RIP Dan Jenkins

Was Dan Jenkins very good?

Yes.

Was he the GOAT of sportswriters, or even of Texas sportswriters?

No.

That was his mentor, Blackie Sherrod. And, there was no comparison on them in opining about news issues.

Jenkins, IMO, had a couple of minor and a couple of larger issues against him.

On the minor side, he was such a Ben Hogan fanatic that — contretemps with "the kid" Tiger Woods and his agent Mark Steinberg aside, he couldn't give Tiger a fair shake at times. (At other times, he was awed of Woods, though.)

I wrote about some of that here. Here's an outtake:

Dan's fetishizing of Ben Hogan to the point of trying to count things like the North/South as a major is ridiculous. 

Plus, Hogan, setting aside his car accident and miracle comeback, played in a relatively barren era for golf. Sam Snead had a long career, playing at a winning level throughout the 1950s, but Byron Nelson had retired, and until Arnie and Gary at the end of the decade, when Cary Middlecoff and a young Boros are your next in line, it's not good depth. Given that the PGA banned Bobby Locke, using a face-saving excuse to cover for jealousy, that only adds to the egg on the collective golf face of the 1950s in the US.

Indeed. Hogan won six of his nine majors after his car wreck. Other than his one Open, the 50s in Britian belonged almost totally to South Africans and New Zealanders. America had a bunch of one-major winners and a couple of two major winners at the other three Slam events in the 50s. Hogan simply had weak competition.

And, as for his love of all things Hogan, as reflected in his World Golf Hall of Fame induction as well? A lot of his fellow golfers didn't like Hogan as a person that much.

And, if you're going to count alleged one-time majors, Dan? The Haig would be ahead of Hogan anyway. If Jenkins would just have admitted this was biased fandom, not objective, and at the same time belittled Woods a touch less? Different. I got no problems with admitting you're a fanboy. Trying to used Twain's lies, damned lies and statistics for a pseudo-objective sheen? Different.

On the bigger side?

Unlike Blackie, he couldn't do news commentary and analysis as well as sports. And, even to the degree he could do that, he was ... "less reconstructed" than Blackie. In other words, he was conservative beyond political correctness. I'm far from alone in that take.

Contra Ray Ratto and others in the sports column world, I never tried to imitate Dan. That's because I never thought too much about it. Also, I never thought too much about whether or not Jenkins was that imitation-worthy.

I, and many others, though, did take Blackie's "scattershooting" idea, complete the lede graf in our own way, and run with it. I otherwise imitated Art Buchwald at times — someone of whom Blackie reminded me a bit.

Beyond that, if Jenkins' invented dialogue between golfers is a good sample, his writing there — never read by me — is probably a bit turgid. (Tiger was right, I think, that his fake Tiger interview didn't come off well as parody, and I think that is part of why.) I was NOT a big Landry Cowboys fan, and besides, "North Dallas Forty" was the best on that. And, Jenkins never covered baseball in detail, let alone the NBA. (Thank doorknobs for that one, too. His non-PC rips on the NBA would have been semi-Trumpian, probably.)

But, we're going to get some good RIP, too.

I do think he was the best golf writer we've seen in half a century, bar none. And the car wrecks we call the U.S. Open brought out some of his best. His observation of majors in general is also good. And SI wraps up his best in golf and football writing from his time there.

Let's honor him for that.

And, for leaving a posthumous gift at Golf Digest.

And, his best sports coverage wasn't golf.

It was, per his memoir, "His Ownself."

Let's be honest about that.

Of course, we're all our own best subjects as authors. The key is to disguise that and make it interesting.