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What: “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel”

Where: HBO, tonight, 10-11

HBO has again found four interesting topics for its award-winning sports magazine show. The lead story is on Bill Parcells, the New York Jet coach. This would be the weakest of the four stories, particularly for viewers outside New York, but Jim Lampley’s interview saves it.

Lampley sets the tone by referring to Bear Bryant’s comment that a head coach was easy to find; he’s always the meanest guy in the room. Lampley asks Parcells if that is an accurate assessment. “It is at times,” Parcells says.

Lampley points out there is a perception that Parcells plays mind games with players. Parcells says, “I would disagree with that. I don’t sit back and say, ‘Well, I’m going to calculate doing this to this guy and that to that guy.’ ” But when Lampley asks former New York Giant quarterback Phil Simms, who played for Parcells, about his mind games, Simms says, “Oh, I couldn’t name just one. It was something every day.”

Simms says, “You put up with it for one main reason; it’s going to make you win. I’ll never admit it, but that fat SOB was right. Everything he was telling us was right.”

The second story features Joe Morgan talking about baseball’s lack of commitment to minorities. Reporter Larry Merchant points out that 40% of the players are minorities but only three of 30 managers are blacks or Latinos and there are no minorities among the general managers. Morgan points out that baseball is turning its collective back on scouting minority prospects in inner cities.

“I’m not mad at Bud Selig. I’m mad at the system,” Morgan says. “I’m mad at John Doe owner. . . . The system is the reason we don’t have more African American managers.”

The third story--and this one may by the most fascinating--deals with Ronney Jenkins, a running back from Port Hueneme who starred at Brigham Young before transferring to Northern Arizona. Jenkins, named the Western Athletic Conference freshman player of the year in 1996, was suspended for one game for breaking BYU’s honor code and threatened with expulsion for breaking it a second time before he transferred. Jenkins’ offense? Premarital sex. With the woman who is now his wife.

Jenkins is not a Mormon--2% of the BYU student body and 20% of the football team is non-Mormon. “Listen, sex is quite normal to me. It’s not a crime,” he says.

Jenkins’ grandmother, Jean Cobbs, complains that the punishment did not fit the crime.

The most powerful story is the final one. It deals with every parent’s nightmare: youth coaches who are pedophiles. Adrian Martinez, 10, of Las Vegas says he came forward to make it easier for other kids to do the same. Every parent who has children in youth sports should watch this segment.