Foreword

He stands out vividly from the majority of the writers in the press tent. At-the close of a golf tournament, most of the others scramble for their typewriters (or the modern machines for transmitting their copy) and thrash out their reports at high speed. They have got to get them done as soon as possible. Dan Jenkins is different. A tall, slim, silver-haired man in a double-breasted blue blazer, he sits at his typewriter the picture of ease as his fingers deftly tap out his story on the Crosby Pro- Amor the Masters or the British Open or the Ryder Cup match. He has a deadline to meet all right. Now, as during the many years he was with Sports Illustrated, his editor at Playboy or Golf Digest wants his stuff as soon as he can get it to them, which means yesterday if he is describing the playoff of our Open or the British Open. You would never guess this from Jenkins' demeanor. He sits at his typewriter with his back as straight as a cadet's, his eyes practically expressionless as each new line succeeds the line above. When someone comes over to ask him a question, he is never harried and, as often as not, he is light-hearted during the exchange. From time to time he interrupts his magisterial calm to light up a cigarette. In about two hours his story is finished and on its way to the magazine. He tightens the knot in his tie, adjusts his jacket, and glances at his watch to see how much time he has at his disposal before he meets some friends for a late dinner.

When people across the country read Jenkins' right-after-the-event articles, they marvel at their off-beat introductions, the humor which illuminates the reportage, the soundness of his treatment of the principal figures and the core of the action, the idiosyncratic asides that he tosses in because he likes them, and an ending that is sometimes ironic and at other times echoes a point he has made. Invariably, the reader has no sense whatsoever that the man who banged out the report had a deadline to meet, and, don't forget it, most people who write would rather meet Primo Camera than a tight deadline.

At one time it was fashionable to say that Dan Jenkins seldom went out onto the course to watch the play in a golf tournament, preferring to mosey over to the headquarters television trailer where the director, studying the numerous screens grouped around him, calls out which camera's coverage he wants to appear on the telecast. Dan knows the directors well, and he is happy to accept their invitation to drop in at the headquarters trailer. It is both a pleasant and sagacious thing to do. Out on the course, a reporter can't watch the various contenders and see all the shots that have to do with the winning and losing of the event. Jenkins, however, spends a lot of time on the course. With his sense of where the key action may take place, he sees as many of the crucial shots as nearly anyone. He knows the players well, and during a tournament he spends a good deal of time chatting with them off the course. On the day of the final round, he often chooses to watch the decisive holes in the Hospitality Room, listening to what the players who finished earlier have to say about the climactic action of the tournament. He never scribbles anything down. With his wonderful ear, he takes note of and retains their savvy and incisive comments.

As a natural editor of the immense amount of material he gleans, Dan has the time and the disposition to relax with his friends around a table during the unimportant hours of the long, tedious tournament days. The Jenkins Group, as it has come to be called, is made up of fellows like Bob Drum, Pat Summerall, Blackie Sherrod, Dave Marr, Bud Shrake, Sonny Jurgenson, Ed Sneed, Jack Whitaker, Ben Wright and sundry other writers, telecasters, and retired quarterbacks. At the Masters, they convene at one of the long tables in the upstairs lounge of the clubhouse, but wherever a significant tournament is being held, they stake out a point of assembly and almost instantly make themselves at home. If Dr. Johnson or Robert Benchley were to walk by, they would be asked to pull up a chair. Johnson and Benchley had all the requirements necessary to be eligible for the Jenkins Group: a knowledge of golf and other sports; a sense of humor, preferably droll; a critical wit that knows what is corny and synthetic; a genuine pleasure in listening to their friends' banter; a better than average background in literature, history, and the arts; and, above all, a convivial nature.

