A Rushmore passing

There will be no more classic lines, the ones every sportswriter of a certain age has long since committed to memory. The man we all wanted to be, Dan Jenkins, is dead, passing Thursday at the age of 89. Life gave him two-up a side, and then God done Tiger Woods-ed him.

To make a poor attempt at parody.

Every attempt by every one of us to parody Jenkins' style was a poor attempt, because none of us was as clever or quick or the straight-up, balls-out writer he was. His work had both sagebrush and late nights at P.J. Clarke's in it, a seamless melding of Texas frontier smartass and New York urban cool. The alleged sophisticates who read his stuff thought it was crude and sexist and racist, but they always missed the wink and the nudge in the ribs that came with it. Some people just don't get satire, and that's a fact.

And Jenkins worked in satire the way some folks work in clay or oils.

Four or five of his novels are the funniest things I've ever read -- you've likely heard of "Semi-Tough" and "Dead Solid Perfect" -- and not all were about sports, even though Jenkins became Dan Jenkins covering college football and golf for Sports Illustrated. "Baja Oklahoma," for instance, was about a barmaid who hit it big as a country-and-western songwriter.  "Fast Copy" was the story of a whip-smart woman who leaves Life magazine to come back to her tiny Texas hometown and edit her father's newspaper. And "You Gotta Play Hurt" was the cripplingly funny chronicle of put-upon columnist Jim Tom Pinch, and the single greatest novel ever written about sportswriting.

A passel of those novels got turned into movies. Some were OK. Some -- notably "Semi-Tough" -- were crimes against nature, utterly missing the point of the books. Sometimes Jenkins went over Hollywood's head, too.

Sports fans, though, loved his stuff. As a sportswriter, he had few equals, and there was no one precisely like him. Some of his ledes alone have become immortal, and sometimes notorious; he got hate mail from Domers for weeks when he cracked that Notre Dame had tied one for the Gipper after the legendary 10-10 tie between the Irish and Michigan State. Yet it's those kind of lines that put him right up there on sportswriting's Mt. Rushmore, and that will live as long as those of us who wanted to be him keep reciting them.

Myself among them. Not a month ago, I repeated a line from "Fast Copy" here on the Blob, prefacing my annual foray into Valentine's Day poetry with the admonition from the newspaper editor in that novel: "Don't write me nothin' that rhymes." And just the other day ...

Well. I was chatting with a buddy who'd just landed an adjunct teaching gig. And a line from T.J. Lambert of "Semi-Tough" fame popped into my head.

Seems T.J., a Giants teammate of "Semi-Tough" protagonist Billy Clyde Puckett, had become the head football coach at TCU, Billy Clyde's (and Dan Jenkins') alma mater. It was, T.J. said, a great teaching opportunity.

"Think about it, Billy Clyde," he said. "I get to mold the minds of our young pissants."

I think of that line every time someone tells me they're going to teach.

That line and others, of course. So many others.