(Dan Jenkins passed away March 7, 2019, at 90 in his Fort Worth hometown. More on all this later, but he was an original and he was authentic, the perfect guy in the perfect place at the perfect time. He took advantage of that, and good for everybody that he did. This piece ran originally in the March 24, 2019 editions of The Times and The News-Star.)

The first baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, said that “every boy builds a shrine to some baseball hero, and before that shrine, a candle always burns.”

Brooks Robinson was my guy. In football, Don Meredith. Golf: Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer hit the tape at the same time. Animal hero would be Secretariat, a stud literally and figuratively. Nice work if you can get it.

But those guys, through no fault of their own, were always playing for second place in my own personal Hero Department.

My guy was, is, and always will be Dan Jenkins, the most influential sportswriter of the 20th century, the undisputed star of Sports Illustrated during my generation’s youth, a scratch golfer in his day, a scratch human being, and a scratch novelist until only a few days before he died on March 7 in his hometown of Fort Worth.

My guy, 90, ran through the tape. He was cleaning the clubs and signing the scorecard of his final book just days before his passing.

Mistakes, I’ve had a few, but then again, too many to mention. But if the category is Choice of Hero, I aced it. In Mr. Dan, I chose wisely. And in this bureau, a candle will always burn.

I’ve told this story to only a couple of people, but please let me tell you now. Stories involving Mr. Dan have always made me feel better; I hope this has the same effect for you.

I’d just started writing for a living in 1984. As a college student, I’d written for money for a few years, but now I had dental and a steady byline and everything. Thought I was Hemingway’s little brother and Raymond Chandler’s caddie. Almost bought a snap-brim hat.

One summer afternoon in July of that year I opened my Sports Illustrated a few days after the British Open and, under Mr. Dan’s byline, read this:

“Somehow, you knew it would come down to the Road Hole and the Valley of Sin and all of the golfing lore pressed among the buildings that look like haunted houses in the city of St. Andrews in Scotland. And you had the feeling that it just might involve the two outstanding players in the game today, Severiano Ballesteros and Tom Watson, once the unknown kid with the hyphenated name got out of the way. And that’s what happened on the oldest links in the world Sunday when a wild shot by Watson and a birdie putt by Ballesteros gave the British Open championship to the dashing Spaniard. Neither shot was expected. Both were as bizarre as the surroundings, which uncharacteristically included a windless sky, a blue sea in the distance and Scots fueled by lager scaling the rooftops of ancient structures.”

“By God that’s enough,” my 24-ish-year-old self, a rookie sportswriter at the Longview News-Journal in east Texas, said. And then I rolled a piece of paper into the carriage and typed, “Dear Hero Comma…”

I told him, best I could, that I was the little boy in a South Carolina town of 750 people who always had a paperback and baseball glove and Sports Illustrated in my back pockets whenever I headed to the tractor or tobacco barn or cow stall or church or school or wherever it was I was supposed to be, and that I so appreciated him taking me every week from Dillon County to places like Fayetteville, Arkansas or Austin, Texas or New York City or, most recently, to St. Andrews. And even to Lincoln, Nebraska, although I didn’t necessarily want to go there anymore if he could help it.

I told him he made me think and laugh, that he was better than the Winnie the Pooh guy and maybe even the Hardy Boys guy, and that I was beginning to understand how hard it was to make it look easy and so I appreciated, deeply, how hard he worked, secretly, to pull it off. And that if it wasn’t for him, I had no idea what I’d be doing. And also that I’d been meaning to write him since I was 9 and just hadn’t gotten around to it — high school and acne and adolescence and all — and that I was sorry.

His writing was like what he’d once said about Augusta National its ownself: Mr. Dan gave you nostalgia along with the thrills. Perspective plus accuracy and clarity. And, when it fit, humor.

When I’d finished, I bought a stamp and mailed it to Sports Illustrated.

The next week I got a letter in the mail, typed, with liquid paper in a couple of places, and signed by Dan Jenkins. It began:

“Dear Teddy: I don’t normally do this because I don’t have a secretary and I don’t have the time, but your letter demands an answer because it was so nice and flattering. I really appreciate it.

“I think your stuff is just fine for this stage of your career. (I had actually sent Mr. Dan my latest newspaper clipping, having just covered the Longview City Championships while he was in Scotland; I actually did that. Sigh…Again, regrets, I’ve had a few…) You have a big edge because you like my stuff – ahem – which means you have good taste…”

A wit, this guy…

He then told me who to read, gave me a journalism lesson or two, told me that knowing what you want to do in life, regardless of the money, was what was important, and suggested I look him up that fall in Fort Worth when he’d be in Texas hawking sales of Life Its Ownself, the long-awaited sequel to his best-selling novel of 1972, Semi-Tough. “I may be all alone and can use the company,” he wrote.

