Quotes from Dan Jenkins

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.

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

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.

Marty Russo was too good a golfer to be a servant of the people.

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

The first thing they gave me at 'Sports Illustrated' was a first-class air card. 'And oh, by the way, there's the petty cash drawer,' they told me. 'Take a few thousand dollars for expenses.'

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.

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.

Nobody else is Tiger Woods. Not on this planet.

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

I don't have contempt for Tiger Woods.

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.

High school golf, college golf and the decade that followed all come back to me now as one big raucous, goofy gangsome.

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

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

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.

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

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

Fort Worth is friendly; it's still a Texas town. It's the most Texas city in Texas.

There's usually one piece in 'Vanity Fair' every month that grabs me, but when it presents hatchet jobs without substantiation to impress its liberal friends, I laugh first, then toss.

Golf was never a religion to me.

You must remind yourself at all times that the golf ball is nothing. It's an object. It's something to be swatted and sometimes lost and not even looked for.

My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'

Something mystical happens to every writer who goes to the Masters for the first time, some sort of emotional experience that results in a search party having to be sent out to recover his typewriter from a clump of azaleas.