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Heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman of Baltimore will be the subject of an hourlong ESPN documentary about his rise to glory and the countdown to his rematch with Lennox Lewis on Nov. 17 in Las Vegas. The project, which will be shown during the hour before the HBO pay-per-view event starts, is part of a new series on the network called ESPN's Original Entertainment. Filming began in mid-September in New York's Catskill Mountains, where Rahman began training for the bout. There are visits to the Randallstown neighborhoods where Rahman grew up, along with those through the streets of Baltimore, including to the Mack Lewis gym where Rahman got his start.

As proof that money can salve even the most substantial hurt feelings, Major League Baseball and ESPN put aside their squabbling over Sunday night baseball telecasts and announced the settlement of a lawsuit filed by ESPN.The two parties reached agreement on a new six-year deal to run through 2005 that the Associated Press reports is worth $800 million. It will boost the number of hours of coverage on ESPN channels from about 500 to more than 800 annually, with a new package of Wednesday games, select Sunday games and a Sunday highlight show, "Baseball 2Day," on ESPN2.

ESPN definitely isn't taking the warm, inspirational approach with its scripted dramas. A Season on the Brink depicted Bob Knight as an out-of-control tyrant. The Junction Boys portrayed Paul "Bear" Bryant as a win-at-all-costs fanatic who in the end realizes he went too far. Its original series Playmakers had so many unsavory characters and story lines that the NFL asked ESPN not to renew it for a second year. ESPN obviously drifts to the dark side of sports. So it should come as no surprise that ESPN's effort about Pete Rose doesn't dwell much on his exploits as the hits king.

ESPN SEEMINGLY loves to look back at itself nearly as much as it does at the sports the network has covered over its 25 years of existence. To that end, the network is staging "Old School Week," bringing back five anchors of the past for one-shot returns to SportsCenter starting Sunday night. They range from gone so long we barely recall (George Grande), gone so recently we didn't realize he'd left (Charley Steiner), gone to bigger sports things (Greg Gumbel), gone to bigger smart-aleck things (Craig Kilborn)

NEW ORLEANS - Can ESPN move the sport of bass fishing from the lakes and rivers to prime time? That's the $40 million question. The media giant bought the country's oldest and largest bass fishing organization for about that amount in the spring and is already gussying up the image of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society. Eight cameras were out on the Mississippi Delta last week covering the 31st annual BASS Masters Classic for a nightly show, coverage of the weigh-ins and a wrap-up after the finale.

Last weekend, while the golf world was focused on the Los Angeles Open and young Eldrick "Tiger" Woods, Crofton's own Gary Carpenter was posting some impressive numbers of his own at the Woodlands Country Club in Houston.Playing at the seventh and final stop of the ESPN-sponsored Junior Tour, Carpenter turned in a two-round total of 151, earning third place in a 140-player field.Carpenter's third-place finish at Woodlands, combined with an early season second at Marco Island, Fla., and an 18th-place finish in Phoenix, Ariz.

Just like your humble media watcher, ESPN's Keith Olbermann has been taking some time off recently, but unlike your humble media watcher, Olbermann's time off was not by choice.Olbermann got his break courtesy of a two-week suspension from the network for putting his mug where it didn't belong, or at least putting it there without permission, according to sources.It seems that Olbermann was a guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" on April 16, firing off witty retorts and rejoinders. When asked during the "Five Questions" segment where the most godforsaken place on the East Coast was, Olbermann, with a big grin, answered "Bristol, Conn.

Let's say you are the executive of an all-sports cable network -- Home Team Sports, for instance -- and you have purchased exclusive television rights to a hot property, let's say, the Orioles.Would you, the HTS executive, be at all willing to surrender your exclusive rights to an Orioles-Toronto Blue Jays game with pennant implications in September to an over-the-air station?Of course not, and it was entirely unreasonable and more than a little naive, not to mention unfair, for anyone in Baltimore to expect that ESPN would do the same for yesterday's Grey Cup telecast for Channel 2.Though it was unfortunate that the Baltimore-B.

Sunday's Cincinnati-Ravens game will be a watershed game for the participants, to be sure, but also for the broadcaster, ESPN and the announcers.We'll get to the import of the contest to ESPN in a bit. But for analyst Paul Maguire, the game's significance lies with its timing as opposed to the combatants.You see, Sunday's is the eighth broadcast -- four preseason games and four regular-season contests -- that Maguire, Mike Patrick and Joe Theismann will work together, and Maguire, the former Buffalo Bills punter-linebacker, assumed that the newly formed threesome would be clicking by now."

THOUGH THE run-up to its debut has been handled with ESPN's traditionally low-key approach, the basketball version of College GameDay premieres tomorrow. Taking ESPN's successful football approach of going live from college sites, GameDay begins a run of eight weeks from Connecticut's Gampel Pavilion. (The show will originate from Maryland's Comcast Center on Feb. 12, when the Terps play Duke.) Tomorrow's GameDay airs at 11 a.m., 8 p.m. and midnight (after the Pittsburgh-UConn game). Each show is an hour.