Gridiron John : To Make Certain No One Will Laugh at Football on Fox, Rupert Murdoch Hired John Madden. But Can a 58-year-old, Loudmouthed Ex-jock Find Happiness in the Land of Bart Simpson?

Ten weeks before today’s season opener, on a hot Los Angeles afternoon, the lobby of the Century Plaza hotel is humming with people who look like they’ve arrived at more than a convention. Here they come, striding purposefully in dark- suited teams of three or four, a blur of teeth and cuff links, slim briefcases and heels, the men and women who own, manage or sell time for the stations of the no-longer-upstart Fox network. At this summer’s affiliates meeting, there is excitement and tension in the air, and not just at the prospect of next season’s episodes of “Melrose Place” or the thought of what an earthquake might feel like. This is more about what the NFL is going to feel like on each of these fine Rupert Murdoch-fed stations.

Don’t you know it’s going to feel good? At least for a while. At first, the presence of the National Football League on Fox on Sunday is going to feel wonderfully strange and, well, newsworthy , or a helluva lot more newsworthy than “Models Inc.” or even “The Simpsons.” If you’re one of those in attendance at the Century Plaza, chances are that for seven months you’ve been looking in the mirror every morning and repeating the mantra: “NFL. NFL. NFL.” Maybe you pinched yourself to make sure you weren’t dreaming and then shouted, “Playing with the big boys now, you damn betcha!”

If, on the other hand, you are not an employee of Fox or one of its stations and are old enough to remember the Korean War, it’s quite possible you assume the NFL was in part created by and for CBS and that Fox is television’s version of the Mustang Ranch, and you therefore view this whole deal as the newest proof that everything is worse than it used to be.

Even for the believers, there is, of course, the matter of whether this will work in the numbers department or end up as the biggest cost overrun since the B-1 bomber. Last year, Murdoch, desperate to get a major sports franchise for his overmatched network, outbid CBS by roughly $400 million, paying $1.58 billion for the four-year rights to the NFL’s big-dog NFC division (Cowboys, 49ers, Giants) and dunning the affiliates $30 million a year to help defray the cost.

The estimates by some market analysts that losses could amount to as much as half a billion over four years are cause for a few skipped heartbeats in the privacy of the rooms upstairs. But if any of the affiliates are nervous on this day, all they have to do to fortify themselves is take a good, long look at the comforting figure of John Madden, who is on the premises most assuredly for that very purpose.

Coach! There he is! The beloved pitchman and CBS telestrator commentator, big-footed American hero of the interstate, the blue-collar pope of professional football himself has come along in Murdoch’s bargain as the ultimate insurance that no one will be able to laugh at football on Fox with John Madden calling the plays.

“We wanted John, we needed John,” says a Fox executive. “Back in January, the press was asking, ‘Will we see Al Bundy in the booth? Will we see Bart Simpson? Is this the end of Western civilization as we know it?’ ”

Earlier in the day, Madden gifted the affiliates with a luncheon pep talk, but now he is camped in an upstairs lounge, nursing a diet Coke and recalling the dark December day when the unthinkable happened.

“It was a Friday afternoon. And I was going to Detroit to do the 49ers,” says Madden, who is conspicuous in these surroundings not just because of his 250 pounds but because he’s dressed in a droopy blue warmup suit with a lavender baseball cap pulled down on his head. “And I was on my bus, and I got a call and someone told me that Fox might get football. And I assumed that Fox would get football, but that they would get a part of it. Like when ESPN came in with a Sunday night game, and TNT came in with a Sunday night game. The NFL would give ‘em a little piece. And then they said CBS was going to get out of it, and I said, ‘Nah, never happen.’ I laughed it off.”

CBS, after all, had been broadcasting the NFL for 38 years.

