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What: “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel”

Where: HBO, tonight, 10

Fran Tarkenton, 60, as shown in this edition of “Real Sports,” is still scrambling. However, it takes HBO and correspondent Frank Deford awhile to get to the meat of the story.

After a good deal of time is devoted to Tarkenton’s playing days and his stints on “Monday Night Football” and “That’s Incredible,” a darker side of the former Minnesota Viking and New York Giant quarterback is brought out.

Last September, amid accusations of fraud, Tarkenton, who now lives in Atlanta, agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission $154,000 in fines without admitting or denying any wrongdoing.

Irwin Jacobs, a former friend and business associate who along with a few others invested $15 million in one of Tarkenton’s dot-com business ventures, Knowledge Ware, Inc., believes he should have done jail time.

“Here is a guy who actually lied and cheated openly. He is one hell of a scrambler,” Jacobs says. “I mean the guy can scramble away from the government, who never lets anybody get away with his kind of stuff. It blew me away.”

Responding to Jacobs’ charges of lying and cheating, Tarkenton says, “I don’t do name-calling, but we didn’t, and I didn’t. Irwin Jacobs, in fact, made a whole lot of money on Fran Tarkenton. Whole lot of money, before then and after then.”

The second segment deals with NFL injuries and focuses on guard Mark Schlereth of the Denver Broncos, who has had 28 surgeries; former Raider center Jim Otto, who has had 40; and second-year Bronco guard Lennie Friedman.

The third segment is on Mallory Cole, a junior golfer from Tampa, Fla., who has had great success despite suffering from cystic fibrosis and other ailments that come with the disease.

As for the final segment, if you’ve ever wondered about the thinking of a stalker, an interview Bernard Goldberg does with Dubravko Rajcevic, 45, of Croatia, will provide some insight. Rajcevic has been in a Miami jail for more than 10 months after being arrested for stalking tennis’ Martina Hingis. Rajcevic, who is convinced that someday he and Hingis will get together, continually says, “I have done nothing wrong.”