Life Lived on Flip Side of Sports Page

Dan Jenkins has been among America’s best and funniest sportswriters for more than six decades, writing for Sports Illustrated and then Golf Digest. But he’s best known to many as the author of “Semi-Tough” (1972), a shaggy novel about professional football that became a movie starring Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson.

One of the many good things in Mr. Jenkins’s new book, “His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir,” is the story of how that novel came to be written and published. He had the title first. “Growing up in Texas,” he writes, “I’d spent a lifetime listening to guys say, ‘I’m semi-tired ... I’m semi-hungry ... I’m semi-horny ... He’s a semi-sorry excuse for a football player.’ ”

Actually writing the thing came pretty easily. “I borrowed or stole lines,” Mr. Jenkins admits, from football players who were his friends: men like Don Meredith, Bubba Smith, Billy Kilmer and Frank Gifford.

Selling it turned out to be oddly easy, too. One night in P. J. Clarke’s, the Manhattan bar and restaurant, Mr. Jenkins ran into another Southerner, Willie Morris, then the editor of Harper’s Magazine. When Morris heard Mr. Jenkins’s proposed title, he perked up and said: “ ‘Semi-Tough?’ I’d buy a novel called ‘Semi-Tough’ if there was nothing in it but blank pages.” Morris introduced Mr. Jenkins to the man who would edit his novel.

“Semi-Tough” was good to Mr. Jenkins. It was a best seller before it was a hit movie, and it allowed him to buy a 16th-floor penthouse on Park Avenue, an oceanfront vacation house on Kauai and to send his children to fancy private schools. It might have made him even more money, he says, but the film didn’t perform overseas. As a Hollywood mogul told Mr. Jenkins, “Football don’t do foreign.”

I woke up with a smile on my face every morning during the two or three days I spent reading “His Ownself.” It’s a casual and sly sportswriter’s memoir, albeit with a few egregious missteps that I’ll get to, one of those books that reminds you that good stories happen only to people who can tell them.

Mr. Jenkins has had, in his recounting, a busy, lucky and friend-filled life. If he tends to boil everything and everyone down to an anecdote, as if he were preparing to be the keynote speaker at the Great Sports Banquet in the Sky, well, at 84, he’s allowed. And his material isn’t bad at all.

Mr. Jenkins, born in 1929, grew up in Fort Worth. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was mostly raised by relatives. It was a happy childhood, though. Movies made him want to be a journalist. “I was more impressed with wisecracking newspaper people on the screen,” he comments, “than I was with swashbuckling sword fighters.”

He wrote about sports in high school and college, and felt he had life licked even before Sports Illustrated came calling. “I was 26 and a sports editor and writing a daily column with my picture in it,” he says.

Mr. Jenkins has a gift for summing up a personality in a few comic strokes. His mother, whom he liked but who lacked the maternal instinct, “invented the migraine headache.” Describing a high school friend, Dick Growald, who later became a correspondent for United Press, he says: “He grew a big black mustache and once lost 50 pounds on a six-week diet of black coffee and Anacin.”

When Mr. Jenkins wasn’t covering college football games or golf tournaments, he spent most of his time drinking and smoking in what he calls “convivial bars,” swapping stories with colleagues. “I could sit in comfort and eventually reach for a cheese stick or a deviled egg,” he says. “Dinner at last.”

Mr. Jenkins got to know almost everyone who mattered in sports, from Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer to Bear Bryant and Howard Cosell, but most of his best stories are about journalists and the writing life.

He remembers the editor who told him, “See how many paragraphs you can go before you put the score in.” He recalls a “cocktail-motivated routine” he had with another Sports Illustrated writer, Roy Blount Jr., about how to respond to people who say, “I saw your book.” Part of this routine went — and I recommend these lines to writers everywhere — “You saw my book? What was it doing?”

Mr. Jenkins’s old-school vibe can verge on cranky geezer vibe. Music these days sounds to him like “dueling leaf blowers.” Discussing how actors were better in the old days, he cracks, absurdly if amusingly: “In the 1930s, Joaquin Phoenix wouldn’t get the girl, he’d get the luggage.”

He is brutal on Tiger Woods, whom he found detached and humorless, and on pro football, which he finds too corporate. It’s also too dumb: “If you piled up the number of college degrees among pro fans in the entire country, it wouldn’t reach the roof of a Walgreens.”

With pro football, you’re basically cheering for owners and accountants, he observes. With college, you’re “cheering for the campus, the drag, the old school colors, the memories.”

Mr. Jenkins is among those writers — P. J. O’Rourke is another — who combine an anarchic prose style and a sometimes colorful personal life with conservative politics. He’s been friends for many years with George H. W. Bush, calls Fox News “the only news program network that doesn’t seem to hate America” and is a committed loather of political correctness.

His anti-P.C. campaign is where his geezer routine crosses over into something worse. On Twitter in 2010, writing about the Masters Golf Tournament, he made a racist joke that got him into trouble: “Y. E. Yang is only three shots off the lead. I think we got takeout from him last night.”

Mr. Jenkins’s memoir would have been a good place to apologize, so we could all move on, but he doesn’t. Instead, he doubles down, printing several similarly derogatory and sophomoric Asian jokes. Now this writer is going to be partly remembered for this stuff, which is a shame.

One reason it’s a shame is that, in the end, one of the best things about “His Ownself” is how generous its author is. Mr. Jenkins made friends, and kept them, from every era in his life, and he remembers many of them here. He stops to praise his favorite waitresses, to list the books and movies he loves, and to recall those who wrote him thank you notes.

He ends his book by mentioning some of his favorite young sportswriters, and quoting their work at relative length. These include his daughter, Sally Jenkins, a columnist for The Washington Post. But they also include writers from Deadspin, ESPN.com, Yahoo.com and Golf World.

That’s a menschy thing to do. It’s so old school it feels new.