A consumer's guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it's in play here.

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

By MIKE PENNER

Dec. 11, 1997 12 AM PT

What: “Knee High and Livin’ Large:

The World According to Me

(Li’l Penny Hardaway with Stacy Wall).”

Price: $14.00 (Crown Publishers).

If ghost-writers are merely puppets for the celebrities whose stories they are paid to tell, how far down the literary food chain does the ghost-writer for a puppet rate?

It’s a lousy assignment, any way you slice it, but Nike, determined to wring every cent out of its Li’l Penny commercial franchise, has enlisted one Stacy Wall to create a fake history and fake memoirs for its pint-sized plastic pitchman.

And then charge 1,400 not-so-li’l pennies for it.

Well, there’s a sucker born every minute, and most of them already wear Nikes, so maybe there’s an audience for side-splitting photos of Li’l Penny walking his pet dog Choppy--the gag: Look, Choppy is almost as big as Li’l Penny!--and such raise-the-roof witticisms as “Tyra and I hit it off immediately, and everyone could sense the special on-screen chemistry between us. I really do not want to provide any more intimate details of our special moments in my book. I will save that for my Barbara Walters interview.”

The real Penny Hardaway plays along with the shtick, writing a short (of course) foreword--unless it was ghost-written--that candidly, and rather wisely, admits, “I don’t want to read [this] book.”

(Which brings up a nagging, disturbing point about the Li’l Penny phenomenon: Is Anfernee Hardaway really so uninteresting, so lacking in charisma that Nike had to invent a miniature alter ego--voiced by comedian Chris Rock--just to make sure Penny sold some shoes?

Top three reasons not to buy Li’l Penny’s book:

3. It isn’t funny.

2. Rock happens to be very funny, but, evidently, decided to sit this project out.

1. If Nike really needs 14 more of your dollars, why doesn’t it just raise the price of its sneakers to an outrageous sum? Oh, right. Did that already.