pasted on the wall by the phone along with the days of the week.

Once, someone asked my younger brother what it was like to grow up the son of a sportswriter and author, and his imposingly elegant and successful wife. She was always opening critically acclaimed restaurants, and he was always reinventing forms of journalism and writing bestsellers in alarmingly casual-seeming fashion.

My brother considered the question.

“They were out every night, and when they came home they went to Europe,” he said.

Yet somehow my father, despite his globe-circling, and reputation for enjoying the smartening effects of scotch, managed to provide us with a childhood that was, in fact, happy and healthy. How did he accomplish this? One of his methods was a deceptive sobriety, another was a veiled attentiveness to his family, and yet another was a sly conscientiousness at his work.

The dinner hour was always ours. My parents would sit at the kitchen table with their three children, and their three tall glasses of milk. My father would talk to us while he stole bites of our baby food. Alphabet soup. Creamed corn. Franks and beans. Stouffer’s frozen vegetables.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I learned a joke today.”

“Tell it.”

“What’s green and lives in the sea?”

“What?”

“Moby Pickle.”

He began giggling helplessly at the absurdity of the joke, and couldn’t stop for the next five minutes, while around him, three pajamaed urchins capsized their milk with delight.

The rest of the world has its view of Dan Jenkins, and I have mine. It’s impossible for me to read his life’s work with professional detachment because for every U.S. Open story, there was a family summer. The combined quality and volume of his writing on golf, as well as hundreds of other subjects, is all the more impressive to me in light of the fact that he managed to produce it while also attending school plays, writing checks to orthodontists, mustering private-school tuitions and lifting the family luggage. All of which he made seem effortless. His fathering style, interestingly, was not much different from his writing style, which is to say, excellence disguised as offhandedness.

Some of the stories, of course, represent absences. But not as many as you would think. He managed to be, despite my brother’s joke, a vividly present father. He often took us with him; we scampered with impunity through press rooms, and carried hot coffee to him, and surely must have pestered him, though he never complained about it. Others might have found him acerbic; we only found him gently or hysterically funny. While his readers might be amazed to discover he had children, his children were amazed to discover he had readers.

Look again at the writing of Dan Jenkins, and ask yourself if it could have been as effortless to write as it is to read. Peruse the easy rhythms and the jauntiness of phrasing, and yet the unfailing truthfulness and the nail-on-the-head precision in each description. Consider the fact that, despite the ease with which the sentences pass, he almost never employs a shopworn, overused word, but rather finds the unexpected one, which also happens to be utterly right.

Which is the real Dan Jenkins, and which is a cunning veneer? I’ll step aside and let someone else answer the question.

“Do you understand,” my mother once said, “how hard your father works?”

The answer was no, at the time I didn’t. It’s only as an adult and a colleague that I’ve come to understand. Small things, details, return to me, and make more sense now. The curious fact that, though he was reputed to love his cocktails, I never once saw him drink at home. The steady metallic sound of a Royal typewriter as I went to sleep, and the sound of it again in the morning.

As an adult, I reread the old work and I look at the new work, and what I see in it is this: a constant stripping away of pretence, and of the profligate excesses of feeling that surround sports, to find the real people and truths underneath. An unwavering effort to think about things plainly and thoroughly, the better to describe them. Sound judgments, about what’s funny and not, what’s poignant and not, what’s worthy and what is not. Constant restless experiments with form, and a lifelong refusal to go with the crowd, or to mail one in.

He comes from a generation of writers that adopted a demeanour of perpetual nonchalance, cigarettes dangling. He didn’t talk much about writing. He never said, “Don’t be a writer; you’ll sentence yourself to a life of excruciating self-doubt and criticism.” He never said, “It’s one of the hardest professions in the world.” He never said, “It’s ditch-digging, it’s breaking rocks with a shovel.” Instead, his instructions were his example.

He did say this: “Dad loves his work.”

As a writer, I drew three lessons from him: the absoluteness of his concentration, the contrariness of his thinking, and the depth of his respect for good writing. All of which together can only be called a kind of integrity. “Learn your craft,” he told me. “And don’t ever let a thing go until it’s as good as you can make it.”

So I do something others don’t, when it comes to my father. I take him seriously. God knows, somebody has to.