Sports - Fiction

Rude Behavior

Name: Rude Behavior
Author: Dan Jenkins
ISBN: 9780307799234

by Dan Jenkins

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Overview

The good-ole-boy heroes of Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough and Life Its Ownself are back in this exuberant tale of football and other excesses. Rude Behavior finds Billy Clyde Puckett, former New York Giant football god and later television announcer, as general manager and part-owner of a new NFL team, the West Texas Tornadoes. His old drinking partner-in-crime and favorite receiver, Shake Tiller, has written a bestselling book, The Average Man's History of the World, and his nearly perfect wife, Barbara Jane, is in Hollywood, making a movie with Shake, who happens to be her old flame. Meanwhile, Billy Clyde's father-in-law, Big Ed Bookman, who is more Texas than oil and is majority owner of the Tornadoes, is trying to lure the old Giants coach, T.J. Lambert, to run his new team. And Billy Clyde has met a bartender named Kelly Sue Woodley, a wiseass beauty who works at a joint called "He Ain't Here" and causes some major marital discord.

All these folks are back to take part in some serious fun, which in Jenkinsland means football, plenty of "young scotches," athletic exploits on the field and in the bedroom, a lot of riffs about the stupidity of "gubmint reg-you-layshuns," and the sublime beauty of country music. Hilarious, stubbornly retrograde, and laced with affection for everything Texas football stands for, Rude Behavior is vintage Dan Jenkins.

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Editorials

Charles Salzberg

It's been a very long time since those lovable bad boys...led the New York Giants to the Super Bowl, and now they're back. The question is, Do we really want them?
— The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this continuing saga of former sportswriter Jenkins's sardonic alter ego and narrator, Billy Clyde Puckett (Semi-Tough, etc.), the former footballer and gadabout sports junkie slips from redneck obstreperousness to fundamentally racist and misogynist stupidity. The plot of this very shaggy, junior-high-school dirty joke centers on Billy Clyde's attempt to use the money of his father-in-law, Big Ed Bookman, to establish an NFL expansion team in the semiarid Texas wasteland between Amarillo and Lubbock. This improbability is of small concern to the book and occupies less than a tenth of its length. Billy Clyde spends most of the time regaling the reader with the mind-numbing back stories of every character--no matter how minor--who crosses his path. Most all of these have three unlikely names or nicknames, none of which is believable or in good taste. Other diversions include a timeline tracing the history of the NFL, lots of babe-ogling in bars and arguments over the stats of yesteryear. Billy Clyde is too much a part of the absurdity to provide a satiric norm or to separate wisecracks from wisdom. In places, Jenkins gets off an amusing zinger or two, but far too much of this overdone but underachieving farce reminds one of a comedian who grows nastier the fewer laughs he gets. Author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Anyone who has read Semi-Tough (LJ 10/15/72) will not be surprised that this book, which continues the adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett, is sexist, racist, redneck, antigay, politically incorrect, and guaranteed to offend virtually every category of human being. It is also rolling-on-the-floor funny. Billy Clyde and his rich father-in-law win one of the NFL expansion franchises, the West Texas Tornadoes, and extravagantly cheat their way to the Super Bowl. Along the way there is plenty of time for comments on Hollywood (Billy's wife is a movie star), corruption in college football (he's in favor of it), cheerleaders, lawyers, developers, and diners in small Texas towns. Public libraries should buy multiple copies; librarians should grab them first for a fun read. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/98.]--Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, IA

Charles Salzberg

It's been a very long time since those lovable bad boys...led the New York Giants to the Super Bowl, and now they're back. The question is, Do we really want them? -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

The veteran sportswriter rounds up his gang from Semi-Tough and Life on Its Ownself for a crassly funny, cynical, but ultimately endearing nod at professional football. This time out, former New York Giants Superbowl winner Billy Clyde Puckett puts together his very own NFL team and takes them to the Superbowl. Jenkins's latest roman-à-clef is really about growing old. Back in his hometown of Fort Worth, where men are men (unless they're gay "shirtlifters") and where women are "rack-loaded wool drivers" (unless they're "mature"), Puckett defiantly smokes Marlboros and knocks back on the booze in a woebegone little bar called He's Not Here, as he contemplates football's pointless afterlife. Most people no longer recognize him; he's bored with giving motivational speeches to CEOs; and his stint as a TV sports commentator was too silly to endure. Now his wife, sexpot movie star Barbara Jane Bookman, has gone to Switzerland to film a stupid movie directed by Billy Clyde's best friend, Shake Tiller; T.J. Lambert, here a college football coach, is stoically bailing his brainless players out of jail; and sportswriter buddy Jim Tom Pinch is still picking up young bimbos. But just as Puckett's bleary eyes are beginning to wander toward the mature silhouette of bartender Kelly Sue Woodley, Puckett's billionaire "bidnessman" father-in-law Big Ed Bookman gives him a blank check so he can find a town (code-name: Big Food), build a stadium, sign up players, and otherwise invent the West Texas Tornadoes. Puckett goes at the task over infinite quantities of booze and food. But despite false starts, phony injuries, bad calls, and dumb fumbles, the West Texas Tornadoes make it tothe Superbowl, where they prove that winning is a matter of making the best of what little you can call yours. A coarse mix of good ol' boy put-downs, below-the-belt slurs, sports gossip, and aw-shucks sentimentality can't mask the sadness in this tale of men building monuments to their former glory.