Texas Christian University is the home of the personal collection of famed sports writer Dan Jenkins, who has been hailed as the single best golf writer in history by Sports Illustrated, where he worked from the 1960s to the 1980s.
His sports writing was noted by that national magazine for its “hilarious irreverence,” but he was also a longtime chronicler of his hometown of Fort Worth, where he attended R.L. Paschal High School, TCU and played golf.
“This extraordinary collection not only documents the professional achievements of one of the great voices in American sports writing but also provides a deeply personal glimpse into Jenkins’ life through his scrapbooks and photographs,” said Tracy Hull, dean of TCU’s Mary Couts Burnett Library, in a statement. “It will serve as a vital resource for researchers, students, and fans of sports history and literature.”
The collection of bound manuscripts, scrapbooks, photographs, personal letters and annotated galleys spans around 25 feet — or the length of nearly seven standard golf clubs. Jenkins died in 2019. His wife, June, donated the collection to TCU starting in 2023. The documents donated to TCU give a more personal glimpse into Jenkins’ life than the archive at the University of Texas at Austin, which includes the writer’s Sports Illustrated columns.
Allison Kirchner, an archives specialist at the TCU Mary Couts Burnett Library, stands in front of a collection of sports journalist Dan Jenkins’ work. (Shomial Ahmad | Fort Worth Report)“It gives insight into the evolution of sports writing and American sports culture,” said Allison Kirchner, an archives specialist at the TCU library who helped process the collection.
Kirchner said the collection spans more than half a century of writing.
“(It shows) how sports have been reported on over the years, but also how people enjoyed sports,” she said.
Jenkins covered 67 consecutive Masters tournaments, said Kirchner. He was known both as a chronicler of golf and college football. He graduated from TCU in 1953, where the Dan Jenkins Press Box at Amon G. Carter Stadium is named after him and a student journalist scholarship for sports writing was established by him.
Early in his career, he had a column in the Fort Worth Press. He also wrote for the Dallas Times Herald. He then wrote for a national audience, including at Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest and Playboy.
The collection contains letters from famous people, including politicians and television personalities. It features polite letters from Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and a searing undated letter from Ronald Reagan, who called Jenkins’ book, “Life Its Ownself,” a “slander of a nation, a sport, a great state, a great university and of all womankind.”
Dan Jenkins, who was called by Sports Illustrated as the single best golf writer in history, plays at the Music City Invitational in Nashville in 1970. (Courtesy photo | TCU Library Special Collections)He was a novelist, screenwriter and chronicler of Fort Worth culture. The collection includes movie posters and bound manuscripts.
He wrote a column about the wild adventures of golf buddies on a municipal golf course in Fort Worth that they called Goat Hills; an intrepid female reporter chasing a breaking story on serial bank robbers in “Fast Copy”; and about a Fort Worth barmaid who wants to be a country-western songwriter in “Baja Oklahoma,” which was adapted to a made-for-television comedy-drama starring Julia Roberts.
His satirical novel “Semi-Tough” that was later adapted into a feature film gives a window into football and Texas culture in the 1950s and 1960s.
When the Golf Writers Association of America honored Jenkins in 2005, his daughter Sally Jenkins, who followed in her father’s footsteps to become a sports writer, wrote a tribute to her father in TCU Magazine.
“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,” wrote Jenkins, a sports columnist for The Washington Post. “His fathering style, interestingly, was not much different from his writing style, which is to say, excellence disguised as offhandedness.”
One of his lines in the novel “Dead Solid Perfect” became a cultural catchphrase: “A man can travel far and wide – all the way to shame or glory and back again – but he ain’t never gonna find nothin’ in this old world that’s dead solid perfect.”
The collection gives a glimpse into the imperfect world of Jenkins’ writings and musings.
The Dan Jenkins Collection is now available to the public through TCU’s Special Collections, housed in the Mary Couts Burnett Library. The collection is open to the public Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and can be viewed by appointment.
Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, in partnership with Open Campus. Contact her at shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.
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