Dan Jenkins was born in Fort Worth, and graduated in 1949 from Paschal High, long famous as the high school that Ginger Rogers and Ben Hogan went to. A week before Jenkins graduated; he was hired to cover golf by Blackie Sherrod, the sports editor of the Fort Worth Press. 'Blackie knew I'd be entering T.C.U—Texas Christian University—that fall," Jenkins says. "I went to college with a byline." Jenkins has been around golf all his life. His father, a furniture salesman, was a golf addict. Jenkins Sr. played some golf with another local fellow, Ben Hogan, at a course called Katy Lake, a nine-hole layout with sand greens, which got its name from a nearby spur of the Missouri, Topeka, and Kansas City Railroad. Dan, who had been the medalist in the Fort Worth Junior Championship when he was fourteen and fifteen, went on to become a potent force on the T.C.U. golf team, and in his senior year, 1953, he was its captain. One thing Dan has in common with Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson is that each of them at one time or another was the runner-up in the Fort Worth City Championship. Another thing he remembers well is a trip he made to Albuquerque to play in an N.C.A.A. Championship. "I thought I was a pretty fair golfer until that tournament," he recalls. "Then I got a look there at a fellow named Ken Venturi from San Jose State, and I began to understand things better."

Jenkins got to New York in 1962, when he joined the staff of Sports Illustrated. He had been a stringer for S. I. when he worked for Fort Worth and Dallas newspapers after graduating from T.C.U. Alfred Wright was then writing the golf for S.I. Jenkins was the back-up golf writer and the head college football writer. In 1967, he became the head golf writer. He was successful from the start, because he was an original. His terse, dry, irreverent style went down so well that it was alleged that young sports writers throughout the country were copying it. One who doesn't is his daughter Sally, who graduated from Stanford about a year ago and is now a sports writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. His two sons, Marty (who is Sally's twin) and Danny, have yet to give any decisive indication which profession or business they plan to pursue. Dan lives in Manhattan with his dazzling wife June. She and two other bright girls from Texas, who also had an excess of free time on their hands, started and operate two successful New York restaurants, Summerhouse and Juanita's.

A few words about "The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate," perhaps Jenkins' best-known book except for his novel "Semi-Tough," an inspired look at professional football that was made into a motion picture. "The Dogged Victims" is a little slow getting off the starting blocks. Don't get concerned if it takes you a while to get into the swing of the first piece, The Game of Golfe, which begins as a sort of James Joycean hallucination that satirizes the all too frequently dispensed adoration of the hallmarks of early Scottish golf by tourists from overseas. By the time that Jenkins has made good his escape from the Cardinal bunker at Prestwick and has moved on to his appointment with the brokerage firm of Heather, Whin, Bracken, and Broom, the tone and the structure of the piece shift into free-wheeling, acute observations on the renowned championship courses, the peculiar mores of Scottish golfers and club secretaries, and other such distillations as seen through the eyes of a percipient Texan who is loving every gulp of the game's astonishing past and present. The subsequent pieces in the book follow vastly different routes. For example, they take the reader back to the 1930s and the first linkages between Demaret and Crosby and the world of Palm Springs and celebrity golf. They include an exploration of the leaner side of professional golf in the 1930s when Byron Nelson was so overcome by winning six hundred dollars in the General Brock Open in Niagara Falls that he didn't know how any man could cope with such a bonanza; a documented dissertation on how every outstanding putter wants to be known as a great striker of the ball, and how great putters like Jack Burke, Jerry Barber, Gary Player, and Arnold Palmer will heatedly deny that they ever could putt a lick; a close-up of Frank Chirkinian, the maestro of directing tournament golf on television, and how he goes about his work; how the strain of playing the tour week after week is so psychologically destructive that all the seemingly relaxed heroes are obsessed with trying to "keep the dog in them from coming up"; and lots of good inside stuff on Hogan, Snead, the Masters, Palmer, Nicklaus, and Trevino that suddenly takes off and, before you know it, you are reading really purple passages that sometimes turn into authentic poetry and at other times into that rarer commodity, wonderful fountains of humor that gush high in the sky like Old Faithful.

This autumn, after his long and memorable association with Sports Illustrated, Dan thought that he would profit from a change of scenery. Henceforth he will be a regular contributor to Playboy, with the whole world of sport his oyster, and he will be doing golf articles for Golf Digest. He will also from time to time continue to write novels, like "Life Its Own self" which is due out this year. In the meantime, pull up a chair and join the Jenkins Group table.

