Bud Shrake - Early Life

Early Life

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, he attended Paschal High School where, along with Dan Jenkins, he wrote for the school newspaper the Paschal Pantherette. He served in the Army and attended the University of Texas and Texas Christian University. In 1951, Shrake joined Jenkins at the Fort Worth Press while he earned a degree in English and Philosophy at TCU. Shrake started on the police beat for the underdog Press while Gary Cartwright covered the same beat for the mainstream Fort Worth Star-Telegram. According to Cartwright, he and Shrake usually could be found hanging out at a bar across the street from the police station; a copy boy monitoring police calls would alert them to stories. Looking back at his job interview at the Press, Shrake would write “it was a rackety, dirty city paper, with the teletypes clacking and a sense of urgency everywhere. A copy editor was eating tuna fish out of a can, and the bowling writer was drinking bourbon, and I thought, 'This is the world I want to be in.' " At the Press, he also worked under legendary sports editor Blackie Sherrod who said about Shrake, “he immediately showed talent and went on to remarkable success and acclaim far beyond the pressbox."

In 1958, Shrake moved to the Dallas Times Herald as a sportswriter followed by a move in 1961 to the Dallas Morning News in order to write a daily sports column. In November 1963, Shrake was dating Jada, the star dancer at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. Shrake’s 1972 novel Strange Peaches, set in Dallas just before and after the Kennedy assassination, included Ruby as a supporting character and borrowed the real-life moment when Shrake, standing with his camera at Main and Houston, locked eyes with Kennedy.

In 1964, Shrake moved to New York, following Jenkins, to join the staff of Sports Illustrated, where editor André Laguerre considered him a "literary" sportswriter. Accordingly, Laguerre often allowed Shrake to write "bonus pieces"—long feature stories sometimes barely related to sports. Among the notable feature articles Shrake wrote for Sports Illustrated are “The Once Forbidding Land” (1965), a profile of life in the Texas Hill Country, and “The Tarahumaras: A Lonely Tribe of Long-Distance Runners” (1967), which he wrote after spending several weeks with the Tarahumaras in Northern Mexico.

Shrake returned to Texas in 1968 and continued his association with Sports Illustrated until 1979 while also writing novels and screenplays, including the thriller Nightwing, the 1980 Steve McQueen western Tom Horn, the Dennis Hopper "acid Western" Kid Blue, and Songwriter, which starred Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Rip Torn. Shrake's play "Pancho Villa's Wedding Day" (1983), started as a movie project with Hopper that never found funding. Nelson, Kristofferson and Torn would be reunited in two made-for-TV movies written by Shrake and Cartwright, “Pair of Aces” (1990) and “Another Pair of Aces” (1991). Shrake played a bit role in the latter; he previously appeared in a “small, but significant” role as “Sodbuster Two” in “Lonesome Dove”.