Prime Choice : When Deion Sanders Picks Team, Make It Super Bowl Favorite

Half of the league’s teams have already lost exhibition games. A first-round draft choice has already been taken from the field in a painfully slow golf cart. Somebody has already spiked, somebody has already danced.

But the man who will make the biggest difference in the NFL this season is spending one recent sunny afternoon in the Pasadena Masonic Temple.

Banging his million-dollar hands across an old piano.

Waiting for his cue.

“Sports isn’t sports anymore,” Deion Sanders says. “It’s all a business. And I’m a businessman.”

The fingers look soft. The eyes wander. The notes sound like the clashing of tin pots.

He is wearing a black shirt, black pants and so much makeup you can smell it.

While his colleagues around the NFL are in action, he is waiting for a guy down the hall to shout that word.

“OK, everybody . . . action .”

A businessman waiting to get busy.

“I’ve been to training camp about three days in my whole career,” Sanders says. “Why would I go now?”

Sanders is a defensive back with the athletic ability of a point guard, the instincts of a fighter pilot. No defensive player has more impact. No player on either side of the ball may be more valuable.

Not Steve Young. Not Jerry Rice. Not even Emmitt Smith.

Sanders joined the San Francisco 49ers in the third week last year and led them to a Super Bowl championship. Insiders agree it is a title they could not have won without him.

He is a free agent again this summer. More than half a dozen teams are interested in spending up to $4 million for him for only eight games, but only two have a chance--the 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys.

The 49ers sign him, they win again. The Cowboys sign him, they win. Deion is that big.

Big like Bart Starr in the 1960s, Terry Bradshaw in the 1970s, Joe Montana in the 1980s.

But he is a symbol of a new era, one in which a nickname describes not your personality, but your market share.

Deion is not Bulldog or Mad Dog.

He is Neon. He is Prime Time.

And he’s not putting on a pad until October.

He continues to play two sports, even though in one of those sports--major league baseball--he is big the way Joe Orsulak is big.

This is the time of year when great players are traded to pennant contenders. Sanders was traded away from a pennant contender.

He continues to treat football, in which he would be a Hall of Famer if he played more than a dozen games a year, as though it were an extracurricular activity.

“I’m not even thinking about football,” Sanders says.

To Sanders, two-a-days are vitamins, drills are something they do in the Marines and those hungering to witness his impact will just have to wait, because on this day he is shooting a TV commercial. For a high-speed video game, naturally.

With a cast and crew the size of a football team, naturally.

“This is not like any commercial I’ve ever done,” actor Robert Powell says. “This is big bucks. This is like a movie.”

How big is Sanders? Powell has been hired so Deion can avoid the inconvenience of, well, being Deion.

Powell is his stunt double. Powell occupies Sanders’ spot in front of the camera while everything is set up just right.

Powell sits and sweats for up to 90 minutes at a time. Then Sanders is summoned to the room, where he utters a couple of lines and leaves.

The next day, Powell was scheduled to show up at a stadium in East Los Angeles, where he said his day would be more fun. There, he would make diving catches for Sanders, be tackled for Sanders.

“The hardest part about this,” Sanders says, “is getting up so early in the morning.”

It is late afternoon, and the stunt double has not yet spoken to Sanders. With the exception of prearranged interviews, no outsiders are allowed to speak to Sanders, even in passing.

“Although you may encounter Deion at the coffee pot, and it may seem like he is available, please hold your questions,” reads one written rule.

Now, the Cowboys would be a different matter. Jerry Jones could reach Sanders through one of the dozens of cellular phones that are being carried through the halls here, and Sanders would pick up.

Jones, the Cowboys’ owner, has been strongly wooing Sanders for months.

“Jerry Jones is a businessman, and I respect that,” Sanders says. “They have been talking to my people a lot. I like them a lot.”

If you are also a businessman, bet that Sanders will sign with them.

The Cowboys have the money and, more important, they have the carrot.

They will let Sanders play wide receiver as well as cornerback, at least in passing situations, if not full time. He would help replace Alvin Harper, a free agent who signed with Tampa Bay.

“Wherever I go, I will play wide receiver, and that’s it,” Sanders says.

The 49ers will never do that. Something about a couple of guys named Rice and Taylor.

“In the position we are in at wide receiver, Deion makes a nice fit,” said Stephen Jones, Cowboy vice president. “And he is about the only guy that we would get into playing with our roster in order to make room for him. He is an impact player.”

And what an impact that will make. The biggest story of the season, is all. Sanders changes teams, and the NFL championship changes hands.

What about the Miami Dolphins? Aren’t they located across the swamp from Sanders’ Ft. Myers, Fla., hometown? Aren’t they on the verge of a sentimental last stand for Don Shula and Dan Marino?

Are you kidding?

“Coming home means nothing,” Sanders says. “My mom is going to see my games no matter where I play. Last year, I got tired of the Dolphins lying to the fans, telling them that they were pursuing me when they weren’t pursuing me. Make me look like the bad guy.”

Sanders says the Dolphins have not spoken to him recently, and he doesn’t seem to mind. He sighs.

“That’s the thing with teams today,” he says. “They use you up, every last bit of you. Loyalty means nothing. So you have to be the same way.”

Stephen Jones of the Cowboys is asked whether he thinks Sanders is cheating the game’s fans and history by refusing to play a full season.

Jones says no.

“When you look at what it’s worth to him to play two sports . . . that’s why he does it,” Jones says. “I mean, it’s worth a lot.”

Perhaps he’s referring to the million-dollar deal Sanders signed with Sega Sports last winter, leading to this commercial shoot.

“Time to go,” says a nervous-looking publicity flack. “Deion needs to be wardrobed now.”

It is early August, and the 49ers are traveling to Japan on a team-unifying trip for an exhibition against the Denver Broncos.

The Cowboys are in the heat of Austin, Tex., scrimmaging in a week that will decide just how much they want to return to glory.

Deion Sanders, he’s in a green room playing table tennis. Soon, he may even be wardrobed.

“Owners have taken all the fun out of sports,” Sanders says. “Kids look at sports now not to play for the sake of playing, but to play so they can make a million bucks.”

Wonder why.