Uneven offering from the dean of living American sportswriters
It can be difficult to see someone you have admired for decades – a parent or other relative, an athlete, or a writer or performer whose work you have enjoyed – start to decline, losing the powers of mind and body that were the reasons you looked up to them. I find myself in just that position with regard to Dan Jenkins, the quick-witted dean of American sports writing; and I present as evidence his most recent book, Sports Makes You Type Faster.
Dan has always cultivated something of a curmudgeonly persona, and it was his somewhat world-weary, even cynical, outlook, and his eye for the absurd, which attracted me to his work when I first started reading his books in the mid-’80s. In the last few years, however, and in his last couple of books, the inner curmudgeon has manifested itself more and more strongly, and it comes through in full force in many of the essays which comprise his latest book. He falls back, especially in the first part of the book, on tired clichés, and geezer-esque, get-off-my-lawn-style rants against PC-ism and liberals
He has arranged the essays in the book—most of which are new, with a few warmed-over and updated pieces mixed in—into two major groups: team sports, and individual sports, working, in order, from football (pro and college), basketball, baseball, soccer, and hockey to golf (the high point of the book, in my opinion), tennis, winter sports (skiing and skating, mostly), track and field, boxing, and auto racing.
The essays range from the snarky third-person pieces he often does which are cast in the voice of a pro football owner or coach, or a pro athlete; to otherwise thoughtful essays on the state of college football or golf (the two sports where his interest mainly lies, and where he shines brightest) that are peppered with rants about the “PC crowd” and liberal professors, etc.
Dan is at his best when he tunes in to thoughtful, nostalgic reminiscence about the past. The chapter entitled, “When The Furniture Talked”, about the days of sports broadcasting in radio, is one of the finest pieces in the book. Part Two, which turns from team sports to individual sports, starts a little weak, with the golf piece “The Tour Stop”, which is a rework of a piece that appeared in his 1994 collection, Fairways and Greens (updated with current players’ names), but picks up three chapters later, with ponderings on the old days in Beware: Rascals Loose, and the following few essays in which he waxes nostalgic about Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, and Dan’s own amazing, never-to-be-equaled run of 230 majors covered. The book continues on a pretty good run from there, as Dan gets onto the subjects of tennis, skiing, track and field, boxing—even airplane racing.
The pieces in the second half are, on the whole, gentler and more thoughtful than those in the first half. I would go so far as to say that the second half saves the book, but all in all, I will stop short of calling Sports Makes You Type Faster a must-have book, except for the most ardent Dan Jenkins aficionado. For the golf-centric reader I recommend tracking down a copy of 1994’s Fairways and Greens, a more recent collection entitled Unplayable Lies, or his classic collection of golf writing, The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate.
