One-time sportswriter turned best-selling author Jerry B. Jenkins on faith, fame, favorite memories

It's been a year since the final book in the "Left Behind" series, "Kingdom Come," was released. A mind-boggling 65 million copies of the 16 books about the end-times and rapture have been sold, several topping the New York Times best-seller list.

Pretty heady stuff for author Jerry B. Jenkins, who started out as a teenage sports stringer for his hometown newspaper, or for anyone who writes in the Christian market, where selling 20,000 to 30,000 copies is considered successful.

But Jenkins isn't a stranger to best-selling lists. He has penned more than 170 books, including as-told-to biographies of Hank Aaron, Orel Hershiser, Walter Payton and Nolan Ryan. He wrote one in the 1990s with evangelist Billy Graham, "Just As I Am." He calls the 13 months he spent with Graham "the privilege of a lifetime."

Jenkins recently sat down with The Bee for an interview about his life, his faith and his work.

Q: Do you have a favorite sports figure you wrote about?

A: I have two, actually. I really enjoyed Orel Hershiser. He was so bright, and so outspoken in his faith. When he was on "The Tonight Show," he sang "The Doxology." The camera had caught him in the dugout singing during the World Series, so Johnny Carson asked him, "What were you singing?"

Orel said, "I was singing 'The Doxology.' "

Carson said, "You mean that church song?" Orel said yes, and the audience started clapping.

He said, "I'm not going to sing it here," and Carson said, "Yes you are," so he did.

Joe Gibbs of the Washington Redskins is also a very outspoken believer and insisted on having an afterword in his book telling people how to come to faith. The publisher tried to talk him out of it, saying it's in the story and if people want to come to faith, they can do it. But Joe insisted, saying he didn't want to do the book otherwise. He got a lot of letters from people who said they prayed the prayer with him.

Q: How long have you been a Christian?

A: I became a believer at a real young age through my mother. It's interesting, she had a painting on the wall, the famous (Warner) Sallman painting of Jesus knocking on the door. When I was 6 years old, I didn't recognize it from a Bible story and asked her about it. She said, "It's not in the Bible, but it's symbolic of Jesus knocking on the door of your heart." She led me to Christ.

Then when I met Dianna (Jenkins' wife) almost 15 years later, her grandfather knew Sallman. They lived in the same apartment building and both were artists. It's just a small world.

Q: Tell me about staying and writing with Billy Graham.

A: People ask what he's like behind closed doors, and he's the same as he is in public. He truly lights up a room. It's his humility that draws people to him. Most people who are that much of a household name would find it hard not to get a little too full of themselves.

I remember one crusade. He was getting pretty old, and they brought him into the stadium in a golf cart, and people just stood and applauded. Afterward, I asked him, "Wasn't that nice that people were thanking you for your decades of service?"

He said, "I wish I could have dug a hole and crawled into it."

I said, "But they weren't cheering you as a personality; they were just thanking you."

He said, "The Lord will share his glory with no other." He just really doesn't want that. His humility is his greatest quality.

Q: Was there anything while doing that book that surprised you?

A: I was surprised at how funny his wife was. Ruth was a sharp wit and very funny. Once when I was talking with Mr. Graham, she kept correcting him from the other room. She'd say, "Bill that wasn't 1949; that was 1950." "That wasn't Bev; that was Cliff."

He'd roll his eyes and finally he said, "Ruth, will you let me handle my own memoirs?"

She said, "I would, Bill, but they're beginning to sound like your 'Forget-oirs.' "

Q: Have you been in touch with him since she died?

A: Yeah, a little bit. But he's not well. ... They had such a sweet relationship. He was like a schoolkid when he was away; he couldn't wait to get home and hold her hand and greet her.

Q: Billy Graham has such a huge reputation. Yet people have criticized him for meeting with so many presidents, Democrats and Republicans, and not holding them to a higher level of morality. How do you feel about that?

A: He tries. One thing that's interesting is he'll never share a private conversation unless the person is gone. I learned some things after (Richard) Nixon died, after (Lyndon) Johnson died, but he won't talk about his conversations with the Clintons or Bush or things like that. He feels those are private.

He never compromises; he always counseled them. Now, you talk about surprises -- there is a naiveté about him. In his interest to say nice things about people, he'll say things like, "He would make a good head of the United Nations" or "She would make a great president." There are times when he'll retract something or adjust it, but to me, it's part of that purity of his soul. He loves everybody; he sees the good in everybody. He will counsel and pray with them and tell them what he thinks.

He really was burned by Nixon. He told me that Nixon came across to him as a Christian. They shared a lot of spiritual times. Then when he read the Watergate tapes and the foul language that Nixon used, Mr. Graham said, "You've heard the cliché about 'It made me sick'? I was almost physically ill when I heard the language he used and the way he talked about people." He felt betrayed.

Q: You also have become something of a household name with the "Left Behind" books. What does that kind of notoriety do to you as a Christian?

A: I'm kind of glad it came at a later age. I'm 58. When (the first book) came out, I was 45. I'd like to think I would have acted the same way in my 30s, but I think maybe the Lord spared me from that.

