Rude Behavior [Hardcover]

Dan Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

From beginning to end, Rude Behavior is deliciously true to its title. Not for the easily offended or the purveyors of PC, it forms the third installment in Jenkins's continuing saga of Billy Clyde Puckett, first introduced in Semi-Tough as a star running back whose attitude matched his twinkle-toed unpredictability on and off the field. Now, some two decades later, Billy Clyde's feet may have slowed, but his mouth and his passions haven't. He still loves the game; he's just sick of the way it's gotten soft: "Pass interference (used to be) when you broke a guy's ribs. Today it's excess frowning." His plan is to heal it. He's decided to turn his back on the clichés that have sustained his life as a broadcaster for "something more important than Hamlet": he will start his own NFL team, the expansion West Texas Tornadoes, and run it the way it should be run. Of course, if he can't exactly set the game right, he will at least set it on its ear with the help of old teammates T.J. Lambert and Shake Tiller--and his father-in-law's fortune.

Between kick-off and pay dirt, Jenkins visits his usual haunts: saloons, locker rooms, bedrooms, front offices, and the field. With rambunctious good spirit, he steers us from the dust of Texas to the glitter of New York and Hollywood. Sure, it's a funny novel--rudeness and crudeness abound--but it's also a novel that insists on tackling the game's problems, piling onto human foibles, intercepting overbearing stupidity, blindsiding political correctness, splitting the uprights with the virtues of hard work and good friendship, and still leaving enough room to slip in advice for disarming airplane smoke detectors. From Jenkins, who would want to accept less? --Jeff Silverman

From Publishers 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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (September 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385470002
• ISBN-13: 978-0385470001
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,463,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just a good ol' boy..., September 19, 2001

By 

Shay Porter (Middle of Nowhere, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rude Behavior (Mass Market Paperback)

This was my belated introduction to Dan Jenkins. I picked it up at an airport because there was a football player on the cover (not the cover shown on amazon, obviously), and laughed through my entire flight. I have since sought out and read all of Mr. Jenkins' work - but the adventures of these football Bubbas still remains my favorite. As a native Texan and a football fan, you gotta love any man who drinks in a bar called "He's Not Here". As a woman, I have to say that readers need to lighten up and have a sense of humor about his often sexist (but seriously funny) world view.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rude Behavior- Yes it is!, January 12, 2000

By 

Jason Birkby - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rude Behavior (Mass Market Paperback)

If you are not a Dan Jenkins fan or strongly oppose "Archie Bunker" bigotry, this novel may not be for you. Jenkins does however weave an interesting tale of the NFL. Far fetched at times very funny at others Jenkins will leave the reader and avid football fan scratching his head, wondering if this is how the NFL is run.

The novel is a bit lengthy and is slow at the beginning. However Jenkins mixes football (both fictional and historical) with hollywood, social issues and political correctivness. Bring back the cast from "Semi-Tough" was great for the reader, but might of lost the new reader.

The book is not quite as funny as "You Got To Play Hurt", which would be a better buy for the new Jenkins reader. However if you like Dan Jenkins, football and aren't easily offended this one is a must read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A pathetic shadow of former greatness., October 6, 1998

By 

edward hackett - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rude Behavior (Hardcover)

I've been a fan of Dan Jenkins' for years. I think Semi-Tough is one of the best football novels ever written and he has proven himself again and again to be a fine sports humorist. That said, Rude Behavior represents a pathetic shadow of Jenkins' former ability. The plot is trite, the dialog is laughable, the characters are shallow, and the book as a whole is just awful. It's hard to see someone I looked up to sink so low. I am embarrassed for Dan Jenkins.