THE BUS MAN'S HOLIDAY; MADDEN'S LIFE: FOOTBALL, FOOD.

Byline: Richard Sandomir New York Times

John Madden was on the road. Like a pigskin Charles Kuralt, he pursues his personal nirvana from the confines of a large, earthbound vehicle.

The Rabelaisian Madden is the best-paid, best-known and, arguably, the best announcer in sports. What he loves most is standing beside Pat Summerall and calling football games. At 61, his body rhythms remain in tune with his days as a college player and pro coach. You can almost believe that he hibernates in Green Bay from February to July, when he awakens refreshed for football.

``I don't live a calendar life,'' he said, wedged into the upholstered, diner-style booth that is the sovereign's seat of power in the 45-foot-long bus. ``I live the season and the off-season. I'd be bored if I couldn't do this September, October, November, December, January. It would kill me.''

This was renewal for Madden, unwinding after Dallas' 37-7 season-opening drubbing of Pittsburgh at Three Rivers Stadium. ``Some game, huh?'' he said, not to praise the Cowboys' lopsided victory as a classic, but to seemingly mark it as the start of his 19th season in television - his fourth for Fox Sports - and his 40th in pro or college football since being drafted in 1958 by the Philadelphia Eagles.

Madden has crossed the country in a bus from preseason through the playoffs since 1987 to avoid panic attacks that made him dread flight. The interstates are as cozy to Madden as 100 yards of turf.

He traveled by train when he started at CBS in 1979, but the bus lets him move at his own pace, lets him chow down at truck stops or offbeat eateries if he has time to stop, and lets him market his Every-Guy-in-the-Easy-Boy image in stadium parking lots and along America's asphalt.

He will not fly, but his wife, Virginia, has no qualms about being aloft.

``It's unbelievable!'' he said, shaking his head of unruly, once red, now almost all gray hair. ``She's flying! She took lessons and she's flying the plane she wants to buy!''

Madden, who is paid about $7.5 million a year by Fox, is buying a new bus for next season that will let him install a treadmill. But the current edition, his second one, is hardly Kramdenesque: three TVs, including one in the bedroom, which is dominated by a queen-size bed and a desk with swivel chair; a sofa and four cushy leather chairs; a galley with a microwave to cook high-cholesterol food, and a refrigerator stocked with Dr Pepper, which he endorses (so don't ask him for a Diet Coke), and a satellite dish on the roof that lets him watch games on the move (with occasional breakup and loss of signal).

With the destination Madden's New York apartment, football was in the bus's 66-degree air. But food concerns overruled. What had people brought John Madden to eat? Madden is in sync with hearty food that fills you up, food you can get without a reservation, food you can slather with Tabasco sauce (kept on a shelf beside the booth), free food you can carry in bags from the nearest Outback Steakhouse that his drivers chance upon.

``If I talk about food on the air, I get it,'' he said, wearing a blue shirt over wrinkled khakis.

He assessed a basket of small fruits toted from western New York by the mother of Dallas Cowboys fullback Daryl Johnston. ``Moose fruit!'' he said, looking at the peaches and plums and apples. From her handwritten letter, he read aloud: ``The apple is an early variety called Pristine.''

But the Madden crew's main dining experience came in aluminum pans and a white pail that looked as if it once contained industrial cleanser. Here was sausage, chili and kluski, a noodle-and-cabbage dish no one could pronounce.

``You guys going to eat the haluschkes?'' asked Wayne Tyra, a friend of Bill Maas, also a Fox analyst, who had stocked the bus with the cuisine and had waited to see the bus off from the Three Rivers Stadium parking lot.

``Yeah, we got 'em!'' Madden said. ``We got the lupkes!''

``Coach, you're large!'' shouted Tyra, who is nicknamed ``Taz.''

``No, Taz, you're large,'' Madden said.

Do you know him, Madden was asked. No, not really, he said. But hey, it's food - heavy, masculine food - isn't it? Does it matter whether he knows Taz?

As Fran Morison, a Fox broadcast associate on Madden's production team, warmed the food to serve the group, Madden inhaled deeply.

``Mmmm,'' he said. ``The only things that smell good are fat and sugar. Tofu being boiled doesn't smell good. Anything that smells good is fattening.''

After he finished a plate of sausage, Madden shouted to Morison: ``Hey, Fran, who chose these little plates? This is a saucer. Get me a man's plate!''

``It was just an appetizer,'' said Morison, handing Madden a heaping serving on a plate fit for a Madden.

