One of the greatest golf writers ever, Dan Jenkins, has passed away at the age of 89.
Jenkins covered over 230 major championships. His first was the 1951 U.S. Open.
Jenkins started his career at the Fort Worth Press before moving on to Sports Illustrated and later Golf Digest where he would finish his career. He’s written many books and is one of the most respected golf writers to ever cover the sport.
In 2011, Jenkins was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, at which time he said, “There aren’t many writers in here. It’s a small group, and I’m pleased to be a part of it. I’d follow Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson anywhere.”
Both Hogan and Nelson are Fort Worth natives and Jenkins hitched his wagon to their careers and became just as much of a legend in golf as they were.
I just figured out that I've spent almost five years of my life just covering majors. If you count other tournaments, that's another five or six years. Then there's the football and the ski racing. Most of the time, it never felt like work. Guess what: I'd have paid them to do it
— Dan Jenkins (@danjenkinsgd) August 10, 2018
One of my favorite things written by Jenkins was his final book that was released in August of 2018, “Sports Makes You Type Faster: The Entire World of Sports by One of America’s Most Famous Sportswriters.”
Here is a small excerpt via one of his posts on Golf Digest:
So this sportswriter walks into a press room …
That sounds like the start of a joke, right? But it isn’t. At this writing, it has been my job to spend one year and four months of my life in Augusta, Ga., covering the Masters for 68 consecutive years.
That’s a Masters record for journalists that stretches from the Augusta National veranda to a public course in Istanbul. Each day I go to the mailbox to see if the prize money has arrived yet. No luck so far.
But it’s been a great gig.
I’d say it’s been a great gig.
Guys like us here at The Stiff Shaft can only imagine the things he’s seen in his career. We can only aspire to be like him knowing that we will never get the chance to cover 230+ major championships in our lifetimes.
“To justify my inclusion in this terrific society,” he said of his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame, “I went back and looked at everybody who’s in it and did some statistics. It turns out that I have known 95 of these people when they were living. I’ve written stories about 73 of them. I’ve had cocktails and drinks with 47 of them, and I played golf with 24 of them. So I want somebody else to try and go up against that record.”
That’s definitely not going to happen.