“And I got another call in the bus, telling me that Fox got it. I still didn’t believe it. I got into Detroit, got to the hotel, and all the production people were there, and Pat, and we’re sittin’ around, and the word started comin’ in and we got the official announcement that Fox had the NFC and we didn’t have anything. None of us saw it comin’. No one. I told (former player and commentator) Matt Millen, who called me in Detroit, it was like an old drill we used to use in football called ‘bull in the ring.’ You put one guy in the ring, and then you number all the players around the ring, 1 through 10.” Madden is pointing now, just like on television, and his mouth is picking up steam. “Coach calls out ‘2’, and the guy (2) comes running out, and you have to hit him. Then he calls ‘5,’ and he comes running out, and you’d have to turn and hit him, you know?” “I told Matt, that was like playin’ ‘bull in the ring,’ and the coach calls ‘2’ and 10 comes!”

Boom.

Is this a match? John Madden and Fox?

A FEW WEEKS LATER, MADDEN IS BACK IN LOS ANGELES. HE IS WEARING A coat and tie this time, seated on a stage in a ballroom at the Universal City Hilton, where Fox is introducing its 1994 lineup to the nation’s television critics. Onstage with him, sitting in a row between some faux Roman columns, are Fox Sports President David Hill; Ed Goren, Fox Sports executive producer for the NFL broadcasts; Tracy Dolgin, executive vice president of marketing, and second-string play-by-play man Dick Stockton. There is a big-screen TV overhead, which has just exploded in a reel of loud, frantic Fox football commercials, in which Green Bay Packer defensive end Reggie White is seen crushing quarterbacks in a series of quick cuts, followed by Madden hurtling down the highway in his bus to a tune modeled after Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

At the end of the reel, Hill walks to a podium, looks out to his audience and proudly utters three words: “Rock and roll.”

Dolgin steps up, and with a pointer and some video charts as a visual aid, promises the critics “the biggest media blitz in sports history” to get America ready for the NFL on Fox. He also vows that Fox will “grow the NFL audience.” Then Goren takes over and gets his biggest response from the critics when he reveals Fox’s plan to air regular “anti-violence” messages from leading NFL players. Many of the critics break into laughter. The irony evidently is lost on Goren.

As is his manner on occasion, Madden deflects a pointed question about violence in the game and returns to a less dangerous part of the field, choosing to decry the league salary cap and its effect on player movement. “I have trouble seeing Joe Montana in a Kansas City uniform,” he says about the former 49er quarterback. “And Reggie White should always be a Philadelphia Eagle.”

No doubt there are those who feel the same way about John Madden no longer wearing a CBS blazer.

“You’ve got new and different, and you’ve got the same,” Madden said earlier, pondering the change this season for him and his 14-year sidekick, former New York Giants end and place-kicker Pat Summerall. “Every time you think you got the same, you look and say, ‘Ooohh, it’s new and different.’ And every time you think it’s new and different, you say, ‘Now, look, it’s the same.’ ”

Madden perhaps can be expected to accentuate the positive since Fox is paying him about $8 million a year (three times his CBS salary) to do what he has always done, that is, to be himself: the average guy ascended to a throne of wisdom. And he wasn’t going to be able to be himself on CBS anymore unless he wanted to start narrating golf or the Winter Olympics. Which wouldn’t have been the real John Madden, he says. Anyway, with the heartache of leaving CBS behind him--Summerall compared it to a death in the family--Madden is now making more than any player in the league, an achievement that can be seen as a mark of television’s final takeover of the NFL.

As the former coach of the “renegade” Oakland Raiders, an infrequent (as in never) flier and all-around Earthman, Madden is what passes for unorthodox in the culture of the NFL and so matches up somewhat with Fox’s perception of itself as an outlaw network. But he is also 58, a fierce traditionalist about an increasingly glitzoid game, and he does not eat breakfast to the sound of Guns N’ Roses. He’s a no-nonsense guy going to a network that to many has so far been little but nonsense. Take a glance at some of the MTV-inspired promotional spots for Fox football and try to imagine Madden designing them, not to mention diagramming them.

Or take Fox’s assembly-line slogan: “Same Game. . . .New Attitude.” Not the sort of hype you expect from the lips of the truth-telling coach--not counting, of course, when he’s in front of a camera hawking some product. There would appear to be some potential for cultural dissonance between man and network.