``I've got to have this haluschke,'' said Madden, digging in. ``I don't know what haluschke is.'' He probed as he ate. ``Hey, there's onions in here!''

Seeing that Lou D'Ermilio, a media director at Fox Sports, had eaten sparingly of the chili and sausage, Madden pushed him to indulge, as if he had slaved over a hot stove all morning.

``You want lupkes?'' Madden asked. ``Come on, Lou. Mangia! You can't come here and not have the lupkes. You'll love the lupkes!''

Madden did. Then, after servings of kluski, sausage and chili, Madden padded to the kitchenette and laid a smear of Jif peanut butter on a roll.

Sometime later, the smell of a skunk seemed to permeate the bus. ``That's not a skunk,'' Madden said conclusively, breathing in. ``It's the lupkes!''

About an hour into the trip, Joe Mitchell, one of the drivers, pulled into a rest stop. He and Willie Yarbrough, who rotates shifts with Mitchell on drives up to 48 straight hours, got out to cover the ``Madden'' name on the side of the bus, to deter honkers and CB users from bothering the man inside.

Sometime later, back on the road, a thought occurred to Madden, as thoughts often do, seemingly from nowhere.

``Hey, Fran, you know what? We never got the confluence,'' he said. Madden was referring to the overhead blimp shot of Three Rivers that shows the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela rivers, which never appeared during the Steelers-Cowboys broadcast. ``And what happened to our blimp?'' he asked. ``The blimp goes and the confluence is gone?''

Like Summerall, Morison replied, in deadpan: ``Well, John, the confluence is always there.''

Flipping from one game to another with his remote, Madden landed on the Baltimore-Jacksonville game. ``What's the score - hey, there's bunting!'' Like tailgate barbecue, celebratory bunting hanging from stadium fences is one of Madden's obsessions. He brings his own bunting on the bus because he likes the way it looks at baseball games. ``Baseball has better opening days and All-Star Games than the NFL does,'' he said. ``Ours stink.''

The game was also the debut of Jim Kelly, the former Bills quarterback, as an analyst for NBC. ``He probably knows what he's doing,'' Madden said. ``I didn't have any idea what to do. I didn't even know how to hold a microphone. My wife said, `Hold it like Pat does.' And that was my fourth year.''

As he watched the Jets score at will against Seattle, Madden contemplated the genius label on Jets coach Bill Parcells: ``If you win a Super Bowl before you're fired, you're a genius, and everyone listens to you. But a coach is just a guy whose best class in grammar school was recess and whose best class in high school was PE. I never thought I was anything but a guy whose best class was PE. In Oakland, Al Davis was a genius. We had Ron Wolff there too, and he was a genius. There was no room for me to be a genius.''

Pointing to the sofa, he said: ``Brett Favre sat right there in his flip-flops. Matt Millen and Bill Maas were here too, and Maas looked at Favre's feet and said, `Hey, are those fingers? Your foot looks like a hand.' So Favre said, `I can pick up a baseball and throw it with my foot.' So I had him prove it. I got my ball from my glove'' - a well-oiled black Mizuno tucked in a cranny above the couch-side window of the bus - and Favre threw it.

As the hours passed, Madden showed off some personal artifacts: a Steuben glass replica of the bus, a cap commemorating a Texas truck stop's induction into his All-Madden Haul of Fame, and Taz's homemade bottle of red wine.

``You want some?'' Madden offered. Nah. Not after the kluski.

Madden then called Sandy Montag, one of his agents, to discuss the opening-week performances of players on their football fantasy teams.

``Hey, I got eight touchdowns, including Testaverde's three,'' he said.

Football, even at a fantasy level, remains Madden's life. It has made him into an in-demand pitchman for hardware, soda, athlete's-foot balm, a steakhouse and video games. Like kluski, football nourishes him.

``Nothing jazzes me up like football,'' he said. ``I've acquired more passion of the years, not less. Not to love it wouldn't make sense.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1-2-3) Former Oakland Raiders coach John Madden, top, was known to be intense in the heat of battle, as this beleaguered official can attest. Today he's just as committed to his current profession. The coach-turned-analyst tours the NFL on wheels, right below, because of his fear of flying. ``I don't live a calendar life,'' he says, wedged into the upholstered, diner-style booth, right-above, that is the sovereign's seat of power in the 45-foot-long bus. ``I live the season and the off-season. I'd be bored if I couldn't do this in September, October, November, December, January. It would kill me.''

(1) Daily News File Photo

(2-3) Mark S. Murphy / The New York Times