MURDOCK PLAYS TO WIN; FOX SPORTS; MAJOR DEALS PUT FOX IN FOREFRONT.

Byline: Eric Noland and Tom Hoffarth Daily News Staff Writers

Rupert Murdoch has taken some extreme risks in American sports broadcasting. But his success on what was considered blighted terrain has established him as a major player in the sports world.

It also has legitimized his bid to purchase one of baseball's flagship franchises, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

And it all occurred at the speed of a Mike Piazza line drive.

Three years ago Fox Sports did not exist. Now it holds major rights contracts for the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League; it also has televised a Super Bowl, two Stanley Cup Finals and a World Series.

The company announced Monday a joint venture with Liberty Media Corp. to buy 40 percent of Cablevision System Corp.'s sports-programming services. The deal, for about $850 million, includes Madison Square Garden, the two teams that play there (the New York Knicks basketball team and New York Rangers hockey team) and eight regional cable channels.

The deal gives Fox a national sports network to compete head-to-head with ESPN, the national sports network owned by Burbank-based Walt Disney Co.

Currently through its cable ventures, Fox Sports regularly televises college football and basketball, figure skating, tennis - even rodeo.

Buying the rights to each sport was considered a daring - if not foolish - move. Each time Murdoch acquired the rights to broadcast a sport, industry analysts and competitors assumed he'd overpaid.

Securing the NFL 

In 1993, as the NFL broadcast rights came up for renewal after years of ever-increasing fee contracts, high-level network executives told the NFL that they should not expect another fat TV contract.

The audience had been splintered by the propagation of cable channels and the explosion of videotape rentals. Faced with a shrinking audience, the networks said they probably wouldn't be able to provide the windfall of rights money that the NFL had enjoyed in more robust times.

In stepped Murdoch, whose News Corp. was nursing the Fox Network through its embryonic stage. The Australian-born media tycoon also brought his checkbook.

NFL heads were spun around by Murdoch's offer of $1.58 billion over four years for the games of the National Football Conference, which featured such high-popularity franchises as the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys. The bid was nearly $100 million per year higher than that of CBS, which had broadcast the package since the mid-1950s.

Almost immediately, there were dire predictions of cartoonish presentations of the games, as well as disastrous financial losses for the network.

But Fox detractors were quickly silenced. The network first raided CBS' talent pool, signing up announcers John Madden, Pat Summerall, Terry Bradshaw, James Brown and many of its producers and directors. Then it set about rattling the established order.

During game broadcasts, Fox put the score and game clock in a corner of the screen. And left it there. Channel-surfing viewers loved it, and the innovation, treated like the invention of the mute button, became widely copied.

The network also was liberal in the number of cameras it set up for a broadcast. In previous years, CBS had used as few as four for a low-ticket game. Fox set up between six and 12 at each broadcast.

And the network spared no expense in creating a crackling, hourlong pregame show for its NFL coverage - even to the point of ordering a truckload of black T-shirts for its hip-talking heads to wear under their suit jackets. The show quickly gained a solid foothold in a lead-in time slot that CBS previously had treated as filler.

It was considered a major coup when Fox signed then-out-of-work coach Jimmy Johnson (for $600,000 per annum) to lounge in the studio and pontificate on the shortcomings of his former coaching brethren.

Murdoch operated all of this at a staggering deficit, as had been forecast, but all the while the point was being missed.

Lure of football

He was using the lure of NFL football to sign up affiliates for his fledgling network. He picked up 10 former CBS affiliates and converted them to Fox, for example, when he spent $500 million to buy New World Communications shortly after closing the NFL deal.

When Murdoch said he didn't care how much he lost on sports, skeptics thought he was kidding. But there was evidence of method to the madness: According to one published report, after taking a $350 million write-off to cover expected losses in the wake of deals with the NFL and NHL, News Corp.'s overall profits rose by almost $100 million.

Murdoch, following the lead that CBS had established earlier when it used the NFL to promote its ``60 Minutes'' program Sunday evenings, used the high-rated game broadcasts to hype the other programming. And viewers began to find Fox.

``We put that $380 million a year (in rights fees) on the table to help build Fox,'' Murdoch recently told GQ. ``We didn't do it so some quarterback can make another half-million a year. That's just a byproduct. What we did, we did selfishly, to build a network.''

Taking risks

To expand the strategy to a year-round dimension, the building continued at Fox Sports. This time against even longer odds.

In 1994 the NHL had gone nearly 20 years without a long-term network contract. The game, after all, did not translate well to TV - viewers would easily lose track of the puck, and the sizzling pace of the sport was neutralized by those long TV shots.

Murdoch, however, was intrigued by reports that ice hockey, riding the long coattails of in-line skates street hockey, had gained immense popularity with boys and young men - one of the important demographic groups Fox was trying to reach with its on-the-edge network programming.

A five-year claim to the NHL was secured for $155 million, CBS again coming in second in the bidding.

Then, cameras were moved closer to the action, often with robotics. Microphones were adroitly positioned to pick up the scrape of skates on the ice, and a computer-enhanced glowing puck was developed.

Televised hockey was a hit.

Two months later, Murdoch delved into baseball, which was in the throes of labor strife and declining TV ratings. Its rights had been tossed back and forth for most of the 1990s, with ABC, NBC and ESPN sharing the national coverage, to weak ratings.

Again, Fox jumped in aggressively, with extra cameras, microphones mounted in bases and on outfield walls, and replay technology that presented, for example, pitch-by-pitch analysis immediately following a player's at-bat.

There was also a bold restoration of the Saturday Game of the Week, which the other networks had put on hiatus after 1989. Fox also established a studio show for the sport, as it did with hockey, based on its NFL success.

``Our goal with baseball, after the (1994-95) strike and everything that was going on, was to stop that momentum train by promoting the best players, by promoting the game and getting everything back to the game and its players,'' a Fox Sports official said. ``It was to say, `Look, who cares about salaries? Who cares about strikes? Let's care about Ken Griffey Jr. breaking a record or the Yankees-Braves World Series.' ''

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Photo illustration: no caption (Fox sports football, Murdoch)