Wealth and material things are usually considered dangerous because we're not to love money and we're not to build our lives around temporal things. It becomes a huge responsibility. Dianna and I felt we would have to account for every dime someday. First of all, we decided the Lord shouldn't get any less than Uncle Sam gets. Basically, once you pay your taxes and give, you're down to 20 cents on the dollar. It still was more than anyone ever needed or wanted. It was a (conscious decision) not to let that change us. It's not easy.

I get recognized just enough to make it fun, but not enough to make it a nuisance. Having done books with the really famous people, the household names -- the Billy Grahams and the Hank Aarons -- I would not want that kind of fame. I once thought I did. I thought, wouldn't it be nice to go out of your house and have everybody know your name, know your face.

When you're with them for one day, you realize that's a trap nobody wants. Nolan Ryan told me once, "When I need to go to the hardware store in my own town to get a hammer, I can't just throw on a sweat suit and a hat. I have to shave, shower, dress, because everybody I see, they only want 30 seconds, but they'll remember if I looked like a slob or smelled or didn't have my hair combed." That's his life -- he's "on" when he's out of the house. Boy, that would be hard.

Q: In your wildest dreams, did you ever think this kind of fame would come to you?

A: Only in my wildest dreams. I remember when I wrote my first stand-alone novel in the late 1980s. I had written a lot of books by then. I had written a lot of series and things like that. But I wrote an international spy thriller that I thought was really special. It was published by Harper and Row. I thought, would I get an interview or a review in Time magazine? Of course, nobody even really noticed it.

Then, 10 years later, I'm on the cover of Newsweek and being interviewed on television, and you realize that stuff doesn't just happen. I consider it a God thing. When it was supposed to happen, it happened, and it didn't happen to me or about me. It was about this book and the message.

Q: Can you describe your collaboration with Tim LaHaye? Did he do the theology and you did the fiction writing, the characters and the plot?

A: I did all the writing.

Q: Why isn't just your name on the books?

A: It was his idea, and he is the theologian and scholar. He just acknowledged from the beginning that he is not a novelist. We had the agreement from the first that we'd split everything 50-50. He would do the theology, which I agree with. If I didn't understand something, he'd explain it to me, and if I still disagreed with it, it's his book and his idea. He deferred to me in the writing.

I think it's worked out great, but once it hits and becomes this gigantic success, people would say, "I'll bet that makes you mad. Here you wrote it and people are talking about Tim LaHaye's books." I just decided from Day 1, that's the agreement, that's the arrangement, and I'm fine with it. And then, too, half of everything that came in was so much more than anybody could ever need or want. It's not like I felt like, "Wow, I missed out on half of it." It was his idea. He's the frontman.

Q: How young were you when you thought about being a writer?

A: When I was a kid, I was a baseball fanatic. Played Little League ball, and we did really well, but I was hurt when I was a freshman in high school. I was 14 years old. I'd been reading Sports Illustrated and the sports pages all my life. To keep getting into the games free, I started sportswriting for the school paper. I realized I had found my niche.

I had a knack for it. I had heard my journalism teacher talking about stringing for newspapers and I liked the sound of it. I went to the local paper and told them I was a sportswriter and showed them my clips and stuff, and they hired me to be a stringer for high school sports. So I've been writing professionally -- back then it was only $1 an inch -- since I was 14.

Q: I'm sure you've gotten many responses from readers over the years for the "Left Behind" series. Is there any particular person that stands out in your mind?

A: Tim LaHaye and I used to keep track of how many we heard from personally. Over 3,000 people have told us they've become believers because of reading them. We think that represents many more.

But there have been two stories that got to me. One was an 80-year-old man who wrote and said he'd read "Left Behind" with a magnifying glass because his eyes were so bad. He said when he finished reading the book, he realized he needed to receive Christ so he wasn't left behind. He said it wasn't what he read through his glasses, but what he saw through his heart.

Then there was our oldest son's in-laws. They ran a Christian bookstore in Minnesota. They talked about a family who came in and told them about their teenage son who had fallen away from the church and the faith and was running with the wrong crowd. They gave him "Left Behind" and waited to see if he would read it. They saw it lying around the house, and then one day, it was missing.

He came to them and said, "I read that book, and you don't have to worry about me." He said he wanted to buy a whole box of the books and give it to the friends he was running with. Before he could do that, he was killed in a car wreck. So they (the family) bought the box of books. They gave them to these kids when they came to the funeral, and several of them came to Christ.

Q: Have you reached what you've wanted to do with your life?

A: Yes, and the Christian Writers Guild, that's a dream. Teaching other writers; trying to restock the pool, you know. And then Dallas, my oldest son, runs our film company in Los Angeles, Jenkins Entertainment. We're making little independent pictures that we're proud of.

Bee staff writer Sue Nowicki can be reached at snowicki@modbee.com or 578-2012.

This story was originally published April 26, 2008 at 6:23 AM with the headline "One-time sportswriter turned best-selling author Jerry B. Jenkins on faith, fame, favorite memories."