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What: “Character Is Everything: Promoting Ethical Excellence in Sports” by Russell W. Gough

Price: $17 (Harcourt Brace College Publishers).

You would expect a book about ethics in sports, written in 1997, to look like this.

Thin. Less than 100 pages. Slim enough to use as a bookmark in either of Dennis Rodman’s rich studies of high character in professional athletics.

Author Russell Gough, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Pepperdine University, concedes that the battle he’s backing with “Character Is Everything” is a steep uphill climb. He cites some of the axioms of our era: Sportsmanship is dead. Athletes are not good role models. “Sports ethics” is a contradiction in terms.

Gough questions the first-place-or-nothing mentality that permeates American sports, describing it as the “No. 1 pollutant” threatening sportsmanship and ethical competition.

This flies in the face of the words of distinguished philosopher Chili Davis, who once held that “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’,” but Gough would rather quote Grantland Rice: “When the great scorer comes to mark against your name, he writes not that you won or lost but how you played the game.”

Currently unavailable in bookstores, “Character Is Everything” can be ordered directly from Harcourt Brace at (800) 782-4479.