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: “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel�

Where: HBO, tonight, 10

Peyton Manning is featured in this edition of HBO’s magazine show. We all know about Manning, his success and his family roots.

Featured in another segment is Ronald Jean, a 5-foot-5, 187-pound running back for Lehigh. Few outside Bethlehem, Pa., where Lehigh is located, know much about Jean. But his story will move you to tears.

Jean would have pro scouts drooling if he were taller. He reportedly has been clocked at 4.31 for the 40 and has bench-pressed 435 pounds. He led Lehigh to the Division I-AA playoffs, where it lost to Hofstra in the first round and finished with a 10-2 record.

But numbers aren’t what Jean’s story is about. It’s about surviving--and succeeding--against all odds.

Jean shows reporter Sonja Steptoe a scar on his stomach. It’s from when his mother slashed him with a knife when he was 13. She was on drugs at the time. It was his mother’s last act of abuse. Shortly after that, Jean was at a bus station in West Palm Beach, Fla., with his mother and 3-year-old sister, headed for New York. Jean said he wasn’t going. So his mother, an immigrant from the Bahamas, left him there, never to be heard from again.

He waited two hours in the bus station before calling the police. HBO tracked down West Palm Beach police captain Laurie Van Deusen, who took the call. She said it was the damnedest case she’d ever handled.

Jean was raised in a series of foster homes. Today he considers one of those foster parents, Jaqueline La Tailade, his mother. He was later taken in by a West Palm Beach family.

His coach at Lehigh, Kevin Higgins, describes Jean this way: “He’s a role model. He’s everything you’d want in a player. He’s been a success in the classroom, he’s been a tremendous success on the football field.�

Jean will graduate in June with a degree in psychology.

Steptoe asks him if he will ever look for his mother.

“I don’t know,� he says. “I’ll forgive her for what she did, but it’s not something that you’re going get over.�

Another story on tonight’s “Real Sports� is about how trading card companies take advantage of youngsters by getting them to buy packs of cards with the hope of finding a “chase card�--a rarity that could be worth hundreds of dollars.

The final story is on concussions in the NFL.

Other play dates are Thursday, 6 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.; Dec. 20, 8 p.m.; Dec. 22, 5 p.m., and Dec. 26, 9:15 a.m.