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.

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.

By EARL GUSTKEY

Jan. 18, 1999 12 AM PT

What: “The World According to Dean.”

Author: Barry Jacobs.

Publisher: Total Sports.

Price: $11.95.

What’s that? You say you were transferred to the West Coast from North Carolina and can’t find any reading on Tar Heel basketball?

This one’s for you.

Just about everything Dean Smith has said about anything is here. No plot points to grapple with, just a couple hundred quotes, strung together in a book by Jacobs, who covers the Atlantic Coast Conference for the New York Times.

Considerable tedium here, but there are these three nuggets:

* In a foreword, Kansas Coach and ex-Smith assistant Roy Williams said this about Michael Jordan’s years with Smith: “I felt he [Smith] was tougher on Michael Jordan than on any other player we ever had.”

* Smith, on the recruiting of Jordan: “. . .the only other school that seemed to interest him was UCLA, but they never offered him a scholarship.”

* Smith, on being hanged in effigy in 1965: “I’m just glad they settled for hanging a dummy and not the real thing.”