Dan Jenkins

To prepare for its next Defence White Paper, Australia is examining an enterprise-level naval shipbuilding plan. To support this effort, RAND researchers explore the feasibility of Australia sustaining a domestic naval shipbuilding industry compared with buying ships from foreign shipbuilders. The authors outline the complex consequences and trade-offs of both options.

And what a reunion it is! Dan Jenkins reunites many of the most memorable and irascible characters from his most memorable and hilarious novels - starting with Semi-Tough. Billy Clyde Puckett, Shake Tiller, T. J. Lambert, Barbara Jane Bookman, Big Ed Bookman, Slick Henderson, Juanita Hutchins, Doris Steadman - the list goes on, and they're all packin' heat. It all begins when Herb's CafÉ - modeled after a Fort Worth landmark renowned for its chicken- fried steak - goes up for sale after Herb's death and the establishment's disastrous sequel as a trendy restaurant featuring outrageous nouvelle cuisine. Tommy Earl Bruner buys the place, rehires most of the old staff, and invites all its former denizens to Fort Worth for a grand celebration. The uproarious outcome could only have been dreamed up by comic mastermind Dan Jenkins.

Sports Makes You Type Faster presents a remarkable new collection of essays by one of America's best-known and best-loved sportswriters. Served up with the acerbic wit that is Dan Jenkins's hallmark, the essays range over the whole world of sports, taking aim at owners, players, fans, and franchises alike - with results that will make you laugh out loud. Winner of the 2012 PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, Dan Jenkins became nationally known for his twenty-five-year-long career with Sports Illustrated, and later for his work as a feature writer and essayist for Golf Digest. His many novels include bestsellers like Semi-Tough, Baja Oklahoma, and Dead Solid Perfect - all of which were made into movies. Among other achievements, Jenkins has been honored with the 2013 Red Smith Award and the 2017 Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism, and in 2012 he was inducted into the 2012 World Golf Hall of Fame, Lifetime Achievement Category.

And what a reunion it is! Dan Jenkins reunites many of the most memorable and irascible characters from his most memorable and hilarious novels-starting with Semi-Tough. Billy Clyde Puckett, Shake Tiller, T. J. Lambert, Barbara Jane Bookman, Big Ed Bookman, Slick Henderson, Juanita Hutchins, Doris Steadman-the list goes on, and they're all packin' heat. It all begins when Herb's Café-modeled after a Fort Worth landmark renowned for its chicken-fried steak-goes up for sale after Herb's death and the establishment's disastrous sequel as a trendy restaurant featuring outrageous nouvelle cuisine. Tommy Earl Bruner buys the place, rehires most of the old staff, and invites all its former denizens to Fort Worth for a grand celebration. The uproarious outcome could only have been dreamed up by comic mastermind Dan Jenkins. This is a special commemorative edition of Dan Jenkins's last novel, including a foreword by Tom Brokaw and an afterword by Sally Jenkins.

Sports Makes You Type Faster presents a remarkable new collection of essays by one of America's best-known and best-loved sportswriters. Served up with the acerbic wit that is Dan Jenkins's hallmark, the essays range over the whole world of sports, taking aim at owners, players, fans, and franchises alike—with results that will make you laugh out loud. Winner of the 2012 PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, Dan Jenkins became nationally known for his twenty-five-year-long career with Sports Illustrated, and later for his work as a feature writer and essayist for Golf Digest. His many novels include bestsellers like Semi-Tough, Baja Oklahoma, and Dead Solid Perfect—all of which were made into movies. Among other achievements, Jenkins has been honored with the 2013 Red Smith Award and the 2017 Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism, and in 2012 he was inducted into the 2012 World Golf Hall of Fame, Lifetime Achievement Category.

In Unplayable Lies, Dan Jenkins takes us on a tour of the links as only he can do it. Here, Dan delves into the greatest rounds of golf he's ever seen, the funniest things said on a golf course, the rivalries on tour and in the press box, the game's most magical moments--and its most absurd. Filled with well-known characters like Tiger Woods, to others like Titanic Thompson--gambler, golf hustler, accused murderer, legendary storyteller--Unplayable Lies is an ode to the game of golf and the people who play it. But it is Dan Jenkins, so nothing--even the game itself--can escape his wrath, his critical eye, or his acerbic pen. This is Dan Jenkins at his best, writing about the sport he loves the most.

This report assesses the economic impacts that a shipbuilder has on its local community and region. The authors utilize a case study methodology to examine two U. S. shipbuilders and the Saab Aeronautics Gripen program in Sweden. While each shipbuilder has had beneficial effects on its local economy, neither shipbuilder has given rise to the ecosystem of favorable spillovers and spin-offs that the Gripen program seems to have created.

From the author of Semi-Tough--one of Sports Illustrated's top 100 sports books of all time--comes the hilarious continuing comic adventures of star NFL player Billy Clyde Puckett. Injured football player and TV sports commentator Billy Clyde Puckett returns with his wife, the former Barbara Jane Bookman, and his old friend Shake Tiller in another hilarious romp through a lost era of professional sports.