Here’s how the Fox press guide describes the improvements planned for the Fox broadcasts: “12 manned cameras, two of which are dedicated for super slow motion replays, and eight tape machines, with two designated for super slow motion replays. By comparison, a typical lead regular season NFC broadcast last year had eight cameras and no more than six tape machines. The mobile production truck from which (producer and director) will work is the Super Shooter 12, housing a state-of-the-art Grass Valley 3000-3 switching system and the Abekas A-51 digital effects unit.” In addition, they’ll be broadcasting in Dolby Surround Sound with four parabolic microphones picking up the raw sounds of combat at the line of scrimmage.

Here’s the way Madden describes these improvements: “We have a new truck, and I think we’re gonna have some more cameras.”

Of the many un-Madden innovations in the NFL over the years (artificial turf, TV timeouts, coaches calling the plays) Madden reserves a special distaste for the “luxury boxes,” the corporate penthouses that now ring the NFL’s newer stadiums. “I just cringe when I go by and see them,” he says. Fox’s one-hour pregame show will include a feature called “SkyBox,” in which a glamorous woman reporter, Lonnie Lardner, will chat with Hollywood celebrities about the game in a simulated luxury box. The names “Jack” and “Spike” are mentioned.

Madden distances himself from all this, saying simply, “The difference is going to be in the pregame show, showing more players, more faces. Getting to know the player better. The different stuff will happen before the kickoff. Then when you get to the game, once they kick it off, you cover that. You cover the game. We’re not getting five downs or anything. It’s going to be the same game.”

And he will still be John Madden. He will still travel between game cities on his customized Greyhound bus, as he has done since abandoning Amtrak in 1986 and jetliners before that. He is getting a new bus this season that is five feet longer than the old one. “I have everything I need. It’s got four television sets, all with VCRs. I watch game tapes more than anything. It’s got telephones and faxes.”

Most of the time, Madden travels alone, except for two drivers. His wife of 34 years, Virginia, a retired schoolteacher and former bar owner, rarely joins him. (His son Joe, 28, oversees Madden’s production company; son Mike, 31, is in real estate development.)

As he’s explaining all this, a smiling man with a camera, who happens to be vice president of sales for a Fox affiliate on the East Coast, butts in and wants his picture taken with the new voice of the NFL on Fox. Madden has no choice but to comply, yet he is clearly not pleased, especially when the fellow asks Madden to call him for dinner when he’s next in town for a game.

“That’s not my favorite thing to do,” the former coach says when the guy is gone. “That’s not my favorite thing. I’m not very good at that.”

AFTER MURDOCH SHOT THE LIGHTS OUT AT CBS SPORTS LAST DECEMBER, Madden almost went to ABC to join “Monday Night Football.” He also considered an offer from NBC, which is still going to carry the NFL’s AFC games (Raiders, Oilers, Broncos). In the end, he went to the highest bidder; it wasn’t just the money, it was the chance to be the marquee player in a whole new sports department that only has one sport.

“I’m not a television guy or some other sports. I’m just football, NFL football. And that’s all Fox is.”

In fact, the hub of Madden’s broadcast team has simply moved intact to Fox in a forced migration from CBS. In addition to Summerall, he’ll have the same producer, director and stage manager, plus some of the same cameramen and audio people. Goren, his executive producer, is also a CBS man.

As Summerall says, “I won’t be saying, ‘Stay tuned for “60 Minutes” and “Murder, She Wrote.” ’ That much will be different.”

No, he’ll be telling viewers to stay tuned for the animated comedy “The Simpsons,” which Fox is moving to Sunday night to take advantage of the NFL lead-in. Maybe this will not be so odd. To some, Madden himself is a cartoon character, the excitable guy who, in the ‘70s, used to race up and down the sidelines as the pink-faced coach of the Raiders, squeezed into polyester pants and a golf shirt, flinging his arms skyward in protest or celebration. Then he literally busted through walls and other barriers into all those Miller Lite commercials in the ‘80s, leading choruses of “Tastes Great!--Less Filling!” He’s done so many commercials--for Ace Hardware, Krylon spray paint, diet Coke, Tinactin foot powder--he finally built his own $750,000 Jumbo Studios near Danville, his Northern California home, where he can tape them without having to leave town.

