NBC'S EBERSOL IS THE KING OF SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT.

Byline: Barry Horn Dallas Morning News

In the spirit of the season, we take you ``Up Close and Personal'' with a man who helped invent the art form as an Olympic researcher almost three decades ago - Dick Ebersol.

Since Ebersol, who has risen from ABC researcher at the Grenoble Winter Games in 1968 to the presidency of NBC Sports, will wield absolute control over the 171 television hours of Olympic programming from Atlanta, we thought we would allow him dominion over a few newspaper lines, as well.

But first, we could use a title for our special ``Up Close and Personal.''

We could call it ``Ebersol & Wife'' since his spouse, Susan Saint James, once played a title character opposite Rock Hudson on television's ``McMillan & Wife.'' But this really isn't a touchy-feely, home-with-the-family tale.

Or we could call it ``Saturday Night Live and the Rest of the Week, Too,'' since Ebersol was one of the show's co-creators and its original producer. But this isn't ``Entertainment Tonight.''

We'll get right to the point and simply headline Dick Ebersol's ``Up Close and Personal'': ``The Man Who Bought the Olympics.''

That's precisely what the savvy and suave Ebersol has done. Using three decades worth of connections and good will, he has made the Olympics an NBC staple.

He was the force behind the deal that landed the Atlanta Games on NBC for $456 million. At his urging and by his enterprise, NBC also owns the rights to the Summer Olympics in 2000, 2004 and 2008. The Winter Olympics in 2002 and 2006 also belong to NBC.

Bottom line for Ebersol's excellent Olympic Adventure: NBC and its parent company, General Electric, have committed $4 billion to televise six of the next seven Olympics.

Only the 1998 Winter Games from Nagano, Japan, do not belong to NBC. They are CBS'. Ebersol says he didn't want them because he looked at the Nagano Games as one giant slalom of headaches. So NBC didn't bid.

Does he regret not bidding for Nagano or any sporting event since assuming command of NBC Sports in May 1989?

``No,'' says Ebersol, taking an unlit Cuban cigar from his mouth, placing it between the index and middle fingers of his right hand and pointing for emphasis.

The 1998 Winter Games may be the only thing NBC Sports has not bid on during its golden Ebersol Era. Since he took control, Ebersol has acquired the NBA, golf's U.S. Open, Notre Dame football and a Summer Olympics monopoly and managed to keep the NFL when CBS couldn't.

This year alone, NBC has televised the Cowboys' victory in Super Bowl XXX, the NBA Finals, baseball's All-Star Game, the U.S. Open, and Wimbledon. Add the Atlanta Olympics, and never before has any manager put together such a murderers' row of premier sports events.

In the course of a two-hour conversation in his 15th-floor midtown office, Ebersol rattles off the stories behind the deals. His dollar amounts are down to the penny. His dates are precise, down to quarter hours.

He is, he concedes, ``rather compulsive'' about such things.

Did Ebersol ever have any problems selling his bosses, NBC president Bob Wright and GE chairman Jack Welch, on his pricey Olympic ideals?

``I don't want to appear arrogant, but I have a pretty healthy ego,'' Ebersol says. ``. . . At General Electric, you are allowed to grow and blossom as far as you can go until you screw up on a series of things. And we haven't screwed up on a series of things at any time in the last seven years. . . . No, it was not a hard sell.''

Duncan Dickie Ebersol's vision for his future came while peering through thick glasses at the television in his parents' comfortable home in Litchfield, Conn.

It was 1961. It was a Saturday. Ebersol sat mesmerized as he watched a new concept in television programming, a sports anthology, ``ABC's Wide World of Sports.''

``I knew within a month of `Wide World' going on the air that being involved with something like that was what I wanted to do with my life,'' he says.

Three years later, Ebersol went to France for his senior year in high school. He took particular interest in an auto race, the 24 Hours of LeMans, which he was determined to visit for a special reason.

``There were 800,000 people there looking to watch a car race,'' he recalls. ``I was looking to find anybody from `Wide World of Sports.' I was looking to get hired. I did. I became a go-fer, as in go for coffee, go for ice cream, go for cigarettes.''

Ebersol worked his new-found relationship into a part-time job when he returned home to attend college at Yale.

