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...

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...

Legendary sports writer Dan Jenkins delivers a golf history lesson that is unrivaled in its scope and style.
In this seminal collection, Dan Jenkins has selected the funniest and most riveting stories from his epic career as a writer for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, where his wry reportage of golf s most thrilling finishes, historic moments, and heartbreaking collapses brought legions of fans intimately close to the action. All the greatest moments of golf over the last sixty years are here: Jack Nicklaus at Pebble Beach, Arnold Palmer at Cherry Hills, Ben Hogan and...

Dan Jenkins' second best-known novel, Baja Oklahoma, features protagonist Juanita Hutchins, who can cuss and politically commentate with the best of Jenkins' male protagonists. Still convincingly female, though in no way dumb and girly, fortyish Juanita serves drinks to the colorful crew patronizing Herb's Cafe in South Fort Worth, worries herself sick over a hot-to-trot daughter proving too fond of drugs and the dealers who sell them, endures a hypochondriac mother whose whinings would justify murder, dates a fellow middle-ager whose connections with the oil industry are limited to...

This collection marks the return to print of John Lardner, one of America s press box giants, a classic stylist whose wry humor and tireless reporting helped elevate sportswriting to art. The brilliant W. C. Heinz called Lardner the best of us. This book shows why.Lardner applied his singular touch not only to his era s icons Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige but to the scamps, eccentrics, hustlers, and con men in the shadow of sports. Whether in snappy columns or leisurely magazine pieces, Lardner held sport of every description up to the light, forever changing the way people wrote,...

Decades before it saturated the airwaves, Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake actually invented reality TV--and skewered it into a comic novel that was way ahead of its time. Frank Mallory is a big gun at one of the four major networks. Cruising around Manhattan in his "Silver Goblet," a Rolls Royce limo, he finds that life in the fast lane is beginning to unravel. Having to deal with the departure of his wife, his boss "The Big Guy," and crazed Hollywood stars--while at the same time having to maintain a high-stakes job--all tend to make Frank Mallory, well, "act out." After Frank struggles to fill...