RIP Dan Jenkins

His 1986 Masters "game story" is 5,000 words long. He may have had thoughts but he didn't exactly live up to them.

 

Nobody wants to read YOUR garden hose.

But they'll read mine.

 

1. Written for weekly magazine. 2. One of most memorable tournaments in golf history. 2. Therefore, golf fans, and who else reads golf articles, didn't care how long it was, they ate it up. Everybody wrote long the night the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. We got no complaints. Sold over 800,000 copies of the Herald, close to quadruple our regular circulation. If it's really important to readers, they'll read it all. Note: Very few sports events get to that level of interest.

 

Would you like me to find five other Jenkins pieces of similar length? Jenkins piece about Goat Hills, a story that's about HIS friends playing amateur golf at a course than no longer exists, is 7,000 words long. His Joe Namath piece is 4400 words long.

I don't mind that people have different ideas about what's good journalism. I do mind when they lecture others about it, yet think they're ok with whatever the moment suits.

Rick Reilly's story about the 1986 Masters is shorter and significantly better, btw. So I'm not sure this is a winning argument for you.

 

I have no issue with recognizing Jenkins as one of the greats of his time, of all time, and have in fact been quoted by a national publication this week praising his contributions to the profession. But the mythologizing of Jenkins as a writer who was succinct and not a showman is LOL funny. There is a lot of bad longform out there today, but there was a shit ton of bad longform back in Jenkins’ day also. He wrote some of it. He was just as interested in style over substance as long as it was his style. Jenkins, today, would be writing shit like Spencer Hall does at SB Nation. He was not interested in the games as much as he was the experience surrounding the games. Which is fine, people are simply doing what they do when someone dies, which is remember only their best work and not much of what they often turned out. Some of his Golf Digest pieces were truly awful, and I’m not even talking about his fake convo with Tiger, which was cringe-worthy. Dan’s thoughts on the current longform community seem pretty clear in the sense that Wright Thomson got one of the first ever Dan Jenkins awards.

Lists like the one above always annoy me, whether they’re from Jenkins, John Franzen, DFW or Hemingway because people treat them like gospel instead of guide posts. Jenkins broke all his own rules frequently.

 

We ruling out an editor telling him they needed that many words? This was 1986. Magazines were awash in advertising dollars then. We've all had an editor who wanted 1,500 words for a story worth about 700 and vice versa.

 

Sportswriting has changed a lot since Grantland Rice and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Jenkins covered his first golf major in 1951 and he started in basically the pre-television era. He tended to write like an old style sportswriter. When he got to Sports Illustrated in the mid sixties LaGuerre let people write long and very eclectic articles. The massive talent that was on the staff overwhelmed a lot of the flaws.

From reading the McCambridge book my understanding is that when Mark Mulvoy came in as editor he tried to correct the excesses at SI, most notably cutting story lengths. Mulvoy took over as editor in 1984 and Jenkins was gone by about 1986. As I read the McCambridge book after the success of Semi-Tough Jenkins did not respond well to any form of editing. He had enough money that he no longer needed the job.

 

No. 3 is my First Commandment for feature stories.

Find THE angle, and make that the story. I don't want to edit or read a story with "And s/he also . ... ... In addition to doing this, s/he engages in ... "

One thing. ONE THING. Hook me on one thing.