The Brief Reads of Dan Jenkins

This is our monthly series of briefreads written by some of the most respected bylines to date. It’s a look at how these reporters got to where they are now — at national magazines, writing novels, winning major awards — because they mastered great stories on deadline. We ask: Can you see the evolution of a journalist?

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On the brink of the Super Bowl remember Dan Jenkins: A foremost football and golf reporter who started his career at the Fort Worth Press. Still a high school student, then sports editor Blackie Sherrod advised him, “Don’t write a morning lead for an afternoon paper, dumb ass." Sixty years later, Jenkins’ leads appear in vintage magazines, novels and defunct newspapers — he's still remembered. Because you can’t forget classic stories like “The Sweet Life Of Swinging Joe.”

We scoured the archives for stories about football that helped Jenkins define how to write the game:

“The Royal Treatment,” Fort Worth Press, Oct. 11, 1958
Those plans of substituting Wayland’s College of Women for Oklahoma on the University of Texas football schedule were abruptly canceled here today by a Longhorn team that wouldn’t accept defeat. . .

“A Look At A Footballer,” Fort Worth Press, 1960
The college football player to most people is a distant object to be alternately cheered, booed, praised, criticized and inevitably forgotten. He is at least this many things: (Pg. 133/search “Jenkins”)

“Army’s Future Is Still Ahead,” Sports Illustrated, Dec. 2, 1963
Alarmists have hinted that, should Coach Paul Dietzell lose again to Navy, he is through at West Point.

“Texas By An Eyelash,” Sports Illustrated, Dec. 15, 1969
All week long in Texas the people had said the Hogs ain't nuthin' but groceries and that on Saturday, in the thundering zoo of Fayetteville, the No. I Longhorns would eat—to quote the most horrendous pun ever thought of by some Lone Star wit—"Hog meat with Worster-Speyrer sauce."

“Dallas Feels The Steeler Crunch,” Sports Illustrated, Jan. 26, 1976
For all of those gaudy things that happened throughout the afternoon, memories of the 1976 Super Bowl will keep going back to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Lynn Swann climbing into the air like the boy in the Indian rope trick, and coming down with the football.

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Post your favorite Dan Jenkins briefreads or tweet us @briefreads. Who else's career should we look back at? (Send us the journalist and the briefreads that made the reporter.)

-eddie