As a kid, Sally Jenkins liked to spend her vacations tagging along with her father to work. But that didn't mean she was stuck in some office playing with paper clips. Dan Jenkins was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and the author of the football novel Semi-Tough, so Sally's notion of a typical workplace ranged from the press box at Giants Stadium to the manicured greens of the Augusta golf course. Today, Jenkins is visiting many of the same places as one of the best-known sportswriters in America.
Last summer, Jenkins left Sports Illustrated, where she had written about college football, tennis and golf for seven years, to join a new monthly, Conde Nast Sports for Women. Jenkins, who lives in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, contributes major profiles, features and cover stories. "Sally is our preeminent sportswriter," says editor Lucy Danziger. "The whole world of women and sports is her beat, and I'm happy to let her do what she wants because she's so brilliant."
An English major, Jenkins covered water polo for the Daily as a freshman and was the sports co-editor in 1981 and 1982. While she ran the department during the heady John Elway football years, she has a more embarrassing memory. "The defining epigram of my years there, I'm told, was written on the wall of the men's room at the Daily," she says sheepishly: "'Sally from sports looks great in shorts.'"
But it was her well-formed sentences that led to sportswriting stints at the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Post. She moved to Sports Illustrated in 1990 and, in 1996, she wrote Men Will Be Boys: The Modern Woman Explains Football and Other Amusing Male Rituals (Doubleday). In it, Jenkins wittily interprets the most macho of sports for women, who account for nearly half of all professional football fans. "It's now a fact: Women watch sports," says Jenkins, who herself is an avid tennis and college football fan. "The professional sports leagues are finally discovering this audience. It was a double espresso sitting under everyone's nose for 20 years."
Jenkins says the new monthly magazine is the first to cover the entire breadth of women's sports--from world-class individual athletes to the new basketball leagues to fitness, nutrition, gear, fashion and travel. "This is the kind of magazine I've always wanted to read," Jenkins says. Which is perhaps the best of all reasons to write for it.
