Dan Jenkins Quotes

Many Americans follow pro basketball from November through June, for reasons that I found unexplainable, other than the fact that they were overly fascinated with soaring armpits.

The golfer has more enemies than any other athlete. He has fourteen clubs in his bag, all of them different; 18 holoes to play, all of them different, every week; and all around him is sand, trees, grass, water, wind and 143 other players. In addition, the game is 50 percent mental, so his biggest enemy is himself.

Tennis was a game invented by a woman named Samantha Tennis in 1839, in the village of Lobsworth, County of Kent, as a diversion for the wealthy and titled Englishmen of the region, who had nothing better to do at the time but drink, belch and wear funny clothes.

Who is the best the sportswriter who wore shorts? I keep trying to envision Grantland Rice or John Lardner in shorts. It never occurred to me to wear shorts. I'd look too silly to wear shorts.

The maplewood flat-finished Martin had represented the most outrageous luxury in her life when she bought it in 1971 for four hundred dollars. But Lonnie Slocum assured her the Martin was a good investment, even if she never learned to play it better than an acid head who was into heavy metal.

Always keep in mind that if God didn't want a man to have mulligans, golf balls wouldn't come three to a sleeve.

The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting, just as an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow.

Lonnie says it doesn't take long to write a song if you're stricken with a severe case of the Tennysons. He wasn't necessarily talking about a chart-climber.

A sportswriter's life means never sitting with your wife or family at the games. Still working after everyone has gone to the party... Digging beneath a coach's lies, not to forget those of athletic directors and general managers and owners of pro teams. Keeping a confidence. Risking it.

As the NFF Historian, I'll have a new platform to indulge my passion for the most emotional, colorful and hysterical game ever developed by mankind and Walter Camp.

Every golfer has at least 14 enemies: his clubs.

Baseball would be a better game if more third basemen got hit in the mouth by line drivers.

Regardless of what the tour pros think, golf is a rich and varied game, and what all of us awkward fools do on weekends is what golf is truly all about.

When Ballesteros triumphed at the British Open in 1979, for his first major win, he hit so few fairways off the tee that he was often mistaken for a gallery marshall.

Much of the fire with him [Ben Hogan] was lit by Byron Nelson, who came from the same town - the same caddie yard - and achieved fame and fortune several years ahead of Ben and who, as a kid, had always been popular and better liked than Ben. No puzzle at all.

I am among those who firmly believe that a round of golf should not take more than three and a half hours, four at most. Anything longer than that is not a round of golf, it's life in Albania.

Juanita found herself at Old Jeemy's radio station in a room she could have sworn was a laboratory where creatures with antennas in their heads, knobs for eyes, jagged arms, and dangly legs conducted experiments on the bodies of dead vocalists.

Laughter is the only thing that'll cut trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.

I quickly discovered that trying to go play golf while living in Manhattan was about as easy as trying to grab a taxi while standing out in front of Saks Fifth Avenue in the freezing rain on the last shopping day before Christmas.

Professionalism in tennis ... only resulted in making billionaires out of rude children, producing an onslaught of moody defectors, and a lot of guys with hair that looks as if bats slept in it... Meanwhile, my head swims with the thought that I have watched tennis progress from Don Budge and Alice Marble to Farrah Fawcett becoming John McEnroe's mother-in-law.

The golf ball has no sense at all, which is why it has to be given stern lectures constantly, especially during the act of putting.

Part of the charm of basketball lies in the fact that it's a simple game to understand. Players race up and down a fairly small area indoors and stuff the ball into a ring with Madonna's dress hanging on it.

I had always suspected that trying to play golf in the company of big-time pros and a gallery would be something like walking naked into choir practice.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

If a caddie can help you, you don't know how to play golf.

Until Sammy Baugh - pro football in Texas was a one-paragraph story on the third page of the Monday sports section.

There have been so many great moments in golf that you even forget some of them.

Only two things can stop Tiger — injury or a bad marriage.

A good one iron shot is about as easy to come by as an understanding wife.