TCU Magazine
It’s fitting, somehow, that Dan Jenkins has come home.
The Fort Worth son, TCU legend, and literary quarterback of the press box is now immortalized on the TCU campus — not with a statue (though he deserves one), but with something better: his life’s work.
TCU’s Special Collections has acquired the personal archive of the late, great Dan Jenkins. Jenkins's typewriter helped capture the seminal moments of many sporting events long before there were 24-hour networks covering all the action.
For anyone who’s ever underlined a Jenkins one-liner, dog-eared “Semi-Tough,” or read his dispatches in Sports Illustrated like scripture, this is hallowed ground. His collection — over 25 linear feet of manuscripts, annotated galleys, screenplays, scrapbooks, photographs, and yellowed clippings — reads like a roadmap to the golden age of sports writing.
From the 1940s through 2017, Jenkins told stories the way athletes played the games: bold, fast, funny, and always with heart.
“This extraordinary collection not only documents the professional achievements of one of the great voices in American sports writing but also provides a deeply personal glimpse into Jenkins’ life through his scrapbooks and photographs,” said Tracy Hull, library dean at TCU.
Before ESPN covered every moment and podcasts filled the airwaves, Jenkins was there — filing from the 18th hole at Augusta, calling plays from the bleachers at Alabama, making the crowd roar feel like it was in your living room. His words didn’t just cover sports. They played them.
And while “Semi-Tough” became a Hollywood film, the real movie was always in the sentences: fast cuts, knockout lines, and the kind of tone you couldn’t fake. The Fort Worth Press gave him his first shot. Sports Illustrated gave him the national stage. But the real story, the one this archive tells, is that Jenkins never stopped being a fan-a wisecracking, big-hearted fan with a ringside seat to the American dream in cleats.
Now, anyone — student, scholar, die-hard fan — can sit at the long table in TCU’s Mary Couts Burnett Library and flip through his life like chapters in a playbook. The Dan Jenkins Collection is open. The press box is eternal. And somewhere, Jenkins is smiling — probably with a cocktail, a wisecrack, and a story to tell.
“In any sports event — golf, football, baseball, whatever — there's always a defining moment,” Jenkins told Golf Digest in 2001. “The best writers are those who know how to recognize that defining moment and hammer it in their stories.”
For more information go to: www.library.tcu.edu/spcoll
