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Old-timers' day: they've been friends--and friendly antagonists--going back to their time as Cowtown most colorful ink-stained wretches. Half a century later, Dan Jenkins (whose new novel, Slim and None, arrives in stores this month) and our own Gary Cartwright duke it out over Bill parcells, Ann Coulter, and that wealthy divorcee in the bar at the Colonial.

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* March 20, 11:32 a.m.

Yo, Danny,

I have it on solid authority that the hero of your new novel, due to be published in May, is a foul-mouthed, whiskey-soaked, homophobic, rightwing crazy who makes his living as a touring golf pro--apparently a character playing to type. Naturally, I look forward to reading it. You are one of only two writers I know (our mutual pal Bud Shrake is the other) who can make golf sound more interesting than collecting porcelain teacups. I've always considered golf a game for idlers, morons, and scoundrels like Ken Lay: Hit a ball, try to find it, hit it again, while lugging a bag of instruments left over from the Star Chamber.

I have bad dreams from my days at the Fort Worth Press, when you used to order me out to the Colonial Country Club to capture the "color" of its annual golf tournament" This usually entailed me interviewing some blowhard who had just shot his weight and blamed the high score on a caddie who couldn't speak good English. Admittedly, I do occasionally miss the open bar in the pressroom and milling about the balcony above the eighteenth green, trying to spot that wealthy divorcee from River Crest--what was her name?--who shaved her pubic hair into a heart and dyed it pink any time Tommy Bolt was headed to town. I guess you'll be holding court in a few weeks at your usual table at Colonial? Then, no doubt, you'll be heading to Augusta for, what is it, your seventy-eighth consecutive trip to the Masters? Does Cliff Roberts, or whatever his name is, still lord over the tournament like Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna? Does he still ban women from club memberships and require caddies to wear leg irons? As the song goes, old times there are not forgotten.

Speaking of which, what do you think about TCU naming our old journalism school for Bob Schieffer? I wrote Schieffer, congratulating him for upholding the honor of C students everywhere and wondering what his colleagues in the Eastern elite media thought about it. He responded that Roxanne Roberts, of the Washington Post, said, "Now let me get this straight. It will be called the Schieffer School of Horned Frogs?"

I hardly ever miss spending my weekends in the press box at College Station. How about you?

Your friend, Jap

* March 21, 18:51 a.m.

Hey, Jappy,

I see nothing has changed since our newspaper days: You still need a fact-checker. The Colonial is in May, after the Masters. Clifford Roberts has been dead since 1977. Augusta has had four chairmen since Cliff. The lady dyed it pink for everyone, not just golfers, and I like to think God put her here to help us write novels.

As for my new one, which is titled Slim and None--and I'd appreciate it if you'd always mention the title when referring to it in public--the hero is not a right-wing crazy; he's just intelligent. Like me, he's a great American and a wonderful human being, which means he couldn't have taken any courses from that liberal pinko commie hate-America idiot you've got down there teaching journalism at that big old public school called the University of Texas. What's his name? Billy Jerker? Bob Jackyjen? They must be awfully proud of him around Austin. Up here in Fort Worth, where we have Bob Schieffer to be proud of, we like to think of the UT guy sitting around the old campfire somewhere in the Arabian Desert, roasting his camel dung for dinner. Obviously he'd be happier there.

Actually, I do miss those weekends in the press box at College Station. Need I remind you that the Aggie band has never lost a halftime?

His Ownself

* March 22, 7:36 a.m.

Danny,

Good to see...

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