Dead Solid Perfect – Dan Jenkins, 1974 ★★★½

Tee Offs & Put Ons

People who pick up Dead Solid Perfect expecting a serious endeavor at sports fiction need to understand: This may be a golf novel, but it’s also a Dan Jenkins novel.

Jenkins’ gimmick with sportswriting was not unlike Dean Martin’s about singing: It was something he seemed to do on the way to the bar, preferably with a few bawdy jokes thrown in.

Dean Martin could sing, though, and Dan Jenkins can write. He’s got a deceptively easy style, fluid with the one-liners, that makes you think he’s not really trying. Sometimes, in fact, he isn’t. But Dead Solid Perfect is one of his better efforts. It’s got a line on its lead character that resonates and holds your attention. It has a deceptively broad sensibility that Jenkins sneaks up on you, rather masterfully. And there are some very funny lines, which Jenkins delivers in the voice of his narrator, a professional golfer named Kenny Lee Puckett.

“We were high school sweethearts who probably never would have gotten married if she hadn’t accidentally become pregnant while she was still wearing my Paschal High letter jacket. And if she hadn’t had five brothers who were all capable of committing various atrocities.”

“In case you don’t know very much about the game of golf, a good 1-iron shot is about as easy to come by as an understanding wife.”

Or his idea for a country-song title: “If My Heart’s Community Property Then Get Your Mental Cruelty Off My Ass.”

In case you didn’t notice, marriage is a preoccupation of Kenny’s. He has been married three times by the time our novel begins: the first to a woman who now sleeps with rich married guys for blackmail purposes; the second to a woman who rode him too hard about being a better man; and the third time, well, the third time was his prize for making the PGA Tour, the kind of woman who turns heads wherever she goes, and is not preoccupied by trivialities like undergarments.

As Kenny’s superstar buddy Donny Smithern puts it: “You can’t ever play a tournament outside the country, Kenny, because Janie Ruth’ll never get those things through customs.”

First published in 1974, when professional golf was still known as the domain of Jack, Arnie, and polyester slacks, Dead Solid Perfect captures an era as much as it does a sport. The wafting smoke from the bonfires of free love and the woman’s movement hangs over the proceedings, as does a sense of jaded malaise that was once ascribed, indelibly if incorrectly, to an American president of the day.

The smug humor is undiluted Southern-fried-frat-boy, with a lot of pungent ethnic and sexual crudity in the mix that dates this more than the clothes. Think Caddyshack meets Smokey & The Bandit, maybe, only with a hard R rating.

The knock on Jenkins, which I have come to share in my other encounters with his prose, fiction and otherwise, is that he's too locked-in to his good-ole-boy persona to be anything more than fitfully entertaining. Yes, that’s the approach he takes here as well, but this was one time I found it worked. Kenny may look the part of success, with his no-frills manner and contending for his first victory in a major tournament, but things are crashing down around him faster than he realizes, which will force a major rethinking of his priorities.

The takeaway line for the whole book comes late, by which time Jenkins has made sure it sticks hard: “"Life...is a promo.”

That line comes from Beverly, his most recent ex-wife, who presents Dead Solid Perfect with something of a social conscience. She knows what’s what with golf clothes, anyway; advising Kenny to make use of the native apparel when he goes to Scotland to play in the British Open: “Ballantyne cashmeres fit you much better than Pringles.”

In the 1970s, winners like Jerry Pate, seen here about to make a clutch approach shot with his five-iron at the 1976 U. S. Open, knew how to win with plaid. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1zWiWvwWXI.

As our novel opens, Bev has two things that make her matter to Kenny: Cancer and insight about what makes him tick.

“Men are lucky,” she tells him. “You’ve got something you love – golf – and that’s great. All I ever wanted was for you to be a larger person.”

Kenny walked out on Bev after too much pushing, but they still keep in touch. His take on her is worth quoting, too: “It might not be possible for any man to be married to Beverly Tidwell unless he was a Nobel Prize-winning poet who could also handle any household problems that came up involving plumbing or electrical wiring.”

Much of the humor of Dead Solid Perfect centers around Donny Smithern, irrepressibly smug and basic in his carnal desires. He’s the most memorable character, certainly. While married to a beautiful woman, he can’t help himself when it comes to a Tour groupie, whether in a hotel room, the woods along a fairway, or even the Friendly Skies.

“He later decided that the only challenge for a player of his stature would be to get laid in first class, not during a movie, not in the john, and not on a 747 where you could move around, upstairs and all,” Jenkins writes. “And to make it more severe, he said, you would have to do it while your wife was traveling with you.

“I said he would need some luck on that one.”

But Donny later claims he got her done, on the red-eye flying back from the Hawaiian Open with a willing fan while Donny’s wife slept a couple of rows away.

At least this is what Donny tells Kenny later. Perceptive readers will quickly learn to take Donny’s claims with a grain of salt.

“Love is a 280-yard drive and a seven-iron four feet from the pin,” Smithern tells his pal Kenny. For Kenny, much of the journey of the novel is in the realization Donnie really means it.

Another pro golfer whom Kenny befriends worries too much about the little things in life. He lacks the eye of the tiger, as Burgess Meredith would say. And how:

“I had an eight-inch putt today, Kenny, and as I was getting ready to tap it in, I thought to myself that right there where I was standing – right there underneath my brown and white Footjoys – I was probably crushing to death a whole civilization of living things.” Naturally, he withdraws.

Kenny also spends a lot of time detailing the folks he knew back home in Texas. Too much time; it’s a major drawback of Dead Solid Perfect how much of the book is spent away from the main action as Kenny recalls pre-Tour days with the gambling golfers of Goat Hill, the kind of course where anything went and usually did. Much time is spent recollecting the Needham boys, Kenny’s ex-in-laws who terrorized their small community and got away with everything, including murder, because their toughness translated into victory on the gridiron.

At times Jenkins plays up the Needham boys’ antics for laughs, but after a near-rape at a girl’s house Kenny helps break up, if somewhat feebly, we come to understand that Kenny has a major failing, something Bev put her finger on long ago.

Kenny is too much of what you’d call a "go-along;" not a bad guy, but inclined to follow in the wake of whatever happens and not trouble himself too much with the direction he’s heading. The novel, in its low-key, amiable way, takes on some pretty deep shadows lying in the weeds beyond the rough. Whether it's taking on casual country-club racism or big-business greed, Jenkins here will surprise those who think of him as a social dinosaur. He certainly did me.

There's actually not a lot of golf in Dead Solid Perfect; strange as it sounds, the most sports action you get before the final round of the major Puckett contends for involves a long-ago hustle over a phantom football game. This is an especially protracted segment in a book given to a lot of rambling, as we pull over to the side of the road just as we reach the home stretch so Jenkins can tell this tall tale of gamblers playing their biggest con with a football team which they make up as they go along.

Dead Solid Perfect does wrap things up with some authentic golf thrills. Jenkins puts us on the course at Heavenly Pines Country Club as Kenny makes his play for the U. S. Open, with Donny his closest pursuer, and some fellow named Nicklaus not too far behind. The ending is both satisfying and anti-climactic; perhaps for the same reason: Kenny reaches an understanding about life and the game that transcends winning or losing.

As a novel, Dead Solid Perfect doesn’t quite live up to its title. Jenkins likes to spin yarns, sometimes for miles longer than I cared to read them. For the most part, he sticks to a well-mapped-out strategy and his aim is true. At times, here and there and sometimes for long stretches at a time, I was reminded of Ring Lardner; something I never would have thought Jenkins capable. And he kept me laughing throughout, which counts for a lot, too.