Yet in ad-crazy America, the commercials have done nothing to dent his “credibility” as a football analyst and, anyway, he will always have his bucketful of Emmys and coaching record with the Raiders to fill out his resume. It is a great record--103 wins, 32 losses, including a Super Bowl victory in 1977.

So many of the men who get paid to narrate football games, be they career broadcasters like NBC’s Dick Enberg or ex-athletes like ABC’s Frank Gifford, are almost interchangeable in their earnest attempts to seem respectable, to offend no one. Madden, on the other hand, while he has not courted controversy, has remained the NFL’s star commentator by refusing to polish his jock talk. On the air he prefers to rip and snort his way to gridiron insight as though still in the locker room, strangling sentences in mid-thought because of his urgent need to get on to the next one.

This is what is known as being yourself, but in his view, being yourself can be, well, a difficult thing. “I mean, bein’ yourself is never one thing,” he says. “You have a lot of different selves. Which John Madden? There’s a very serious John Madden, there’s a light John Madden, there’s a coach John Madden. That’s the thing. It’s not as simple as bein’ yourself. I think that bein’ yourself has to go deeply.

“If you’re going to commercial, and you’re bein’ yourself, it’s all good stuff, but you’re off the air. You say, ‘I’m going to be myself,’ and some guy’s sayin’, you know, ‘Seven, six, five, four . . . two, one. . . .’ Now I’m really myself! Well, hell, you’re . . . it’s a difficult thing. Which self? And then bein’ a self within a framework of short spurts of time and not bein’ able to think about what you’re gonna do but react and bein’ ready for everything because you don’t know what’s gonna happen. Some people don’t have enough confidence to do that.”

Boom.

Madden’s penchant for candor has led him to criticize aspects of the current game, from the epidemic of bad tackling and showboating to the corrosive effect of big money. “It’s going to be hard to build up (fan) loyalties with free agency and all the movement (of players),” he reasons. “The owners can send a player off, and a player can leave on his own, but the fan has to stay there and take it. That’s the reality of it, it’s not going to change. But I don’t think it’s good.”

Money is hurting the game in other ways, he believes. “See what happened, when they started raising ticket prices and gettin’ luxury boxes and stuff, you started eliminating kids from going to the games. That’s bothered me for a long time. Ever see a crowd at a Super Bowl? Count the kids at a Super Bowl. Count the football fans at a Super Bowl! Those things bother me.”

Now, here’s an unfit-for-Fox thought: The money that has flooded into the NFL during the past 25 years, bringing glitz and cowgirl cheerleaders and changing the game and leading to player movement and higher ticket prices and keeping the kids out of the stadiums, has come, as it has in baseball, largely from television--that is, from the billions NFL teams make from the sale of broadcast rights. Television, which made John Madden into the wealthy American folk hero that he is, has also been responsible for tainting the game he loves. Has he ever stopped for a moment to mull this over?

He doesn’t miss a beat in not answering the question. “The next generation, growing up with computers and video games,” he says, “to get those kids, you’re going to have to let ‘em play along on television,” with the kids interactively calling their own shots. “Murdoch is committed to this. That’s how we’re going to get the kids. You can’t get ‘em back in the ballparks.”

WITH ONE WEEK TO GO BEFORE THE FIRST FOX NFL GAME, A PRESEASON match between the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos, the heat is on at Fox Sports headquarters on the KTTV lot in Hollywood. The whole idea of the NFL on Fox is such a novelty to the press that TV sports critics from around the country are closing in from every side.

“It’s interesting being a bug under a microscope,” says David Hill. Hill, a hearty Australian who reminds you a little of Robin Leach and pronounces the name of the game futbull, has spent the last six years in London producing cricket and soccer matches with great success for Murdoch’s Sky Sports. He has been busy today cleaning up some graphics problems, color keys and studio lighting requirements.

“It’s the last frontier of reality in television,” the new Fox Sports president says fervently about the appeal of TV sports. “As sitcoms and other programs become more interchangeable, in sports you still have an uncertain outcome. It’s not necessarily the guy in the white hat that gets to kiss the horse at the end. It’s undeniably real.”