While Yale running back Calvin Hill was prepping for his Cowboys' career and quarterback Brian Dowling was inspiring a ``Doonesbury'' cartoon character, Ebersol was working production on ABC college football telecasts as well as the network's NBA games.

In May 1967, Ebersol was invited to join ABC Sports full time by its president, Roone Arledge. Ebersol's first assignment was to research the backgrounds of athletes who would be competing in the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble and the Summer Games in Mexico City.

ABC's only previous Olympic experience, the 1964 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, had gone well. But Arledge returned home annoyed that his announcers seemed to know so little about the athletes outside the arena.

``He would always read the next day in the press clippings that the person who had won the 1,000-meter speed skating, for example, had been the child of Dutch resistance fighters or something like that. Roone was annoyed that they would never get that in the television stories.''

It was Ebersol's task to make sure television told those personal stories. ``My job was to get to know the athletes, the people who run the federations that govern the individual sports and the people who run the Olympics.''

With Arledge's guidance and Ebersol's eye for detail, it wasn't long before ``Up Close and Personal'' became an Olympic staple.

By the time the Munich Summer Olympics rolled around in 1972, Ebersol was Arledge's executive assistant. Ebersol was in charge of program development at ABC Sports.

On the night of Sept. 4, 1972, Arledge and Ebersol remained alone in the ABC compound long after their telecast day was done. There was a problem with the NCAA football contract. Arledge wanted Ebersol to straighten it out.

That done, Arledge and Ebersol left the studio, stood in fading moonlight and discussed how well the Games were going. As the sun threatened to come over the horizon, they finally decided to call it a night at the urging of a chauffeur who thought 5:30 a.m. time to go to sleep.

Minutes later, Arab terrorists came out of the darkness, walked past the spot where the two television executives had basked in the glorious Games, scaled a fence and launched an attack that would leave 11 Israeli Olympians and a West German policeman dead. It remains the opinion of German police that had Arledge and Ebersol stayed much longer, robbing the precious darkness from the terrorists, they would have been killed.

When Ebersol left ABC for NBC at age 27 in 1974, he thought he had worked his last Olympics. At NBC, he would be director of weekend late-night programming.

Ebersol's first splash came with a rock music show, ``The Midnight Special.'' A year later, ``Saturday Night Live'' was born. At 28, he was the youngest vice president ever at NBC.

By 1977, Ebersol was in charge of network specials as well as its comedy and variety departments.

In September 1981, Ebersol met Susan Saint James while she served as a guest host on ``Saturday Night Live.'' Two months later, they married.

While Saint James starred on CBS' ``Kate and Allie'' from 1984 to 1989, Ebersol retreated to Litchfield, where he grew up, and worked out of home as an independent producer.

Most of his deals were with NBC. In 1989, NBC Sports president Arthur Watson retired in the wake of the Seoul Olympics. On the same April night that ``Kate and Allie'' taped its last show, husband and wife had dinner with NBC president Bob Wright. Together, they celebrated Ebersol's return to the network as the boss of its sports division.

Before her husband took the job, Saint James asked Ebersol what he hoped to accomplish.

``I said I always wanted to do an Olympics like Roone did the Olympics, and this is my chance,'' Ebersol says. NBC already owned the rights to 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona.

``Look, I love pro football. I love basketball,'' he says. ``But I was given the opportunity to be one of the earliest of my generation to see the Olympic movement up close. It is my passion.''

Roone. Roone. Roone.

The name of Ebersol's old boss at ABC punctuates his sentences when the topic is the Olympics.

Says Ebersol: ``One man came up with a blueprint (for televising an Olympics), and it was Roone.''

And . . . ``I am taking Roone's landscape.''

And . . . ``I worry about what Roone might be saying before the Olympics.''

And . . . ``NBC is wonderful about tolerating my relationship with Roone because they know how important it is to me. He is like a father figure. He taught me about production and, even more important, what promotion is all about.''

Says Roone Arledge, who slipped from the presidency of ABC Sports to the presidency of ABC News: ``He (Ebersol) is clearly the class of the field. He had done a spectacular job there even before getting all those Olympics.

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Photo

Photo: Dick Ebersol started as a gaffer for ABC Sports, the n producer of `Saturday Night Live,' then president of NBC Sports.

Daily News File Photo