Peter Gent, a receiver for the Dallas Cowboys of the 1960s whose best-selling novel “North Dallas Forty” portrayed professional football as a dehumanizing business that drove pain-racked players to drug and alcohol abuse, died Friday in Bangor, Mich. He was 69.

The cause was complications of pulmonary disease, according to the D.L. Miller Funeral Home of Bangor.

Gent never played college football — he was a basketball star at Michigan State — and he caught only four touchdown passes in five seasons with the Cowboys.

But he achieved an enduring niche as a writer, most notably with “North Dallas Forty,” his first novel, published in 1973. He contributed to the screenplay for the 1979 movie of the same title in which Nick Nolte played a role drawing partly on Gent’s career.

“North Dallas Forty” was among the early books providing unsettling views of pro athletics that went beyond the game details on the sports pages.

America’s Team

Telling of a team he called the North Dallas Bulls, Gent included characters based in part on his wise-cracking teammate and buddy, quarterback Don Meredith, and on coach Tom Landry, who went on to build the Cowboys into the powerhouse known as America’s Team.

The novel told of players who used recreational drugs and alcohol to cope with physical pain and the emotional toll brought by the fear of losing their jobs.

Coaches and management were portrayed as callous figures who viewed players as disposable parts and allowed team doctors to shoot them up with painkillers that masked their injuries.

‘A total lie’

Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ president and general manager, was quoted by The Washington Post at the time as calling Gent’s portrayals “a total lie” that “indicted the whole NFL and the Dallas Cowboy organization.”

But in his review for The New York Times, sportswriter Dick Schaap wrote that “Gent builds a strong case against professional football” and “balances shock with humor, irony with warmth, detail with insight, and ends up with a book that easily transcends its subject matter.”

At 6 feet 4 inches and 205 pounds or so, he was a forward-center for Michigan State and was drafted by the Baltimore Bullets of the National Basketball Association in 1964 after averaging 21 points a game as a senior. But he was only a 14th-round selection. He tried out instead for the Cowboys, who thought he had good hands.

His best year was 1966, when he caught 27 passes for 474 yards, but he was often injured.

Gent planned to be an advertising copywriter, but put that career aside with the success of “North Dallas Forty.” He wrote several other novels focusing on the football world, and a memoir, “The Last Magic Summer,” in which he told of reconnecting with his son, Carter, as both recovered from the emotional toll of his divorce and a custody battle.