Get ready to rumble with A&E's 'Ring'

You'd be hard-pressed to find a fan of professional boxing who wasn't aware of the sport's long history of corruption. You'd have better luck finding someone who truly thought the main purpose of the Olympic Games is to celebrate amateur athletics. Few viewers, then, will fault "Boxing: In and Out of the Ring," which recounts boxing's long ignominious past as well as its current mess. It airs 8 p.m. Sunday on A&E. Among the lowlights covered by the film: the influence of organized crime in the early 20th century, a 1977 ratings-fixing scandal and the recent arrest of a top boxing federation president on bribery charges. And then there's Don King, the sport's top promoter, who has been sued by at least 20 fighters who say he took them to the top - and to the cleaners. So why do millions keep spending $50 a pop for pay-per-view access to fights? Maybe it's because, as this film suggests, the sport's checkered past and characters like King add to its entertainment value. Speaking of sports, if you take to heart the old Nike slogan, "Just do it," you can't help but admire the athletes of the Women's Professional Football League, a tenuous enterprise launched two years ago and the subject of the documentary "True-Hearted Vixens," which airs at 11 p.m. Sunday as part of PBS' "P.O.V." (Point of View) series. The Vixens in the title are the Minnesota Vixens, one of two teams that conducted a barnstorming tour in 1999 to raise interest in a full-fledged league. We follow the team's ups and downs through numbingly long bus trips, disheartening losses and less than stellar fan support. The women play hard, but their desire is undermined by the men who coach them, pay them and promote them at, among other places, Hooters. "We'd be Chuck Darwin's favorite band," declares the drummer in "Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story," a fictionalized telling of how the British supergroup came to define pop metal in the 1980s despite calamities, dissension and levels of substance abuse that would make even David Crosby wince. "Hysteria," the latest attempt by VH1 to turn its biographical "Behind the Music" series into works of art, airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday and stars Anthony Michael Hall and several actors you've probably seen before but can't recall quite where. Def Leppard's story is unique in that the group made a successful comeback after its drummer lost an arm in an automobile wreck. It is not unique in the group's indulgent excesses - sex and booze, mainly - during its years of peak fame. Those are richly documented here; so is the arm-severing incident. Tune in and see which sickens you more. To commemorate this week's release of "Jurassic Park III," Turner Classic Movies will introduce a newly restored version of its ancestor "The Lost World." The 1925 silent film about dinosaurs living in our times - based on the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - airs at 7 p.m. Friday on TCM. Two newly composed scores to the film will air simultaneously, one of them on the secondary audio program (SAP) on your TV or VCR. The Academy Award-winning "Traffic" airs on pay-per-view beginning Tuesday. You can reach Aaron Barnhart through the TV Barn Web site at www.tvbarn.com or by calling (816) 234-4790.