HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — The bar had been rowdy all night with people dancing and milling about. Seated 30 feet from the stage, Bruce Jenkins waited. Then the band made room for one more.
His daughter Ella, who performs as EllaHarp, began to sing “Crescent City Blues,” a torch song written by her grandfather, a Grammy Award-winning arranger — and the bar got quiet. The crowd pressed closer to the stage. When it was over, father and daughter beelined for each other, meeting in a hug in the middle of the room.
Bruce Jenkins has written for the San Francisco Chronicle’s sports section since 1973, serving as a columnist for 36 years and counting. Now semi-retired, he has covered major events across sports, including 27 World Series and 19 Wimbledons.
A 1971 alumnus of Cal, Jenkins became the first sportswriter from the student newspaper to be voted into the Daily Californian’s Hall of Fame earlier this year. When it came to columnists Bay Area sports fans turned to after big games, Jenkins said he was “definitely in the ballgame.”
The longtime Half Moon Bay resident has the sun-bleached white hair of a southern California boy at 77. Just about everyone calls him Jenks. Jenks listens the way he writes — like he already knows where it’s going.
Both of Jenkins’ parents were famous musicians. His father Gordon Jenkins was an arranger and songwriter famed for his orchestral arrangements for music icons like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. His mother Beverly Jenkins, also known as Beverly Mahr, was a mid-century blues and jazz vocalist of the big-band era. Growing up, Bruce Jenkins remembers playing wiffle ball in the yard outside his father’s Malibu studio.
At age 12, he gave up playing the piano for a stated reason his daughter can recite from memory: “I was just good enough to be wretched.”
His schoolmate’s father was Jim Murray, a legendary sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times who later won a Pulitzer Prize. Murray had his own studio, and Jenkins absorbed him the same way.
“To be able to watch the games with him and hear his commentary, what mattered to him — it really rubbed off on me,” Jenkins said. “He was a very bright, clever man with a terrific sense of humor and a great sarcasm.”
In eighth grade, Jenkins joined The Rail Splitter, his junior high school’s student newspaper. Then he joined his high school paper, then he became sports editor of the Daily Cal. Finally, 53 years ago, he joined The Chronicle where he remains today, writing one column a week.
“It’s actually all I’ve ever done,” he said.
For more than five decades, Jenkins’ stories have come straight from his head to his fingers.
“I’m very conscious of having rhythm,” he said. “I’m offended by non-rhythmic material where a sentence drags on.”
Jenkins abhors sticking to the reflexive phrases of sportswriting — especially when someone “accomplished the feat.”
“I hate seeing things written the same way every time,” he said. “There’s millions of things like that where I just don’t want it to sound like every other story.”
His August 2002 column on polarizing Giants legend Barry Bonds — the one his sports editor called the best baseball column he’d ever read — opens with a cornfield appearing in deepest center field at dusk, conjures Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays, and closes with five words: “It is a game of simple pleasures.”
His peers will tell you that simplicity is harder than it looks.
Scott Ostler, a fellow sports columnist for The Chronicle who recently retired, said he considers Jenkins his column role model. He described Jenkins’ style as understated in the best way — not too many big words, not trying to sound profound; written instead as if talking to someone.
Ostler compared reading Jenkins to taking a hot shower — “it feels good,” he said.
He remembers Jenks hauling a VCR machine the size of four toasters on road trips, complete with a collection of tapes spanning Larry Bird highlights to 1950s Cleveland Browns seasons. In Toronto for a World Series, Jenkins invited Ostler and a colleague to his hotel room and played tapes for hours.
“The guy was so, so steeped in sports,” Ostler said.
Today, Jenkins’ evening ritual still centers around watching as many sporting events as possible from his DVR — including every WNBA game with his wife Martha, a former Giants photographer.
Longtime Sports Illustrated writer and author S.L. Price said Jenkins approaches covering sports with a childlike sense of wonder. “He has a very jazzy, breezy, musical way of speaking,” Price said. “But it’s very tight when he writes.”
The standards Jenkins holds himself to are unforgiving. Ostler said he remembers sharing a press box with Jenkins on deadline during one spring training.
“He closed his laptop and just in the quiet press box said, ‘Awful,’” Ostler said.
Jenkins’ daughter Ella said she considers “awful” to be one of her dad’s life quotes, often shouted out the car window or uttered leaving movie theaters.
Jenkins found Barry Bonds to be the most difficult personality he ever covered — a player he said resented writers and made their lives miserable.
At one big game in Atlanta, Jenkins said he remembers when Bonds surprised him with just how difficult he could be. As reporters crowded around his locker after the Giants had won and with deadlines looming, Bonds was taking his time to get dressed.
With his back to the scrum, he fiddled with his top button. Then he checked his hair. Jenkins said reporters were sweating profusely when Bonds finally turned around — just to tell them he wasn’t going to talk. Then Bonds walked away.
“But the talent had to be acknowledged,” Jenkins said. Bonds’ behavior never affected how Jenkins wrote about him, or stopped him from always voting for Bonds on his Hall of Fame ballot.
“I definitely got that from my dad,” he added.
There were nights Gordon Jenkins had to drag singer Judy Garland to the stage before the curtain rose. But then, her performance would take over the room.
“He’s absolutely his father’s son,” Price said.
Jenkins is known for writing at lightning speed. But his biography of his father published in 2005, “Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins,” took 17 years to research and write.
He interviewed as many people as he could who were connected to his father. Aware of the project, Price would probe Jenkins about its status whenever they found themselves covering the same event. Price said he kept encouraging the project because he wanted to read a good story. Jenkins said Price’s inquiries finally pushed him to start writing.
“To go and look at your family’s story objectively with those tools, there’s something incredibly powerful about that,” Price said.
Interviews for the book included an hour and a little bourbon with Frank Sinatra, who Jenkins said had a special relationship with his father built over ballads — the “mournful strings” as Jenkins called them.
“It’s the greatest hour ever as a journalist,” Jenkins said. He arrived at the interview knowing his father’s work with Sinatra cold, ready to talk to a collaborator about the albums Gordon considered the best of his career.
Price called it “the best portrait of Frank Sinatra ever put on paper.”
Gordon Jenkins died in 1984 before Jenks became a columnist. Without the internet or a newsstand within 25 miles, his father likely never read his work.
“He couldn’t actually see what I wrote,” Jenkins said. “… I think I knew that because I had become a Chronicle columnist fixture at the World Series, I must be doing OK.”
Ostler said reading the book felt like reading a Jenks column.
“It’s a great tribute to his dad that he did that, ’cause he probably made about 10 bucks out of it,” Ostler said. “He just did it out of love.”
“I haven’t actually finished it because I can’t,” Ella said. “It’s like this very emotional thing.”
That connection to her grandfather brought EllaHarp to the stage at Old Princeton Landing in April.
“Crescent City Blues” was written by Gordon Jenkins and sung by Beverly Mahr. Johnny Cash famously settled out of court after lifting the song almost note for note in “Folsom Prison Blues.” Bruce Jenkins has not forgiven him for it.
Ella never met her grandmother, but Bruce said he saw both of them that night.
“She got to channel Beverly there in some wonderful ways,” he said.
“We skipped that generation,” Ella said, “and kind of circled back on the music.”
Gordon Jenkins’ Steinway is waiting for Ella, likely too large to ever move into a place of her own. “I inherited his piano, so there’s sort of a reverence around those kinds of things,” she said.
Price said he suspects Jenkins was hearing his father’s music in his head while writing throughout his career.
“Jenks was having a conversation with his dad the whole time,” Price said.
“He’s got his own music,” Ostler said.