Herbert Warren Wind

Foreword

To those writers who spend weeks in an agony of composing sentences and making them into paragraphs that fit with other paragraphs to form a page and eventually a story, being in the company of Dan Jenkins at a sporting event can be a humbling experience. At a golf tournament, for example, Dan is usually to be found in good weather on the veranda, probably at a table with an umbrella over it and a waiter nearby. All day Dan may sit there as the other chairs at the table are occupied in turn by golfers, golfers' wives, tournament officials, gamblers, actors, club members, millionaires, pro football players, newspaper columnists, television commentators and various of Dan's friends who have no connection with the tournament beyond a clubhouse badge and an eagerness to tell what they have seen out on the course. Sometimes a table for four will have fourteen people at it, with Dave Marr discussing the town's restaurants, Arnold Palmer mulling over a flight plan, Don Meredith checking his grip on a teaspoon, George Low smiling at the size of the check someone other than he will get stuck with, and the rest rattling on about one thing or another while Dan, who has never been seen to take a note in his life, acts as chairman of the recreation committee.

Someone has said that the trouble with sitting around is you never know when you're finished. But Dan has a sense for it. He will rise and wander off and return in a while, having watched several of the tournament's more consequential shots being played. The sitting will resume, and the cast at the table continue to change, and the waiter keep shuttling, and then Dan is gone again. Two or three hours later he will turn up at a restaurant where thirty or forty of his day's companions are having an impromptu banquet, or at a party in someone's hotel suite, and inevitably he will be asked where he has been. "Had to write a story," Dan will say if he feels like explaining.

In the interim Dan has slipped off to the press room or to his hotel and has written perhaps three thousand words of prose that is perceptive, funny, evocative, informative and so well organized that an editor scarcely ever needs to touch it. Dan does this thirty or more times a year for Sports Illustrated, frequently working against a Sunday night deadline that he never fails to make. He writes about golf, football or skiing for the most part but occasionally turns to the pop-sociology study of the surfing fife in Hawaii, the high life in Hollywood, or any interesting style of life anywhere. Meanwhile, Dan manages to produce a book every year or so, either with his own name on it or a ghost-writing job, and he can be seen regularly with his beautiful wife June at Toots Shor's, the "21" Club, P. J. Clarke's or Elaine's in Manhattan or at dozens of other places from Beverly Hills to Kitz-bühel.

One reason Dan is able to live this way is that when he gets at a typewriter he knows what he is talking about. Using golf again as an example — since golf is the subject of the stories in this collection — when he writes of George Low being beaten by a cross-handed Scot in the British Boys championship, Dan understands what such a defeat can do to a person. Dan was beaten in the Texas State Junior by a cross-handed Mexican who wore high-top tennis shoes and a baseball cap. If Dan ever had any notions of a career in golf, that helped dissuade him. But he used to be an excellent player and still would be except that he rarely plays. Dan was runner-up in the Fort Worth city championship — a distinction he shares with Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson — and was captain of the golf team at Texas Christian University, lofty achievements for one whose idea of practice was to drive a couple of balls into the woods before a match.

In those days we hung around Herb Massey's cafe in Fort Worth eating chicken fried steaks with cream gravy and hot biscuits, drank coffee and beer alternately, and played absurd games on a puck-bowling machine. There was one game in which you put your shirt and pants on backwards, faced away from the pins and slid the puck down the board behind you, as Dan reveals in this book in "The Glory Game," which is his memoir as a municipal course hustler. In another version you stood in the hedge and reached your arm in through the window for a blind shot. Dan was good at all the games we played but best at golf. I recall a match when he arrived at the course wearing a suit and tie just as his opponent was stepping onto the tee. Dan hit one practice putt and it went into the hole. Convinced he was ready, Dan trotted to the tee, shedding coat and tie and rolling up his sleeves. He had already been announced and without a warm-up swing he cracked a mighty duck hook into the forest. "You're in for it today," he told his opponent from the University of Texas. "When I come out of there, we'll have alligators and bears chasing us."

While in college Dan played against Don January, Billy Maxwell, Wesley Ellis, Miller Barber, Ernie Vossler, all of whom have done rather well at the game as professionals. He also played against Earl Stewart, Don Cherry, Joe Conrad and many other names on the Texas amateur circuit, which still offers pretty good schooling for someone trying to learn how to play. The dozen times a year that Dan now plays golf, he still breaks 80. I was playing with him on the great course at Merion a while back when he was researching his book The Best 18 Golf Holes in America, and Dan, who had not picked up a club in weeks, shot a 76 in a light drizzle. He has won the National Golf Writers tournament twice, and some other lesser events. But what used to impress us most about Dan Jenkins's connection with the game of golf nearly twenty years ago in Fort Worth was that Dan was the only one of us Ben Hogan would acknowledge. Whenever he saw Dan, Hogan would nod and smile tightly and say, "Hi, fella." We didn't see how you could hope to get any more recognition than that.

