Requiem for a Scribe

Legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins passed away this week at the age of 89. We do
n't have the chops here to do his life in sports, novels, movies, and Twitter justice, so we'll point you to three of the most amazing obituaries you'd ever want to read.

First, from Tom Cunningham in Golf Digest, who quotes Jenkins saying:

“My advice doesn’t change with electricity,” he said. “Be accurate first, then entertain if it comes natural. Never sell out a fact for a gag. Your job is to inform above all else. Know what to leave out. Don’t try to force-feed an anecdote if it doesn’t fit your piece, no matter how much it amuses you. Save it for another time. Have a conviction about what you cover. Read all the good writers that came before you and made the profession worth being part of—Lardner, Smith, Runyon, etc. Don’t just cover a beat, care-take it. Keep in mind you know more about the subject than your readers or editors. You’re close to it, they aren’t. I think I can say in all honesty that I’ve never written a sentence I didn’t believe, even if it happened to be funny.”

Dave Kindred of the Washington Post, a great in his own right, weighs in:

In time, like most every sportswriter of my generation, I wanted to be Dan Jenkins. What a life. There’s Clarke’s, Elaine’s, Toots Shor’s, the Park Avenue apartment, the beautiful wife, June. (“In all my books, I’m the guy and June is the girl, and I always get the girl.”) There’s the getaway place in Hawaii, the “Semi-Tough” quarterback Billy Clyde Puckett, the sportswriter Jim Tom Pinch in “You Gotta Play Hurt,” and the movie “Baja Oklahoma” (with its immortal 10 stages of drunkenness, ending with “9. Invisible” and “10. Bulletproof”). 

“Dan Jenkins, Dan Jenkins!” an ingénue of a sportswriter said upon meeting him. “I’ve always wanted to be just like you.” 

“What, hungover?” he replied.

Finally, Jenkins' daughter Sally, who followed her father into the family business, wrote a moving essay about her Dad:

So here’s the deal if you want a recipe for father worship, if you want kids who, when you are dying in the hospital, will race at 60 mph across town in search of the grape Popsicle you requested, just to please you one more time. Take your little girl or boy everywhere with you, even into bars. Do small, harmless things with them you shouldn’t, let them off easy and end every conversation with a laugh. But give them your God’s honest truth about what matters, and let them see you work. 

He preferred brevity, loathed false sentiment, prized candor and humor above all character traits and was a free speech absolutist. Privately, he was a lenient, adoring and adored man. As great a writer as he was, I don’t know that you can say anything higher about a guy than that his children preferred his company to all others and his approval to all the credit in the world. I was so lucky to be his. 

“I don’t know who to try to impress anymore,” I told my mother.

Kindred's obit mentioned Jenkins' coining of the 10 stages of drunkenness in his novel 'Baja Oklahoma, which are worth repeating in their entirety. See if you resemble any of these:

Witty and charming
Rich and powerful
Benevolent
Clairvoyant
F--- dinner
Patriotic
Crank up the Enola Gay
Witty and charming, Part II
Invisible
Bulletproof

Godspeed, Mr. Jenkins. Twitter, sports, and the world will miss you in equal measure.