Rude Behavior

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.