Good writing about great riding in racing star Malcolm Smith’s autobiography, ‘Malcolm!’

There is no greater name in American off-road racing than Malcolm Smith. The Californian has ridden and driven longer and harder and won more dirt and desert races than anyone alive.

And it’s hard to believe, reading his newly published autobiography, co-written with respected motorcycle journalist Mitch Boehm, that he’s alive at all. The lavish coffee-table book (400 pages, published by Malcolm Smith Motorsports and beautifully illustrated with period photographs) is a chronicle of pain, near-death and destruction.

Born on British Columbia’s tiny Salt Spring Island in 1941 to a schoolteacher mother and a dog-sledding, gold-prospecting father, the skinny, gangly Smith grew up fishing, hiking and exploring the mountains around San Bernardino. By junior high, he was riding motorcycles, and by high school, he was racing them, graduating from a Triumph Cub to a Matchless 500 to the Husqvarna motocrossers on which he’d make history — and doing what dirt bike riders do: crashing.

“I crashed eight or 10 times in that 10-mile race,” Smith writes of one event. “I would get up, come from last, catch the leaders, crash again and then go through the whole routine again. But I managed to finish second overall.”

At 18, he shattered his leg so thoroughly that amputation was thought the only treatment. (His mother, horrified, had him pulled from that hospital and sent to another.) He spent almost a year in bed and was told he’d never ride again.

But soon he was back in the saddle. Over the next couple of decades, he raced, crashed, was hospitalized and returned to racing — and kept winning — at local TT tracks like Ascot and Elsinore, and in Europe in the International Six Day Trials event, at that time the world’s most brutal test of man and machine.

Smith was almost 30, married and a father and running his own motorcycle shop, when a customer named Bruce Brown said he was thinking of doing a motorcycle movie similar to his successful surfing film “Endless Summer.” He wanted to pair Smith with Steve McQueen and some other riders. (Smith, busy selling motorcycles, told Brown to find someone else, but later changed his mind.) The resulting documentary, “On Any Sunday,” earned millions and turned Smith into motorcycling’s most famous face.

The racing continued. Smith took checkered flags at the Mint 400, the Baja 500, the Mexican 1000, the legendary Paris-Dakar Rally and countless other desert marathons.

When more injuries made long-distance dirt racing impossible, Smith gave up motorcycles and took up dune buggies. He would go on to take every important off-road four-wheel trophy.

Smith was, among other things, a genius improviser — draining the oil out of his forks to lubricate a dry crankcase, climbing down a ladder into a Mexican well to soak away a case of heat stroke in order to finish a race, and once flagging down a motorist in a VW, then buying and removing his engine in order to replace the motor he’d blown while trying to complete a desert race. (He was so far ahead that he had time to replace the old motor with the new one, by the side of the road, and still take first place.) As a teenager, he wore a wheelbarrow innertube inside his pants after scraping all the skin off his backside crashing out of a wheelie. The man would do anything to keep going.)

Though much his junior, I raced and rode a lot of the same tracks, some of them at the same time, as Smith and McQueen. (My crowning moment: McQueen tapped the back of my helmet and said, “Nice racing, kid,” after I’d dusted him during practice laps at Indian Dunes.) But I learned an enormous amount about the period and the players and the habits of very successful racers.

The “Harley-Davidson” dirt bike Mert Lawwill rode in “On Any Sunday” was a rebadged Greeves desert bike. I didn’t know that. Off-road four-wheelers routinely are so sickened by the dust and thrashing about that they throw up inside their helmets — shortly after the starts of their 12-hour driving runs. I didn’t want to know that.

Smith, now 74, is no longer racing. But he hasn’t left the scene. He will travel to South America for the 2016 Dakar Rally Raid, where his son Alexander, now about the age Malcolm was when he made “On Any Sunday,” makes his first attempt at the legendary, dangerous off-road race. Having already taken gold in the Baja 1000 that his father won six times, Alexander will have in his pit crew perhaps the most knowledgeable off-road racer alive.

Readers get an inside look at the man, who in these pages — as in “On Any Sunday” — emerges as a good-humored, humble sports hero, at heart an athlete who rode and raced for nothing but the love of it, and left the sport the better for it.

Twitter: @misterfleming