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 LISA DILLMAN

Jan. 25, 2000 12 AM PT

What: “Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed, and the Corruption of America’s Youth,” by Dan Wetzel and Don Yaeger.

Publisher: Warner Books ($24.95).

It could be so yesterday--Nike vs. Adidas and George Raveling vs. Sonny Vaccaro, former best friends turned adversaries--but this book doesn’t allow any such boredom to take hold.

Bottom line: Feuds are fascinating.

But behind the broader scope of corporate and personal sneaker enmity are riveting individual stories. One is in Chapter 4: This Little Piggie Went to Nike. You learn all about Myron Piggie, the former summer AAU youth basketball coach and one-time crack cocaine dealer who is said to be the subject of a federal investigation.

Piggie coached suspended UCLA star JaRon Rush as well as his younger brother Kareem Rush and Korleone Young and was bankrolled by Kansas City businessman Tom Grant and Nike.

Wetzel and Yaeger detail Piggie’s criminal background, a confrontation with DEA agents in 1987 and a 1989 shootout with two off-duty policemen.

Piggie’s brother, Brian, drove his car over the lower leg of DEA Special Agent Ronald Wright. Wright, who was wearing Nike shoes, showed a wry sense of humor, telling the authors:

“The funny part is that if we had gotten him [Myron Piggie] at the informant’s house, he would have been headed for prison, no question. So by driving away, his brother not only broke my leg, he kept Myron out of prison for ten years. That should have been a Nike commercial because his wheel was spinning right through on my ankle and it burnt a hole right through the Nike.”