What’s also undeniably real is that despite some flashy high-profile shows, Fox has suffered a two-year decline in its ratings overall, attracting 7.2% of the nation’s 94 million TV households last season, down from 7.7% in 1992-93. It needs the NFL, even at an initial loss, as an engine to propel its other programming and its 180-odd stations toward critical mass and top advertising dollars. The acquisition of the NFC games already has helped the network add 12 stations in important markets and has convinced Madison Avenue that this year will be better.

“When Fox got the NFL deal,” says Paul Schulman, a Manhattan-based buyer of network time for major advertisers, “it was credibility to the highest degree. People who in the past perceived Fox as the up-and-coming network changed their thinking to say, ‘We now have four networks.’ ”

Still, a TV sports franchise is no guarantee of success. CBS claims it was losing money under its NFL contract and most definitely lost money when it paid $1.6 billion for the rights to major-league baseball. And CBS was not trying to establish a network at the time.

“I think you’ll see the Fox numbers come across pretty strongly,” Schulman says. “I don’t know if they will match identically the numbers that CBS got a year ago when they averaged a 13 rating, but I think Fox will be darn close. And remember, it’s Year 1, and Fox is growing.”

It’s the first network sports department to be based in Los Angeles, and as Hill hustled to create it from scratch in six months, he was struck by the suitability of his new home. “I’m seeing an inter-pollination between a straight-down-the-middle sports production guy and a cameraman or paint-box operator or whatever who’s just come off doing ‘seaQuest’ or something.”

Fox is not alone in trying to put a hip-hop step in TV sports. Check out the music-video-like promos for “Monday Night Football” this season, or give your eyes and ears a 10-minute workout in front of the heavy-metal assault and graphic distraction of ESPN2, the new cable sports channel presumably designed for the sensory impaired.

Hill has assured the NFL that Fox will not trivialize the game while enlisting more advertiser-attractive young people to watch it. “The NFL has not had promotion in prime time,” he explains. “We said to the NFL, ‘Look, what we’ll do is that, because we have a lot of young kids watching, we will promote it differently.’ So that’s where the tag ‘Same Game, New Attitude’ came from. So that’s been the whole thrust of what we’ve been about: getting kids who if no one told them it was exciting. . . .”

While he does not have an office here, Madden’s presence is heavy in the air at Fox Sports, his name invoked with the gravity that would be accorded royalty. Ed Goren stretches the Madden mythology beyond the realms of devotion. ‘He’ll tell you that all he cares about is football. But he’s--I don’t know if he’s a Will Rogers--he’s a great observer of people,” says Goren. He turns around in his seat and points to a watercolor print of an adobe house in the desert. “If I brought 10 people in to look at that painting, 10 people would see the obvious in it, whatever the obvious is in that painting. John would see the obvious and then beyond. That’s what makes him so unique.”

John Madden, art critic! Who would have known? It brings to mind the possibility of a Fox spinoff modeled after the late John Candy’s impersonation of Madden in a TV sketch in which the coach rambled through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York furiously tracing explanatory diagrams over the surface of Rembrandts and Da Vincis, just as he diagrams plays on television. “I Know What I Like: John Madden and the Art of the NFL.”

ON FRIDAY, AUG. 12, ORIGINATING from Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the NFL on Fox indeed comes to pass.

Game time for this meaningless warm-up contest between the 49ers and the Broncos is 5 p.m., to fit into prime time in the East and Midwest. By 2 p.m., the silver-and-white Madden Cruiser is already parked next to the stadium. At 2:40 p.m., the door of the bus swings open, and Madden, wearing tan slacks, a blue blazer and a tie, descends. Accompanied by his agent, a Fox publicist and stadium security personnel, he is ushered through a gantlet of snapping cameras to Gate D and up to the booth where Summerall will join him.

At 3:55, two black Lincoln Towncars edge their way through a small crowd on the stadium’s perimeter drive and stop outside the Fox press shed. The doors open, and out of the second car steps Rupert Murdoch, with his wife, Anna, followed by Chase Carey, chairman and CEO of Fox Television Group. Murdoch, wearing a gray pinstriped suit, cranes his head to take in Candlestick, as if he’s thinking, “So I own this now too.”

