Top 44 Dan Jenkins Quotes

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.

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.

I love Twitter.

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

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.

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.

My real heroes have always been sportswriters.

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

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

When you’re a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It’s not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.

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

Sally Jenkins of the ‘Washington Post’ is the best sports columnist in the country. Second best is Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN.com, and third is Dan Wetzel on Yahoo!

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.

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.

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

The golf ball has no sense at all, which is why it has to be given stern lectures constantly, especially during the act of putting.

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

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

If you’re a friend or a relative of George Herbert Walker Bush, Prez 41, or George W. Bush, Prez 43, or any other Bushes, then you know an 18-hole round of golf shouldn’t take more than three hours out of your day – there are other important things to do.

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.

I actually don’t have a single regret, professionally or domestically. I planned it that way.

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.

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.

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.

I just come from a school where you have to win something to be accepted.

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.

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.

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.

Valet parking is an essential at any decent club.

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.

I like to be entertained, not smothered with ‘literary’ riddles.

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.

I hate political correctness.

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.’

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.

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

I think newspapers will survive in some form or another.

There are no Dave Marrs anymore.

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.

When I was a lad in my 20s, as carefree and debonair as any other underpaid newspaperman, I happened to be a golfer who could flirt with par fairly often, and I was adventurous enough in those days to play any known or unknown thief who showed up at Goat Hills for whatever amount he fancied.

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

I don’t cover golf tournaments anymore – I preside over them.

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.

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