When he began his career at the Minneapolis Tribune in 1965, Ira Berkow’s Baseball Writers of America Association membership number was around 800. Now it’s 18, which means only 17 other baseball writers have been pounding the keyboard longer.

Eighteen is also chai — “life” in Hebrew — which seems appropriate since the Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist for The New York Times recently published his memoirs, Full Swing: Hits, Runs and Errors in a Writer’s Life (Ivan R. Dee).

“My role is trying to make sense of the sports world,” Berkow said in an interview with NJ Jewish News. “I’ve always thought that writing a column should be the way Red Smith did it. Sometimes there’s the light touch, the funny story. Sometimes it’s just holding up the mirror to the nature of sports.”

Holding that mirror earned Berkow his Pulitzer in 2001 for national sports reporting for The Minority Quarterback, an essay about the difficulties faced by a white football player at an African-American college and the only sports entry in the Times’ series How Race Is Lived in America.

Berkow loves to refer to Smith, a mentor and fellow Times columnist and Pulitzer winner, when discussing his career. While on the staff of the student newspaper at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Berkow, who turned 67 on Jan. 7, made the audacious move of sending some of his work to Smith — considered the dean of American sportswriting — and asking for feedback, which was generously given. Thus began a long and mutually respectful relationship. When Smith died in 1982, Berkow wrote a front-page obituary for the Times and, subsequently, a biography about his friend.

Among his 17 books, Berkow, who was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2006, has collaborated on two projects with Jewish celebrities: Hank Greenberg, baseball’s first Jewish superstar, in Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life, and Jackie Mason’s How To Talk Jewish. He also wrote about his childhood neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side in Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar.

“I had a very culturally Jewish upbringing,” he said. “I was bar mitzva’d under duress. I went to Hebrew school until I was 11 or 12, until I found sports. I thought it wasn’t necessary to continue with my Hebrew studies, but my parents felt otherwise.”

When Berkow was 16, he needed his birth certificate to participate in a baseball competition. His father extracted it from the family safe: “Ira Harvey Berkovitz,” it read. The teenager couldn’t understand the error, but his father explained that he had shortened the family name to Berkow “for business reasons.” Even Berkovitz wasn’t the original name; that had been changed from Bercovici (pronounced ber-ko-VEECH) when his Romanian grandparents arrived at Ellis Island.

When an ailing Greenberg decided he wanted to write his autobiography, he had his son, Steve, contact Berkow. “Actually it came down to a choice between James Michener and me, but he was busy that week,” said Berkow, who originally turned down the proposal. “I knew Greenberg. He was Jewish; I’m Jewish. He was important in my growing up as a legend. Out of tribal loyalties, I felt I ought to do it if they wanted me to.” In poor health, Greenberg was unable to meet with Berkow, who gave him a list of questions; Steve Greenberg told him working on the project prolonged his father’s life. The book, which Berkow supplemented with interviews from family, friends, and ballplayers, became the basis of the award-winning documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.

Berkow acknowledged the impact high salaries for athletes have had on his profession. “You don’t take them out to dinner anymore. Sometimes you [would] have a drink or a meal and guys can open up in a way they can’t do sitting in a locker room with a television blaring.”

Technology has also changed the relationships. “The athletes would rather be on TV and answer puff questions than try to deal with someone who’s going to be writing in the newspapers.”

In the end, however, “if you ask good questions, you often will get decent answers.”

In addition to older readers, Berkow thought Full Swing would be of interest to younger people, who, like him, don’t know what they’re going to do with their lives. “I hate to say I was a screw-up in high school, because most of us [were]; we didn’t pay attention.” His advice? “Find something you like and go after it with all your heart.”

With Full Swing on the shelf, Berkow said, “I’m not going to be a daily newspaperman all my life; that’s going to come to an end in the near future…. I don’t have forever to do the other things,” which include working on the book for a musical. “As I get older, the energy is not there to split the time between the newspaper and the other things.”

Looking back on a career than spans almost a half-century, Berkow mused, “It all went pretty fast. It scares me.”

Ira Berkow will join three other authors at a book and author event at Congregation Neve Shalom in Metuchen on Sunday, Jan. 21, at 10 a.m. For information or call 732-548-2238, ext. 14.