THE INSIDE TRACK : THE HOT CORNER : 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: “Sports--An Illustrated History.”

Author: David G. McComb.

Publisher: Oxford University Press.

Price: $25.

This is a good read until halftime, then the book tails off into a nothing-new-here recap of major sports events in the 20th century.

Yes, we know terrorists murdered athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

Yes, we know Jim Thorpe had to give up his 1912 Olympic medals.

Yes, we know James Naismith invented basketball.

But in the first half, McComb presents a tightly crafted look at sport’s ancient roots--the Greek, Roman and later European and native American games and activities that gave us what so many cherish today.

And he examines some activities that disappeared along the way. Chariot racing was so popular, McComb writes, that it outlasted the Roman Empire by 500 years.

He writes of Rome at its height, with five amphitheaters and two large stadiums, of crowds of 200,000 watching bloody six- and 10-horse team races.

He takes you back to 23 BC, when sumo wrestling began in Japan.

Other nuggets:

* Algonquin and Iroquois tribesmen of North America played a stick-and-deerskin ball game called “baggataway.” French Jesuits supposedly called it “lacrosse.”

* In the latter years of the Middle Ages, the Germans and Dutch played a game called “kegels,” in which wooden balls were used to knock over wooden cones. Its descendant: bowling.

* Stoolball was an early 1800s game featuring English milkmaids throwing balls to knock over three-legged milking stools. McComb says it was the forerunner of both cricket and baseball, but fails to explain its link to baseball. Most historians call baseball an invention of Civil War soldiers.

* Tennis evolved from a handball-like game played in monastery courtyards by French monks, who in the 15th century added rackets to a game they called tenez.

* Golf emerged in Scotland in the 1700s, upper-class gentlemen using little leather balls stuffed with boiled feathers, and clubs fashioned from bent thorn tree branches.