Was there ever a year in golf like 1960?
It was the year that the sport and its vivid personalities exploded on the consciousness of the nation, when the past, present, and future of the sport collided. Here was Arnold Palmer, the workingman's hero, "sweating, chain-smoking, shirt-tail flying"; Ben Hogan, the greatest player of the fifties, a perfectionist battling twin demons of age and nerves; and, making his big-time debut, a crew-cut college kid who seemed to have the makings of a champion: twenty-year-old Jack Nicklaus.
And of course, the rest: Ken Venturi, Chi Chi Rodriguez,...

Among the provocative social phenomena of our time, few have caught the public fancy as profoundly as that quintessentially American species known as Bubba. The conventional notion of Bubba is a Southern redneck who thinks a rented movie and a six-pack are quality entertainment. According to Dan Jenkins, this historical view has been advanced largely by "effete Easterners and West Coast ponytails who claim to like trout pizza and fat novels written by some kind of Ecuadorian." Granted, says Jenkins, there is more than one Bubba from Georgia who has spray-painted his girl's name on an...

"Tell me about plumbing, fine. Tell me aboutcarpentry, terrace gardening, the timer on VCRs. Goahead and explain cellophane. Tell me about all ofthese things, but don't try to tell me about golf, okay? Golf I know."--DanJenkins
After four decades of covering golf-not tomention "playing scratch from the blues andgambling for my own money when I didn't haveany," Dan Jenkins most definitely knows golf. He may, in fact, know the game better than anyone on theplanet. Now, his latest and long awaitedcollection brings together his best writing on the game, from serious pieces on timeless...

The legendary golf novel, rereleased in a special edition with a new foreword by the author.
Don Imus said it best: "Dan Jenkins is a comic genius." And nowhere is that genius more evident than in Dead Solid Perfect, his uproarious 1974 novel about life on the PGA Tour. To some, Kenny Lee Puckett, the star of Jenkins's ribald saga, is a more important figure in the history of golf than Bobby Jones himself.

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...

Introduced in Dan Jenkins's previous uproarious novel of the pro golf tour, "The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist, Bobby Joe Grooves is now forty-four and still without a win in a major championship. A student of golf lore, Bobby Joe is well aware that only a small group of stars have ever won a major at his age or older, and among them are such immortals as Nicklaus, Boros, Irwin, and Trevino. It's now or never for Bobby Joe, and excuse him for thinking that his chances are slim and none.
So it's off to the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and the rest of the PGA Tour...

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...

In 1935 Betsy Throckmorton s father lures her from a New York job with "Time" magazine back to Claybelle, Texas, with the promise that she can be the editor of his "Claybelle"" Standard-Times." Betsy brings along her husband, Ted Winton, an easterner and Yale graduate to whom she is constantly explaining Texas. Ted will run Ben Throckmorton s radio station, KVAT, where Booty and Them Others sing in rivalry with the better known WBAP Light Crust Doughboys.
In Texas, it s the middle of the Depression and the Drought. And Prohibition is barely over, liquor still a controversy. Every city has...

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...

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,...