Rude Behavior
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4.1 • 15 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