Considering the enormous sum he has spent for the rights to the NFC and the projected losses over four years based on that sum, a reporter asks, by what means would he measure his football venture a success?

“It’s already paid off,” he says, claiming that the network as a whole is $150 million ahead in total advertising sales from this same time last year. “And our stations have increased in value $400 to $500 million from before we had football.”

Jay Nelson, a Wall Street broadcast analyst for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., is more skeptical. “I don’t have access to all the numbers, but in my view, his acquisition of the NFL rights was more of a defensive act than an offensive one. They had hit the wall in their ratings prime time. A guy like Murdoch figures if you’re not attacking, you’re retreating, and he figures with his other endeavors, he could afford to take the risk of a $100-milllion-to-$200-million loss. He’s going to make statements forever that they’ve made it back in such and such, but who can measure?”

Back in the press trailer, Murdoch takes a few more questions about what football means to Fox, offers a quip about Madden’s salary, and then the baron of Fox is gone, presumably on his way to a very good seat.

Time for the show. On TV screens, a montage of helmeted NFL warriors along with electric guitars and the voice of Madden rise through an echo chamber as if out of a primeval gridiron mist: “It doesn’t get any better than this” marks the beginning of the Fox era in the NFL.

After the kickoff, the first thing that looks different is a little graphic strip in the upper left of the screen bearing the game clock and the score. It will stay there throughout the broadcast, recalling the same device used in the World Cup soccer matches. On the air, Madden points it out, commenting: “You can go away and come back, like if someone’s cooking dinner or somethin’, and you’ll always know what the score is. Or you could use the clock to cook the roast by.”

The 49ers score quickly, after quarterback Steve Young completes his first seven passes, prompting Madden to say, “If you had to start a team today with one guy, I don’t know that Steve Young wouldn’t be the guy.”

The much discussed line-of-scrimmage audio is noticeable, but mainly it seems to intensify the sound of the referees’ whistles and the jagged crowd roar while picking up the occasional “get ‘em” from a defensive player. The game is simply louder on the screen. Also noticable is the recurring Fox graphic, a cubic logo that shouts “Fox/ NFL” as it washes the screen between slow-motion replays and live action.

Near the end of the first quarter, when 49er defensive end Richard Dent pops somebody pretty good, Madden says “boom.” The moment does not go unnoticed by the history-conscious Fox publicity personnel. “Let the record show that the first Fox ‘boom’ from Madden came at 5:35 p.m. Pacific Time,” one of them sings out happily.

It becomes apparent that one thing has not changed, and that is the way Madden makes his way effortlessly through a game, displaying a scholar’s knowledge of both teams, their histories and tendencies. “The San Francisco running game,” he says matter-of-factly, “is not a beautiful thing.” Could Frank Gifford say something that true and simple?

The coach reveals an immediate affinity for rookie 360-pound Bronco offensive tackle Kevin Farkas but also has the thought, which he shares with viewers: “How would you like to be the bench, and here comes Farkas?”

Boom.

Between plays, a Fox camera brings in a beautiful close-up of the moon, and Madden expresses his wonder by saying, “Do you believe the cow ever jumped over that thing?”

In the trailer, Vince Wladika, head of Fox Sports media relations, is ecstatic. “I can’t believe I work for this guy! Is he great!”

The 49ers win the game without much opposition from the Broncos, the final score 20-3. It is all over at 7:55.

For David Hill and company, champagne is probably on ice somewhere in the immediate vicinity. There have been no major glitches--at least none apparent to viewers. Fox has broadcast an NFL game, and the NFL does not seem substantially altered by the experience. On the other hand, maybe the shock will not fully register on the NFL’s aging television constituency all at once. Maybe it will take until opening day and beyond for fans to realize that this was a little like what Madden said about the “bull in the ring” drill. Seemed like coach was always calling out CBS, ABC or even NBC, but damned if it isn’t Fox coming at you now.