For the last quarter century, Dan Jenkins has been fixing his cold-eyed stare and wisecracking style on the real-life Billy Clyde and Kenny Lee Pucketts of the sports world. You Call It Sports, But I Say It's a Jungle Out There is a collection of his best work from Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Golf Digest, and his nationally syndicated column, and includes a stack of new pieces written especially for this book. Jenkins spares no one in his search for the culprits who have taken the fun out of sports: NFL owners and refs, PGA Tour administrators, basketball players who can't read, tennis players who can't speak English (or say anything worth hearing when they do). He also finds things worth celebrating: the electric charge given off by Arnold Palmer at his best, the excitement of a truly great college football game, or a real heavyweight champion, like Joe Louis. Overflowing with good ol' boys, great one-liners, famous sporting events, and barroom tales, this is the best of Dan Jenkins--which is to say, it's as good as sportswriting gets anywhere.

From the author of Semi-Tough comes a hilarious novel chronicling one year in the life of irreverent sports columnist Jim Tom Pinch. Jim Tom Pinch is a unabashed sportswriter who has followed around and reported on too many blonde-haired skiers, basketball players with names like Potatus Fry, and Russian figure skaters who want to know how much a house with a toilet costs in America. Now he tells the story of a year of romance, cursing, bimbos, touchdowns, pandering, padded expense accounts---from the Olympics to the Indy 500 to the heavyweight championship--a year that will leave neither Jim Tom nor the wide world of sports the same. "Bawdy, bitter, very funny... Jenkins's farewell salute to big-time sportswriting is a tell-all novel that deflates the hype around each and every event, from the Olympics to the Kentucky Derby to Wimbledon (Kirkus Reviews).

In His Ownself, Dan Jenkins takes us on a tour of his legendary career as a sportswriter and novelist. Here we see Dan's hone his craft, from his high school paper through to his first job at theFort Worth Press and on to the glory days of Sports Illustrated. Whether in Texas, New York, or anywhere for that matter, Dan was always at the center of it all--hanging out at Elaine's while swapping stories with politicians and movie stars, covering every Masters and U. S. Open and British Open for over four decades. The result is a knee-slapping, star-studded, once-in-a-lifetime memoir from one of the most important, hilarious, and semi-cantankerous sportswriters ever.

Decades before it saturated the airwaves, Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake actually invented reality TV--and skewered it into a comic novel that was way ahead of its time. Frank Mallory is a big gun at one of the four major networks. Cruising around Manhattan in his ""Silver Goblet,"" a Rolls Royce limo, he finds that life in the fast lane is beginning to unravel. Having to deal with the departure of his wife, his boss ""The Big Guy,"" and crazed Hollywood stars--while at the same time having to maintain a high-stakes job--all tend to make Frank Mallory, well, act out. After Frank struggles to fill all his number-four network's prime-time slots--it tends to lag behind CBS, NBC, and ABC--the Big Guy forces him to create a show called ""Just Up The Street,"" which is meant to entertain ordinary Americans with the ""real"" lives of other ordinary Americans. Ultimately the resulting script causes the Big Guy's downfall and forces everyone else to return to a reality that comes without scare quotes. Limo is a hilarious, entertaining caricature of the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and provides a fascinating insight into the world of network television. Through a haze of booze and drugs, we see Frank's desperation for a normal life and real relationships. Frank Mallory's only true relationships are found in the confines of his Silver Goblet, where he finds friendship with D. Wayne Cooper and love with Sally Hawks. Only after a series of crises does Frank ultimately find himself--and the happiness that has eluded him. Originally published in 1976, Limo is now back in print, complete with a foreword from acclaimed author Jeff Guinn.

This collection marks the return to print of John Lardner, one of America’s press box giants, a classic stylist whose wry humor and tireless reporting helped elevate sportswriting to art. The brilliant W. C. Heinz called Lardner “the best of us.” This book shows why. Lardner applied his singular touch not only to his era’s icons-Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige-but to the scamps, eccentrics, hustlers, and con men in the shadow of sports. Whether in snappy columns or leisurely magazine pieces, Lardner held sport of every description up to the light, forever changing the way people wrote, read, and thought about their heroes, from superstars to scrappers. These forty-nine pieces represent sportswriting at the top of its game.

Legendary sports writer Dan Jenkins delivers a golf history lesson that is unrivaled in its scope and style. In this seminal collection, Dan Jenkins has selected the funniest and most riveting stories from his epic career as a writer for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, where his wry reportage of golf's most thrilling finishes, historic moments, and heartbreaking collapses brought legions of fans intimately close to the action. All the greatest moments of golf over the last sixty years are here: Jack Nicklaus at Pebble Beach, Arnold Palmer at Cherry Hills, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead at Oakmont, and of course Tiger Woods, just about everywhere. As much about journalism and watching the growth of one of our most cherished sports writers, as it is about the great game of golf, Jenkins at the Majors is a must read for sports fans and golfers alike.

