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: The Spy 100: Olympic Edition

With its 11th annual list of the year’s 100 “most irritating events and people and concepts,” Spy Magazine has adopted, fittingly, a most irritating Winter Olympics theme--complete with the heads of Ellen DeGeneres, Marv Albert and Oprah Winfrey superimposed on the bodies of figure skaters and judges’ “scores” for obnoxiousness (TV’s “Ellen” gets a perfect 6.0; El Nino a 5.36; the Spice Girls a 4.09).

The most grating sports-related annoyance of 1997, as deemed by the Spy staff, was, of course, Albert, at No. 13, whom Spy christens, “The World’s Greatest Transvestite Sports Announcer.”

Also making the cut:

* Green Bay’s Cheeseheads, at No. 28, for suing one another over the copyright to the plastic cheese-wedge hat.

* Tiger Woods, at No. 32, for “hauling Fuzzy Zoeller over the coals after that equally strange-named linksman made a low-grade wisecrack about Tiger’s eating fried chicken,” for “Tiger’s smug father Earl Woods,” and for Tiger’s infamous low-grade wisecracks uttered within earshot of a GQ reporter.

* The WNBA, at No. 56: “Much was . . . spent on research to determine the ball’s colors. No color tested makes ball go into basket more often.”

* Mike Tyson, vastly undervalued at No. 81.

* And, at Nos. 59 and 96, for no apparent reason other than the fact Spy is published in New York City: the Knicks-Heat bench-clearing brawl and subsequent suspensions of Knicks players that “enabled the Heat to rally from a 3-1 deficit” and Yankee bust Hideki Irabu.

No mention of the exceedingly annoying Mighty Duck-Paul Kariya contract stalemate or the immensely irritating late-season Dodger collapse or the resoundingly aggravating early playoff ouster by the Lakers.

But, then, this is Southern California. And our claim to fame in 1997, in the Manhattan-centric view of Spy, was the Heaven’s Gate cult (No. 9).