‘You Gotta Play Hurt’ More Than Semi-Funny

So, let me tell you about the new book by Dan Jenkins. It opens with his sportswriter protagonist fantasizing about using the carriage of his manual typewriter to murder the editor who messes with his work. Oh, did I mention this was fiction?

The novel is called, “You Gotta Play Hurt,” from the man who gave you “Semi-Tough,” and I fault the author totally for my recent 10-day stay on the disabled list with busted ribs, sore from laughter. Don’t necessarily go by me, though, because I would read anything this guy writes. For me, Dan Jenkins could make junk mail funny.

We all have our favorite authors. Me, I’m a sucker for Elmore Leonard, Joseph Heller, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Tom Robbins, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Sara Paretsky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joseph Wambaugh and just about anybody named William, including Shakespeare, Faulkner, Styron, Goldman, Kennedy and Cosby. I have this personal theory that anybody named William is a born writer, just as anybody named Marty is a born agent.

Jenkins makes my cut. Countless different days, he made my day with magazine pieces he wrote. His football stories were enlightening and/or nonsensical, his golf stuff nonpareil. He produced many great works of literature, including a daughter who is now one of the best sportswriters working.

I do not know Dan, dammit. He sat 20 feet from me at the British Open in upstate England (a non sequitur I thought he might enjoy), but I preferred not to disturb his thoughts because he probably was thinking up something clever. Mostly, he sat around in the press tent with Jack Whitaker, a couple of real raconteurs, while I fancied myself a fly on the linen, listening.

At least, I have Jenkins in print to keep me company. In the 1970s, he wrote the funniest books ever composed on pro football and pro golf, “Semi-Tough” and “Dead Solid Perfect.” One of them was made into a perfectly cast but perfectly dreadful film. The other presented Randy Quaid, who always makes me smile, as a golfer who gets to play the fringes of Kathryn Harrold and Corinne Bohrer, both of whom make my heart go skippety-skip.

I don’t know if “You Gotta Play Hurt” could be converted to film. Probably, but perhaps certain books, like well enough, should be left alone, e.g. “Catch-22” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” After seeing his first novel transformed from a savage parody of pro football into a sitcom satirical study of self-improvement movements, I’d be half-afraid somebody would turn this one from a story about sportswriting into a docudrama about newspaper people who chop down trees.

Then again, Hollywood has been known to make a good movie about sportswriters from time to time. “The Harder They Fall” and “Woman of the Year” leap to mind. (And OK, I suppose “The Odd Couple.”) But I’m not sure what they would do with this one, the story of a year in the press-box life of one Jim Tom Pinch, that would be true to the flavor of the book, which is raspberry tart.

“The month of May,” Jim Tom (Dan) writes, “is a dull time in sports, as far as I’m concerned, because the only two events of national interest are those where horses and cars do all the work. Think about it. Humans are only subliminally involved at the Kentucky Derby and the Indy 500, and I dare you to try to say subliminally fast if you’ve been drinking.”

Jim Tom is a character out of Jenkins pages of yore, or should you happen to be from Texas, of yorn. All he really craves out of life is a cigarette and a drink and other activities harmful to one’s health. Oh, and he wants his magazine editors to stop tinkering with his sentences, accusing them of being the sort who would have clarified one of Charles Dickens’ leads into: “It was the best of times--and, ironically--the worst of times.”

Jenkins and his imaginary alter egos in all their journalistic journeys generally dote on certain subjects--golf, Ft. Worth, television and chicken-fried steak--as, say, John Irving pretty much restricts himself to wrestling, Vienna and bears. A review disclaimer also must be included at this time that books by Jenkins, if literature be forejudged like cinema, would be rated R, for raunchy.

Doesn’t bother me. Trouble is, it’s not every reader’s cup of tea, although I suspect one of the major groups on Jenkins’ hit list of least-favorite individuals would be tea-drinkers.

After recommending this latest book to friends, not to mention having given considerable thought to contacting Simon & Schuster and offering a suggested jacket blurb, “Laughed Our Guts Out--L.A. Times,” the funniest thing happened. For one thing, when this particular newspaper actually got around to reviewing the new Jenkins, the bottom line was that as books go, this one might make excellent firewood.

Whereupon two of my nearest, dearest men friends called up just to tell me how much they hated it. Whereupon some female friends called up to tell me what a sexist hunk of junk it was. Whereupon a colleague from New York, broadly parodied in the book, volunteered that he, too, had a blurb to propose, that reading this book by Jenkins was “like watching Willie Mays play center field.”

Yeah?

“For the Mets.”

I respectfully beg to differ. No, on second thought, I disrespectfully beg to differ. This book is exactly like most of America’s current best-sellers, the only real difference being that it’s good.