Dan Jenkins' second best-known novel, Baja Oklahoma, features protagonist Juanita Hutchins, who can cuss and politically commentate with the best of Jenkins' male protagonists. Still convincingly female, though in no way dumb and girly, fortyish Juanita serves drinks to the colorful crew patronizing Herb's Cafe in South Fort Worth, worries herself sick over a hot-to-trot daughter proving too fond of drugs and the dealers who sell them, endures a hypochondriac mother whose whinings would justify murder, dates a fellow middle-ager whose connections with the oil industry are limited to dipstick duty at his filling station - and, by the way, she also hopes to become a singer-songwriter in the real country tradition of Bob Wills and Willie Nelson. That Juanita is way too old to remain a kid with a crazy dream doesn't matter much to her. In between handing out longneck beers to customer-acquaintances battling hot flashes and deciding when boyfriend Slick is finally going to get lucky, Juanita keeps jotting down lyrics reflective of hard-won wisdom and setting them to music composed on her beloved Martin guitar. Too many of her early songwriting results are one-dimensional or derivative, but finally she hits on something both original and heartfelt: a tribute to her beloved home state, warts and all.

Jack Brannon, a golf writer in his forties who has been bunkered more than once in the marriage game, covers the sport for a big-time magazine. Bored with the PGA, he decides to check out "the Lolitas," on the LPGA Tour. Jack chooses as a magazine subject Ginger Clayton, a fiery eighteen-year old whose killer looks and killer game make her the kind of star who can take the LPGA to the next level. She is, indeed, The Franchise Babe, and everyone wants a part of her, but someone, it seems, is trying to knock Ginger out of the competition-permanently. Filled with dead-on take downs of sports moms, adventurous promoters, suck-up corporate sponsors, double-dealing sports agents, and just enough menace to make golf dangerous, Dan Jenkins latest tale of hijinks on the links is not to be missed.

Made into a hilarious and timeless film starring Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson, and Jill Clayburgh, and recently named number seven on Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, Semi-Tough is Dan Jenkins's masterpiece and considered by many to be the funniest sports book ever written. The novel follows the outsize adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett, star halfback for the New York Giants, whose team has come to Los Angeles for an epic duel with the despised "dog-ass" Jets in the Super Bowl. But Billy Clyde is faced with a dual challenge: not only must he try to run over a bunch of malevolencies incarnate, but he has also been commissioned by a New York book publisher to keep a journal of the events leading up to, including, and following the game. Infused with Dan Jenkins's characteristic joie de vivre and replete with cigarettes, whiskey, and wild women, Semi-Tough is an uproarious romp through a lost era of professional sports that will have any armchair quarterback falling out of his or her recliner in hysterics on a semi-regular basis.

Now forty-four and still without a win in a major championship, Bobby Joe Grooves continues his quest for success, confronting both familiar competitors and all-new rivals, including teenage phenomenon Scott Benson, an arrogant young man with a gorgeous mother who soon captures Bobby Joe's attention. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

The best golf writer on the planet returns with his funniest book ever. Dan Jenkins virtually invented the golf novel with Dead Solid Perfect, his rollicking account of the life and times of touring pro Kenny Lee Puckett. After thirty years of waiting for the follow-up, Jenkins returns to the world of big-time golf in The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist and finds a world where endorsements and course fashion matter more than the side bet. His hero, Bobby Joe Grooves, is a hell-raising two-iron-wielding rogue trying to turn his one annual tournament win and considerable Texas charm into a spot on the Ryder Cup team. Standing between Bobby Joe and his little spot of golf heaven are two ex-wives, a girlfriend, various pious PGA officials, and his embarrassing lack of a career major. A book that will teach you more about golf history than any weepy sunset-over-the-eighteenth-green retrospective, The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist is an uproarious portrait of what it's really like to play on the PGA Tour. It's vintage Dan Jenkins.

This Texas Traditions Series reprint takes us back to the Lone Star State during the Cold War at the beginning of the 1960s. The postwar generation is in a frenzy of high living and profligate spending. Big Texas oil is still subsidized by a federal depletion allowance and cattle still account for much of the state’s wealth. But these longtime mainstays of Texas finance are giving way to transistors and computers. A new millionaire class is growing up around business mergers and electronic technology. The characters in Shrake’s novel are caught in this brave new world in one way or another. Some are the princes of prosperity; others are victims of it. This is a world of lobbyists, merger lawyers, small-time politicos, sons of oil money, and the women who cheer them on or worry about their souls. In the opening section of the novel, we visit the Texas Gulf Coast and see the machinations of Sam Guthrie and Waddy Morris Jr. as they attempt to take over a rival technology company. Back in Dallas, idealistic attorney Ben Carpenter moves to thwart the Guthrie/Morris takeover. Then we move to Fort Worth and attend the drunken party given in honor of Ben Carpenter’s thirtieth birthday. The party moved to Mexico on Cadmus Wilkins’s bus where everyone has to confront his or her inner self. And some are found wanting. The several vignettes of the novel paint an accurate picture of Texas as it moves into the urban era and as its middle class began deserting the old verities and tasting what were once forbidden pleasures. Shrake is a first-rate stylist who knows how the upper half lives.