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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.

What: “The Tao of Sports” by Bob Mitchell.

Price: $11.95 (Frog Ltd. Books)

Lao-Tzu, author of the original “Tao Te Ching [The Book of The Way],” did his writing during the Golden Age of Chinese philosophy, about 25 centuries before the Insolent Age of Rodman, Belle and Irvin.

Bob Mitchell, being not quite so fortunate, was moved to create a modern-day sports application of the “Tao Te Ching,” he writes, “as an antidote to all the recent attention being showered on the underbelly of sports [grandstanding, violence, incivility, greed].”

The resulting “Tao of Sports” is part spinoff and part sendup of Lao-Tzu’s famous work, organized in the same format as the original, with 81 short, simply written chapters bearing such headings as “Patience,” “Serenity,” “Mystery” and “Harmony.”

Here “The Way” is replaced by “The Game,” as in:

“The Game gives, the Game takes away. You try with all your might without results; then you just hang on for the ride, and the magic happens. Opposites coexist: glory and humility, urgency and patience, power and softness, pain and joy. For each winner, there’s a loser; for each loser, a winner.”

This, in Taoism, is known as the principle of the yin and yang.

Or, in the National League, the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies.

Mitchell’s book is not an altogether faithful reworking of the “Tao”--chances are, Lao-Tzu would never have addressed the concept of “Awe” as “How awe-inspiring are the spectacular achievements of the human species! The great pyramids, Amiens Cathedral, the Sistine Ceiling, ‘King Lear,’ Beethoven’s Ninth! To say nothing of Wilt’s 100, Joe’s 56, Jack’s 20, Mark’s 7, Rod’s 2!”

Clever and good-humored, “The Tao of Sports” preaches a Zen approach to athletic achievement that Jimmy Johnson ought to read at once but might never comprehend:

“Would you rather win and stay the same than lose and grow? Would you rather crush a weak opponent than learn from losing to a strong one? . . . How to correct errors, how to learn from defeat, how to know weaknesses for the next time--that is the great challenge.”

Johnson, no doubt, would answer the first two questions “Yep!” and “Damn right!” and correct any errors by cutting everybody who committed them.