Clearly, Dan has done so. After many years as a daily columnist in Fort Worth and Dallas and now as a senior editor for Sports Illustrated, Dan is one of the country's most widely known writers. A look at the prose that flows on the following pages will show you why.

EDWIN SHRAKE

Austin, Texas

IT first occurred to me that golf was not particularly the grimmest game in the world one afternoon when I was reading The Brothers Karamazov on an electric cart. There is nothing in The Brothers Karamazov about golf, of course, and very little in the novel about electric carts. But I happened to be reading it, studying for an exam in comparative literature, as I came up the 18th fairway of the Worth Hills municipal course in Fort Worth several years ago. This struck some of my friends as being kind of funny, although not as funny as the fact that I was out of the hole and stood to lose at least fifty big ones.

At any rate, one of the thieves I played golf with in those days said, "I'll tell you one thing, Jankin. You'd be a lot better off if you worked on your golf and paid less attention to them Nazi Roosians."

He was probably right, I said, but it certainly was a bum rap they were trying to pin on Dmitri Fyodoro-vitch.

My friend laughed, grabbed the crotch of his trousers, and said, "I got your da-mitty damned old dorry-vitch right here. I also got you out, out, out and one down."

Nobody has a soul, I said.

"Naw, they mostly usin' MacGregors and Spaldings now," he said.

A chapter in this book titled "The Glory Game" contains a lot more exciting repartee like this, and it also describes in detail why the author gave up a promising career as a tournament player, a career which might well have led him to the zenith of an assistant pro's job in the lake regions of Wisconsin.

There was another time, later on, when it occurred to me again that golf need not be so grim. This was one day in 1952 when I was covering the Masters tournament for the Fort Worth Press, a daily newspaper which folded a long time ago but hasn't realized it yet. A typewriter I was using in the Augusta press room did a quaint and curious thing. On a hasty deadline, it wrote, "Sam Snead won the Masters yesterday on greens that were slicker than the top of his head."

My editor said he thought that was pretty foolish, what I had done, leaving out the where, how and why in the lead, and insulting Sam Snead. Where, had I ever heard that this was journalism, or, to use his terms, "good newspapering?" I told him from reading The Brothers Karamazov, the new Daphne Du Maurier he most likely had not read yet. So I wrote an example to prove to him that I could do it his way. It went:

"Sam Snead, champion golfer, won the Masters, a big golf tournament, yesterday, which was yesterday, on a golf course. Mr. Snead is losing some of his hair but not all of it."

The final, crushing proof for me that golf should be taken light-heartedly came in the spring of i960. I was sitting comfortably in the men's grill of Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, vividly describing the moment that Harry Vardon invented the grip, when Arnold Palmer and Dow Finsterwald entered the room. They strolled over and invited me to join them in a practice round before the Colonial National Invitation.

No thank you, I said. There will be a large gallery and I don't want to dazzle the crowd with my button- down shirt and my shank. I'm a writer, not a golfer, I said. Palmer said he wasn't sure about that last part, but come along anyhow because it was late in the day and the people had gone home. So I weakened, unfortunately.

There were, of course, at least five thousand people lining the 1st fairway and gathered around the tee, waiting for Palmer and Finsterwald. When I walked timidly onto the 1st tee with my tie off, my sleeves rolled up, and the caddy carrying my white canvas bag, the only thing I overheard in the gallery was a man asks a friend, "Who's this geek?"

Hoping to put myself at ease, I went briskly over to Arnold and Dow, took the driver from Palmer's hands, as if to examine the all-weather grip on it or perhaps the swing weight, and tried to say something snappy.

"Who's away?" I said.

Palmer drove about 290 yards down the middle, and Finsterwald drove about 260 yards down the middle, and then it was time for me to tee off. I had always suspected that trying to play golf in the company of big time pros and a gallery would be something like walking naked into choir practice. And it was. In that moment on the ist tee, I suddenly felt blinded and flushed, and that I would like to be somewhere else. Bolivia, maybe.

