Year One: Jenkins Medal nominees

The Moody College of Communication’s Texas Program in Sports and Media (TPSM) has announced the 2017 nominees for the inaugural Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. The Jenkins Medal is named in honor of the legendary Dan Jenkins, award-winning sportswriter, best-selling author and iconoclast Texan. The Jenkins Medal will be awarded for the first time this fall in two categories: one for lifetime achievement in sportswriting, and one for the most outstanding work of sportswriting published in the previous calendar year. The nominees for the 2017 award of excellence are:

A 16-member jury of working writers and editors selected the 2017 award of excellence nominees. Jurors for the inaugural award include: co-chair Sally Jenkins, Dan’s daughter and writer for the Washington Post; Kirk Bohls of the Austin American-Statesman; Chuck Culpepper of the Washington Post; Gerald Early, author and professor of humanities at Washington University in St. Louis; Houston-area sportswriter Melanie Hauser; Joe Posnanski of MLB.com; John Walsh, long time executive editor of ESPN; Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN; co-chair Michael MacCambridge, author of numerous books; Karen Crouse of The New York Times; Bryan Curtis of The Ringer.com; Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Star; Kathleen McElroy, associate director of UT’s School of Journalism and former editor of The New York Times; Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated; Seth Wickersham of ESPN The Magazine; and Alexander Wolff, author and contributing writer at Sports Illustrated.

The first pair of winners will be announced and honored at the inaugural Dan Jenkins Medal Awards dinner in Dallas on Friday, Oct. 13, 2017.


Dan Jenkins

Dan Jenkins bio

Dan Jenkins is an award-winning sportswriter and best-selling novelist whose career spans more than six decades. To date, he is the author of 23 books—12 novels and 11 works of non-fiction. After 15 years of writing for newspapers in Fort Worth and Dallas, Jenkins became nationally known for his stories in Sports Illustrated for more than a quarter of a century, and afterward for his five-year stint of writing a sports column for Playboy, and since then for his columns, features, and tweets in Golf Digest. Three of his best-selling novels—Semi-Tough, Dead Solid Perfect, and Baja Oklahoma—have been made into movies. He is one of only three sportswriters to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He has also been inducted into the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame, the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, the  Texas Golf Hall of Fame, and the TCU Lettermens Hall of Fame. For a lifetime of excellence in his profession, Jenkins has received the Red Smith Award from the Associated Press Sports Editors Association, the Ring Lardner Award from the Union League of Chicago, the PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing, the lifetime achievement award in sports journalism from the PGA of America, the William D. Richardson Award for outstanding contributions to the game from the Golf Writers Association of America, the Old Tom Morris Award from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, the Lincoln A. Werden Memorial Award from the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association for a lifetime of contributions to golf journalism, and the Amateur Football Award from the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame. But Jenkins says he is proudest of the fact that he has managed to stay employed by one publication or another throughout his long career.