Dan Jenkins Quotes

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.

The president I came to know best was George Herbert Walker Bush. No. 41 in your program, No. 1 on your list of fast-playing golfers.

Tiger Woods was a month away from 34 years of age when his debutantes began turning up in the news. He was a grown man with a wife and two children. Well, we supposed he had a wife, but that was before we learned she was only an ornament.

I haven't looked for a golf ball since mulligans were free, which was a law I passed in 1995.

I think newspapers will survive in some form or another.

The U.S. won the majors 29-11 in the 1980s. That's when Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus were carrying the ball, and when Seve Ballesteros was becoming a Brit in the minds of English and Scottish journalists.

You count a man's U.S. Amateur titles after he starts winning professional majors. That's something any intelligent golf writer with a sense of history is supposed to know.

I don't know how television or radio is going to survive without newspapers because that's where they get all their news. It's going to be hopeless.

Golfers don't fist fight. They cuss a bit. But they wouldn't punch anything or anybody. They might hurt their hands and have to change their grip.

Title IX came along and changed a lot of things for the better, but nevertheless, it meant that money became more important.

All I've ever done is try to get at the truth of the matter.

I used to never miss the 'New Yorker' or 'New York.' Now I never bother.

Presidents are nice people. They're nice, fun-loving people who have great jobs.

Putting is not an art, it's a dreaded evil. No wise man ever said that.

If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don't have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here's what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a general named Eisenhower.

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

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.

The PGA Championship, last of the majors each year, might well be accustomed to having fun poked at it by the print press for being mired in August, but this isn't fair.

Nobody can make a putt that breaks to the right. It's unnatural. Unless you're left-handed, of course. Standing over a putt that breaks to the right can actually make you dizzy. I've long thought that right-breaking putts are a major contributor to mental and physical ill health.

The greatly anticipated 2009 Masters was like going to a Broadway hit and finding out that the star, Sir Tiger Woods, was off that night, and his replacement was the cab driver who dropped you off at the theater.

All day long I've been telling myself it's only a merry-go-round. Some people fall off quicker than others. No big mystery.

There's nothing anyone can do about Tiger Woods but look at his game and swoon.

Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam.

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.

CEOs are worried they're going to get fired any minute. They're worried about their portfolios.

Valet parking is an essential at any decent club.

Among the many things that have slipped up on me while my back was turned are all of these challenging and well-manicured public courses that have sprung up across America with elegant bars and restaurants.

I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn't exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years.

Being a club pro and all, a guy trying to keep up with golf's modern technology, I hadn't found much time for Internet dating, but then one day I knew I'd met the girl of my dreams when she replied to a comment I'd made on You-and-Me.com. She said, 'I love it when you talk equipment to me.'

At times, my very own media makes me cringe, and occasionally out loud. By the way, nothing clears the head like an out-loud cringe.

Just think about it: what in the name of God would Alabama be without the University of Alabama? What would Oklahoma be without the University of Oklahoma? Nothing.

The key to any good sports story is identifying the defining moment. In football games or a boxing match, it's usually pretty obvious. But in golf, sometimes it happens on Thursday. Usually it's Sunday, but guys who don't know the game, they can miss it.

Everybody in the Olympics is paid. Lindsay Vonn is going to make a million dollars whether she skis or not.

I hate political correctness.

There are no Dave Marrs anymore.

Players don't usually like anybody who makes more money than they do.

Every golfer has at least 14 enemies: his clubs.

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

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.

Even as a little kid, I was fascinated by newspapers and magazines. They were my TV. I'd be the first one up to grab the morning paper, mainly to look at the sports pictures, the war pictures.

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.

I don't have contempt for Tiger Woods.

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

I've worked my whole life and never missed a deadline.

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.

It must be the PGA Championship if it's August and you can sit down and talk to the heat or reach inside your shirt, where it's 110 degrees, and grab handfuls of humidity.

I gather most people don't remember that when the U.S. Open first went to Pebble Beach in 1972, a big deal was made of the Open going to a public course for the first time.

My real heroes have always been sportswriters.

The recreational golfer who gives it careful thought will conclude that the favorite golf hole in his life played downhill, gradually or severely, and normally was downwind as well.

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.

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.

Locker rooms and grill rooms are still the best places to find out things you don't know - at the Masters or any other golf tournament.

There was a time when caddies couldn't wear shorts.

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.

Of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower gets credit for doing more for golf than any other White House resident, a mid- to high-handicapper though he was.

First, I thought Twitter was some kind of hybrid car being developed by Government Motors. Then I thought it was a new bite-size snack combining what's best of the Frito and the Cheeto. Then I found out it was me. On a laptop. At the U.S. Open. Having fun.

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.

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.

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.

The ocean-bordered southern part of California has always been a place of Hollywood make-believe, casual opulence, suntans and jewelry.

I probably remember the 1954 Masters more vividly than any of the others.

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

The first president I met was L. B. J.

If you see a player out in public having dinner, chances are he's with his boring money manager or some boring rich guy he hopes to design a golf course for.

Anybody can make jokes. But unless they come from conviction, and there's truth in them, you haven't nailed it. They aren't as funny as they could be, and they don't make a point.

Jack Nicklaus is the greatest winner I've ever seen.

Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.

Vijay Singh won a playoff in 2004 at Whistling Straits after a final-round 76, which was the highest last round by the winner of any major since 1938, when Reg Whitcombe won the British Open with a 78 in a storm that blew down the exhibition tent at Sandwich.

I don't suppose anybody's ever enjoyed being who they are more than Arnold's enjoyed being Arnold Palmer.

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.

Historians tell us that a gentleman named John Ball once captured eight British Amateur titles.

The Masters is a sell-out annually, and even the scalpers mind their manners.

My favorite sport, frankly, is college football. I'm a college football junkie, even though I'm associated with golf and like golf and have played it all my life.

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

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.

Prescott Bush was himself a president of the U. S. Golf Association at one time - 1935 - before he became a U.S. senator from the state of Connecticut.