Dan Jenkins has combined a lifelong enthusiasm for the sports of football and golf with an inimitable brashness and irreverence. From his days as a young Fort Worth, Texas, journalist to his post as senior columnist for Golf Digest, Jenkins has been a creative, sometimes crusty, and frequently contentious commentator. In more than four decades of celebrated sportswriting he has entertained, stimulated, and provoked his readers by transforming clichéd and caricatured sporting figures--the dumb jock, the crazy fan, the demoniacal coach--with his witty, eccentric prose.

Daniel Thomas B. Jenkins was born 2 December 1929 in Fort Worth, Texas. He was the son of a salesman and an antiques dealer. In a November 1984 interview with Stephanie Mansfield for the Washington Post Jenkins mourned the fact that his father, "a sports nut," packed up and left the household when he was a boy. His mother was often ill, and Jenkins...