And that’s just what I did. For The News-Star in Monroe, I covered Notre Dame at LSU on a Saturday night in Tiger Stadium, then drove in a GMC Sierra pickup truck through the night to the old Anatole hotel in Fort Worth and ate breakfast with Mr. Dan and his son Marty. Another story for another time but I will add this: The first thing he said to the waitress was, “I need 14 cups of coffee, 7 ashtrays and maybe two dozen eggs,” and, to her credit, she said, straight-faced, “We’ll start you off with the coffee and ash trays,” and she did and here we went.

One of the great days of my life is all.

I gave him the next 25 years or so off. I’d contact him now and then when a new novel came out and I’d scribble something out and get it in the paper, but I didn’t want to be a stalker. That is, until a few years ago…

He’d lived in New York and then Florida and Hawaii but now he’d moved back to his hometown, a few par 5s away from his beloved TCU Frogs. I got his address from a friend at TCU and wrote him. “Dear Hero Comma…”

Got an email a few days later. “Yo, Teddy. I’ve been wondering what happened to you…”

And from that exchange, I was allowed within his gravitational pull the past several years. Few things have blessed me more. Eventually I wasn’t in awe all the time and was able to relax and put a decent swing on the ball now and then.

Got to meet and share a few meals with Hero and his secret weapon, the priceless June Burrage Jenkins, his Paschal High classmate and wife of 60 years, ever since they’d honeymooned in Augusta while he covered the Masters some April in the early 1960s. Got to meet his wonderful family — I’d trust Marty and his cousin Amy with anything I could ever have in life; it’s been suggested that with that pair on your flanks, no intruders get through the wire.

Also got to meet their friends, people they’ve lived life most closely with for 70 and 80 years. Mr. Dan always knew how lucky he was, and he was eternally grateful to “the Skipper,” as he said, for it. It’s likely why he was so quick to share.

One reason he’s my hero is because, of the hundreds of other sportswriters I’ve eaten with through the years, Mr. Dan is the only one I ever recall, besides me and a couple of others, who’d ever picked up a check. A very generous soul. But that’s only about No. 218 on the List of Reasons I’ll Miss Him. Simply, I mourn because the world has lost a great man.

Through writing about life and disguising it in stories about ball, Mr. Dan encouraged both in me since I was a little guy and in everyone who recognized it a vitality of existence, a hopeful view of life, and a tender attitude about love. How do you repay a guy for modeling that for you his whole life?

And what I witnessed from him and June Jenkins in what they liked to call their “advanced stage of our development” was that they fought every day’s battles with the best weapons any of us could have — love, kindness, and humor. My guy retires as the heavyweight champ, undefeated, undisputed.

What hurts me most is that no matter how dreary the day might be, there was always the possibility of opening your email and finding something funny from him. You always knew that when it seemed all hope of victory was gone and you had your head bowed in the huddle, defeated, he’d come running out of the tunnel, bum knee taped and stitches in his forehead, putting his helmet on and buckling his chin strap as the crowd recognized what was happening and now roared … he’d come to save the day. Again.

We always knew we had the best player on the field.

Mostly there was always the certainty of seeing him and Marty at the Masters — he covered 68 straight. There was always the joy of knowing, as PGA of America Lifetime Achievement in Journalism award winner Ron Sirak said before last Friday’s gathering celebrating Mr. Dan’s life, “No one’s ever enjoyed being who they are more than Dan Jenkins enjoyed being Dan Jenkins.”

Bingo. It was fun and comforting just watching Mr. Dan be Mr. Dan. The service was a celebration of a couple of love stories really, the one between him and June Jenkins, and then the one between that dream-come-true couple and everyone who knew them.

Like I’ve said, the guy shared.

Though I’ve communicated with him often since, the last time I saw him was last spring at Augusta. But a year ago this month, my wife and I — he called her Heidi because he couldn’t pronounce Linnea — “What? Who can say a word like that?!” — ate Sunday morning brunch with Mr. Dan and June Jenkins and their daughter Sally in downtown Fort Worth. Lord, thank you for that. When we left, we went one way and they went another and Heidi looked back at them and said, “I just love that family. And I adore that man.”

And I laughed, because for 55 years or so, ever since I learned how to read, I’d been looking for the word to capture how I felt about him. It was something beyond love or admiration and even appreciation. Not to be all giddy or anything, but it was some mix of all those.

And that was it. Adore. I just adore that man.

Go Frogs.

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