Dwight Clark shopped for a kitchen table, slept in and missed his wake-up call, and ate a hotel shrimp cocktail (risky move) just three days before Super Bowl XVI.

We know these mundane details about the San Francisco 49ers legend because of “Dwight Clark’s Super Bowl Diary,” a six-part feature that ran in The San Francisco Chronicle the week before the team won its first Super Bowl championship.

It was a fun, if a bit hokey, feature when it ran between Jan. 16 and Jan. 25, 1982, before the victory over the Cincinnati Bengals that began the 49ers championship dynasty. But 38 years later, it’s a detailed, lovely and sometimes unintentionally hilarious historic document.

It also retains Clark’s charm, even if the column was dictated by the player and actually written on The Chronicle’s sports desk. (Our source, former Chronicle sports editor Dan McGrath, credits longtime NFL writer and columnist Ira Miller. “The feeling in the office was it was so bad it was good,” McGrath said this week.) Clark died in 2018, after an ALS diagnosis.

With the team hoping for its sixth Super Bowl win on Sunday, Feb. 2, we read the entire “Dwight Clark’s Super Bowl Diary.” Here’s what we learned:

Super Bowl XVI was basically one big “Seinfeld” episode

“Dwight Clark’s Super Bowl Diary” was, indeed, a football column about nothing. More than seven years before Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David debuted their hit sitcom “Seinfeld,” the 49ers’ 10th round pick out of Clemson perfected the form.

Pretty much every Clark paragraph reads like a pitch for the hit comedy. But his first day at his Pontiac, Mich., hotel is the most on the mark:

“I was supposed to get a wake-up call at 8:30 a.m. A little before ten, I heard (49er cornerback) Eric Wright yelling through the door, ‘Get up, Shu, get up!’” Clark said. “Shu is my roommate, wide receiver Mike Shumann. For many reasons, we didn’t get our call, so my first Super Bowl week began with us both jumping out of our beds and flying downstairs to our 10 o’clock meeting with no breakfast and no shower.”

Clark would report in the next column that he purchased an alarm clock.

The 49ers were not on a regimented diet

While we now live in the age of personal chefs for athletes and performance-based dieting, the 49ers of Super Bowl XVI appeared to be eating like bargain-seeking long-haul truckers.

There are many examples in “Dwight Clark’s Super Bowl Diary” of horrible pre-Super Bowl food choices, but the trip that Clark and Joe Montana took to the Wendy’s fast food chain is the best. Here’s Clark’s description of the scene, after he gorged on a double cheeseburger, a single, fries, a milkshake, and then another single.

“We got really sleepy sitting there eating. I think it was the combinaton of getting up early to do the ‘Today’ show, then practice, then food. We sat there practically nodding off in the booth at the restaurant,” Clark said. “While we were out, we wandered through the shopping mall and I walked into a store and saw they were selling shirts with my number on them. When I first saw it, I felt honored, and then I thought about it, and I couldn’t remember giving anybody authorization to do that.”

Dwight Clark, the team’s star receiver, was also a 49ers season ticket holder

This came up when Clark was short one ticket for family — he had 15 and needed 16 — then got bailed out by winning the Super Bowl ticket lottery. His explanation:

“(Former 49ers player) James Owens and I each bought a season ticket last spring to give to two men from the Atari company we met at a golf tournament,” Clark said. “They gave us each a console and cartridge for video games, so we decided to give them season tickets. But the tickets were in my name, and when the computer picked out the names of the people who could buy Super Bowl tickets, my name came up. Don’t ask me how.”

Bill Walsh allowed some Super Bowl XVI players conjugal visits

Dwight Clark in his Jan. 22, 1982, diary entry:

“I thought Bill (Walsh) made another good move. He’s letting the married guys stay with their wives tonight after the plane comes in,” Clark said. “That ought to help keep everybody relaxed.”

Clark and his girlfriend Shawn Weatherly seemed pretty stressed

At the time of the Super Bowl, Clark had been dating Miss Universe winner Shawn Weatherly for almost four years. There was already a lot of tension in Ira Miller’s pre-diary feature on Clark and Weatherly’s romance, which included this quote from Weatherly about Clark’s sudden media obligations:

“I’m really happy to see this for Dwight. The only thing I resent is a little bit of what he does — and that’s fall asleep as soon as everybody leaves, and I’m ready to talk. ‘What did you do? What happened?’ It’s so funny. I have so many questions that I want to ask him, but just because I don’t have a tape recorder and microphone, he falls asleep on me.”

Clark used the column to apologize to Weatherly repeatedly.

“I need to call Shawn,” Clark stated. “… I was supposed to call her again this morning, but since they didn’t wake me up, I couldn’t.”

(The couple broke up later that summer.)

The Pontiac, Mich., hotel scene was pretty grim

Clark was still on a rookie contract, and did not have a high salary. He wrote about his excitement at the prospect of getting free athletic wear from Super Bowl sponsors, and the time he got to eat prime rib at no cost. (“Guy Benjamin, our backup quarterback, has a card that lets you eat at the restaurant free.”)

Meanwhile, the hotel sounded like a nightmare. In addition to a shared room and no wake-up call, Clark shared this gem:

“We were in a hotel, and people had straight access on the house phones to our rooms,” Clark said. “You couldn’t shut the calls off, and people were calling and asking to come up to the room for an interview.”

Dwight Clark was very tired, but he was still thinking about the fans

If you’re a 49ers fan and lived in the Bay Area long enough, there’s a good chance you have a story about running into Dwight Clark, and Clark being extremely cool. An entire book has been written about Clark’s exceptional relationship with the 49ers faithful.

“Dwight Clark’s Super Bowl Diary” documents Clark at the beginning of this process. Here’s Clark describing his last day in the Bay Area before heading to the Super Bowl, doing some last-minute shopping with Weatherly at a grocery store.

“We were in a hurry, but people kept coming up,” Clark said. “You’ve got to be nice to them and you’ve got to give them autographs when they ask. It’s been 10 years since they had anything to celebrate. I hope we give them something more to celebrate this weekend.”

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub