Semi-Tough

Dan Jenkins

After a knee injury ends Billy Clyde Puckett’s football career, he reinvents himself as a network television sports commentator, carrying his larger-than-life personality into a new arena. Accompanied by his wife, the former Barbara Jane Bookman, and his old friend Shake Tiller, Billy looks back on a lifetime shaped by competition, camaraderie, and the colorful characters of the sporting world. Both hilarious and sentimental, this cantankerous memoir offers an affectionate, irreverent portrait of sports—and of the friendships and experiences that endure long after the final whistle.

Dan Jenkins

A battered former football star reinvents himself as a television sports commentator, trading the playing field for the glossy, absurd world of network executives, celebrity athletes, and professional football politics. As his marriage, career, and access to the social elites of Texas and New York collide, he navigates a year filled with romance, hard drinking, newsroom rivalries, padded expense accounts, and questionable judgment. With the same irreverent energy that made his sports writing famous, the author skewers the NFL, the media, sports celebrity, television culture, and the vanities of 1980s America. Wildly comic and unapologetically profane, the novel is a sharp satire of the institutions and personalities surrounding the national obsession with football.

Dan Jenkins

Former NFL star Billy Clyde Puckett takes on a new challenge when he becomes manager of a Texas football team, where winning on the field may be easier than managing the excesses surrounding it. As his wife pursues a Hollywood career and a flirtatious bartender complicates his already unruly life, Billy Clyde is pulled into a fast-moving world of loyalty, temptation, and larger-than-life personalities. A spirited sequel featuring the irreverent good-ole-boy characters of earlier novels, the book skewers football culture, celebrity, marriage, and Texas bravado with equal gusto. Its humor is broad, sharp, and exuberant, reflecting the author's celebrated sportswriting wit and unmistakable comic voice.