As I bent over to tee up the ball, I could barely see my hand shaking. I remember being able to taste a giant cotton rabbit in my mouth as I addressed the shot. I remember catching a glimpse of my shoes and wishing they had been shined. And I remember that as I took the club back, I overheard another comment in the gallery.

"No livin' way," a man said, quietly.

The drive went somewhere down the fairway, rather remarkably, but the next shot went only fifteen or twenty feet. I topped it. The next one went about ten yards. I topped it again. And the next one went about fifty yards. I hit a foot behind it. Eventually, I managed to pitch onto the putting surface, a feat that was greeted with a ripple of applause, which I took for what it was: a slightly unnecessary sarcasm from a few of my own friends in the crowd.

For a moment or so, I felt all right. I was on the green at last where I could stand around with Arnold and Dow, lean casually on my putter, and smoke. Except when I walked onto the lovely bent grass, I accidentally dragged one foot and my cleats carved a horrible divot out of the turf.

Humiliated, naturally, I quickly got down on my hands and knees to repair the divot. But when I got back up I noticed that the moisture of the green had implanted a huge damp splotch on each knee of my trousers. I leaned over and stared at the splotches, and began to give each leg a casual ruffle. When I raised up, my head hit something hard. It was my caddy's chin. He had come over to hand me the putter.

I took the putter and went over to my ball. I marked it and tried to hand it to the caddy so he could clean it. I dropped it. We both, bent over to pick it up, bumped shoulders, and then got our hands on it at the same time. I dropped my putter. He dropped the towel. I picked up the towel. He picked up the putter. We exchanged them.

At this point, I thought I would light a cigarette to steady the nerves. I removed the pack from my pocket and tapped it against my left hand the way one does to make the cigarettes pop out. About four of them squirted out and onto the green. I picked them up and lit one. But when I went to remove it from my dry lips, it stuck, my fingers slid off the end, knocking the burning head down onto my shirt front. This forced me into a bit of an impromptu dance, which, in turn, resulted in my cleats taking another huge divot out of the green.

When that divot had been repaired, when I had successfully lighted another cigarette, and when I had a firm grip on the putter, I glanced around to see where Palmer and Finsterwald were and realized they had been staring at me, along with the other amused thousands, for God knows how long. It had been my turn to putt.

I won't go on about the rest of that round, or about the blue-red-purple funk that I played in. The point is made. I will say that because of the experience, and many others, I now know most of the pros pretty well. For example, I know Arnold Palmer well enough to call him Arnold. And Ben Hogan, with whom I have also played golf, has become a close enough friend that he never fails to phone me up to chat whenever we happen to wind up in Mratinje, Yugoslavia, at the same time.

This book is about professional golfers for the most part, and about the unique world around them. It is not a book with a continuing story line, except that modern golf itself is something of a story. But Arnold Palmer does not divorce Winnie and run off with Raquel Welch in the end. He marries his three-wood.

There is sometimes a temptation on the part of a writer putting together a collection to try to hang all of the stories on one line, to shape them into something larger and more meaningful than they are. This book doesn't do that anymore than it pretends to tell the desperate slicer where his V's ought to point. It is not a history, though there is history in it, and it is not an instructional, though there are theories expounded.

If anything holds the book together other than the binding, it is the fact that a great many fascinating people play this game unconscionably well, and talk about it even better; and most of the more interesting personalities are examined within these covers, playing as I saw them play, and talking as I heard them talk.

The book takes its title from the words of Bobby Jones, who was often capable of writing about the game as well as he played it, which was not exactly with a 12-handicap. Speaking on the topic of golf's pressures, whether in championship competition or in one's normal Sunday foursome, Jones once wrote, "On the golf course, a man may be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a sidesplitting comedy — any of these within a few hours, and all without having to bury a corpse or repair a tangled personality."

We golfers are all of those things at different times, I think. But since I have never known one who did not complain largely and most constantly about bad luck, I believe that we are mostly just the dogged victims of inexorable fate.

Why else, on occasions all too numerous, would we three-putt?

Foreword

Acknowledgment

The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate

The Game of Golfe