The Masters misses Dan Jenkins, a regular since 1950

It was 1951. Jenkins was a 22-year-old Texas Christian University student and golf-team member moonlighting as a sportswriter for his hometown newspaper, The Fort Worth Press. His beat essentially was Ben Hogan, a native son, who made Jenkins’ maiden journey to Georgia a memorable one with a two-stroke victory.

“The press tent was indeed a tent and open at two sides to catch the breezes,” Jenkins said in 2018 of the first time he reported from Augusta National. “Table-model typewriters were provided, but you brought along your own portable in case the one at your assigned seat wasn’t worth the struggle. Light bulbs dangled from the ceiling above. A crowded row of Western Union operators was on hand to send your stories, often turning them into puzzles in their haste. You kept a carbon copy to use when calling the office to clean things up. Almost everybody smoked every waking moment.”

So began a remarkable streak of Masters coverage by Jenkins, who attended each year through 2018, a run of 68 consecutive Tournaments by one of the most influential sports journalists of all time, whose insight and wit illuminated golf for seven decades.

Chronicling Hogan’s 1951 victory would be the first of 231 major-championship assignments for Jenkins – he also spectated at the 1941 U.S. Open as a 12-year-old – as he covered 62 U.S. Opens, 56 PGA Championships and 45 Open Championships in addition to his extensive Masters reportage.

Jenkins, who was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2012, died March 7 at the age of 90. Mentally sharp but physically frail – in recent years the Club gave him a preferred parking spot to spare him a long walk into the Press Building – he had confided to friends last spring that it would be his last visit to one of his favorite spots.

“He loved everything about the place,” said Golf Digest executive editor Mike O’Malley, a colleague and friend of Jenkins’ since 1996. “He was always genuinely excited about what would happen every year. He couldn’t wait to get to Augusta.”

After 10 years of covering the Masters for The Press, Jenkins put in two years for the Dallas Times-Herald before coming for 22 years (1963-84) as a Sports Illustrated writer. Some of his best early magazine work was collected in the 1970 anthology “The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate,” the title borrowed from a phrase used by Masters co-Founder Bobby Jones.

In his Sports Illustrated account of the epic 1975 Masters, won by Nicklaus in a taut battle with Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller, Jenkins employed a line that would become symbolic with final-round drama at Augusta National. “There is an old saying that the real Masters doesn’t begin until the back nine on Sunday,” he wrote, “and it continues to be true.”

Jenkins started writing for Golf Digest in 1985, filing 1,500- to 2,000-word essays for the monthly publication from the majors, including the Masters. He swapped the stories for tweets in 2009, but the “Ancient Twitterer” kept his style. “He wasn’t just funny,” O’Malley said. “He was informative. Jenkins wrote of surprise 2016 Masters Champion Danny Willett that he looked ‘like a guy who could have driven the getaway car for Bonnie and Clyde.’ ”

“I like it,” Jenkins said of Twitter. “Why? Quite often you can say things that would never fit the theme of a story. You’re forced to spit it out quickly, trust your first impressions, and make a point precisely.

Away from the course, there was a traditional Tuesday night dinner with friends at a Mexican restaurant in Augusta to kick off another Masters week. Jenkins enjoyed the camaraderie – and the food – of the Golf Digest rental home. “The key to any Masters house was the ham,” O’Malley said. “If I didn’t get the honey-baked ham for the house, there would have been hell to pay. Everybody tired of it after a day or so, but not Dan.”

This will be a different kind of Masters, the first one without Jenkins since 1950.

“Jack and Gary start the Tournament with their tee shots, but for the press a big part of Thursday was seeing Dan come in and take a seat on Thursday,” said Associated Press golf writer Doug Ferguson. “That’s when you knew the Masters had begun.”