HOT CORNER

What: “Confession of the World’s Greatest Gate-Crasher: Dion Rich.”

Author: Charlie Jones.

Publisher: Seven Locks Press, Santa Ana.

Price: $15.95.

Dion Rich, 73, of San Diego doesn’t claim to be “normal.” Weird is what he is. He also comes across in this 202-page paperback as self-absorbed and a little unscrupulous.

Rich, who claims to have had financial success in real estate, has had a near lifelong avocation of sneaking into major sporting events, the Academy Awards and the like.

Besides tales of Rich’s many adventures, the book contains 130 back-and-white, sometimes grainy pictures of Rich with a variety of celebrities.

Rich seems to have a certain charm that enables him to win people over.

Somehow he won over longtime and respected network sportscaster Charlie Jones of La Jolla to write his story.

But Jones is not the first. There have been many stories about Rich, including one by Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated that seemed to give Rich the national attention he craves.

Reilly’s story appeared in his Sports Illustrated column after the 2002 Super Bowl in New Orleans. It took Rich six minutes to sneak into the Superdome. But because of Reilly’s column, coupled with the intense security measures since 9/11, Rich’s gig may be up.

He was tailed by the Secret Service at the 2002 Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City, and he had to buy a ticket to this year’s Super Bowl in San Diego.

However, he did enough wheeling and dealing that the ticket did not cost him any money, a feat that made him proud.

So he claims that his streak of sneaking into every Super Bowl except the third one -- he was on a skiing trip -- is intact.

Rich reveals some of his gate-crashing secrets -- sneaking past unsuspecting ticket takers, finding open doors in remote locations, using phony credentials.

He also explains how he tries to blend in, enabling him to go undetected. He sometimes ends up on the field and in the locker rooms, and he has the pictures to prove it.

At the end of the book, he offers advice to wannabe gate-crashers. Maybe this is the best advice: “Gate-crashing is not for everyone.”