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What: “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel”

Where: HBO, tonight, 10

One of the segments on this edition of “Real Sports” deals with dodge ball, the schoolyard game that has been around for generations. “Real Sports” is known for tackling controversial topics, so one might wonder: Why dodge ball?

It’s no joke, even though the segment opens with Adam Sandler, as overgrown kid Billy Madison, playing dodge ball in the movie “Billy Madison.” Although Bernard Goldberg’s report might cause some chuckles along the way, the people he interviews are very serious, and very passionate.

There are those who believe the game, in which the object is to hit other kids with a rubber ball, teaches excessive violence and should be banned. And there are those who believe such a ban would result in an over-sensitized world where kids aren’t allowed to be kids.

Neil Williams, a physical education scholar from Eastern Connecticut State, is a proponent of banning the game. “Dodge ball is a game that brings out the worst in kids,” he tells Goldberg. “It eliminates kids from games. Kids get hit in the head. Kids are human targets. It’s just not a game that has values that we should be teaching our children.”

Matt Labash, a writer for the Weekly Standard, bashes such thinking. “It’s the wussification of America,” he calls it.

Goldberg asks, “You think we’re getting soft?”

Labash: “It seems like we are more and more raising our kids like little veal chops, tenderized little medallions that we need to guard, we need to sort of plane all the edges off of life.”

Goldberg: “What does that tell you about America?”

Labash: “It tells me that we’re prepared to mollycoddle our children to any extent. Anything to eliminate the possibility of pain, degradation, humiliation, second-place finishes, we’ll do it.”

Another one of the four segments on this edition of “Real Sports” is about a junior high school basketball coach in Alexandria, La. The school has a winning tradition, but what sets this coach apart is that he is also the school janitor who has a ninth-grade education. It’s quite a story.