AS FAMILIAR AS ABC ROONE ARLEDGE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY SHORT ON SURPRISES AS IT RECOUNTS HIS MANY TV INNOVATIONS.

Byline: David Kronke Television Writer

When he ran ABC Sports (and, to a certain extent, ABC News), Roone Arledge always preached emphasizing the human angle, finding telling details that bring an event's drama into full relief. Curiously, however, he didn't follow his own edict in ``Roone: A Memoir,'' a posthumous autobiography hitting bookstores today.

Arledge - the guy who gave us ``Monday Night Football,'' ``Nightline,'' state-of-the-art Olympic coverage and the meteoric (if temporary) rise of ABC News - died last December while polishing this book. A man who had left such a lasting imprint on TV is worth reading, but one wishes he had spent a little more time offering insights on the industry he helped mold and a little less, for example, on inside-baseball contract negotiations. (For a guy who demonstrates such antipathy for bean counters, he certainly counts a lot of beans himself, particularly when they underscore his successes.)

``Roone'' is a breezy, highly readable book, offering standard accounts of Arledge's greatest hits, but doesn't dig much deeper. The chapters on ``Monday Night Football,'' the terror-stained 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, how the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis begat ``Nightline'' and his landing stars like Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer include precious few nuggets not already known.

And ``Roone'' reveals little of the title subject. His three wives are mentioned only as he meets and divorces them. A bout of debilitating depression arises and is cured in a mere paragraph. His most personal revelation is that he loves to cook - and comes six pages before book's end. He's not much more forthcoming about his colleagues: Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, David Brinkley and Sam Donaldson are all brilliant if occasionally tetchy. He's only mildly vindictive toward the Capital Cities Broadcasting executives who eviscerated the news and sports divisions after buying the network.

What's almost as interesting as what Arledge writes is what he omits. There's a painstaking account of his protracted efforts to bring Sawyer to ABC, including a moment where she says money isn't important to her. He avoids, however, discussing her eventual $7 million salary or the backstage battles between her and Donaldson that almost torpedoed ``Prime Time Live.''

Arledge also doesn't cop to the possibility that he may be as responsible as anyone for the ludicrous salaries TV-news celebrities earn these days, which funnels money away from the actual news-gathering process and by necessity emphasizes style over content: Their authority is, ironically, diluted the more their price escalates. He kvetches that belt-tightening over the years shut down a lot of foreign bureaus, but doesn't connect the dots further - that ignoring the world beyond our shores resulted in viewers unaware of the fractious global picture, contributing to a myopia that made Sept. 11 such a shock.

Instead, ``Roone'' is a final victory lap written in the terminal stages of the cancer that would claim his life. In the end, the innovative visionary is content to play avuncular raconteur, which will please some readers and disappoint others.

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``Roone: A Memoir''

By Roone Arledge

432 pages, HarperCollins; $25.95