What results is a hyperbolic, first-person report on a world whose lexicon involves all manner of stereotype and slur and whose concerns are more or less confined to food, drink, drugs, money, sex, digestive excretions and football. Often cited as among the funniest sports books ever written, it came in at No. 7 on Sports Illustrated’s 2002 list of the top 100 sports books of all time.

“I loved it,” David Halberstam wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “I read it aloud to my wife, who does not like football one bit, and she loved it. It is outrageous. It mocks contemporary American mores. It mocks Madison Avenue; it mocks racial attitudes; it mocks writers like me; and it even mocks sportswriters for Sports Illustrated like Dan Jenkins.”

“Semi-Tough” was adapted for a 1978 movie that starred Burt Reynolds as Billy Clyde Puckett.

Dan Thomas Jenkins was born in Fort Worth on Dec. 2, 1928, although many sources list the year as 1929. His father, E. T. Jenkins Jr., known as Bud, was a salesman, a gambler and evidently a charmer who left the family when Dan was a toddler, though he showed up now and then to take his son to sporting events.

In a 2014 book, “His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir,” Mr. Jenkins expressed a fondness for his father, as well as for his mother, Catherine (O’Hern) Jenkins, whom he described with arch affection as a self-indulgent character who sold antiques and remodeled houses “and ultimately invented the migraine headache.”

From the age of 2, Mr. Jenkins grew up — contentedly, he wrote, in spite of the Depression — in the home of his father’s parents. He became the first member of the family to go to college, — at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he played on the golf team. One of his early heroes, the golfer Ben Hogan, also lived in Fort Worth, and Hogan became something of a mentor, admired by Mr. Jenkins for his work ethic, perseverance (Hogan returned to championship golf after nearly being killed in a car accident in 1949) and devotion to excellence.

Mr. Jenkins got his first job in journalism in the mid-1950s, at The Fort Worth Press, hired by Blackie Sherrod, a writer and editor who would himself become celebrated in Texas as a Southern Damon Runyon. Mr. Jenkins succeeded Sherrod, whom he cited as an influence, as sports editor before landing at Sports Illustrated.