They’re Checking the Standings Before the Ledger : Eddie DeBartolo Jr.: 49er owner knows what he wants and is willing to spend whatever he thinks is necessary to get it.

Eddie DeBartolo Jr., who has owned the San Francisco 49ers since 1977, isn’t much like anyone else in pro football.

For one thing, his is the richest NFL family. He and his father can put their hands on $1.4 billion.

Second, although he has been in California long enough to know better, DeBartolo keeps going back to live in Youngstown, Ohio.

Third, he’s in football to win. Whereas the profit motive drives some others to “maximize our financial potential,” as some owners say, DeBartolo, who builds shopping malls for a living, is in football to maximize his Super Bowl appearances.

So when there was a fight over former Raider linebacker Matt Millen last summer between the 49ers and Rams, it lasted only about 35 seconds. The Rams dropped out of the Millen bidding as soon as DeBartolo made his first offer.

DeBartolo is a knockout puncher. He usually gets his way. Nobody pushes him around. Last spring, for example, a bunch of NFL Establishment figures tried to put one over on him--in his view--and failed.

The way he reacted has changed the face of the 70-year-old league.

DeBartolo was insulted, he said later, at the Palm Desert pro football convention in March. Club owners representing the NFL’s old guard planned to guarantee the election of one of their own as commissioner--succeeding Pete Rozelle--by excluding the younger owners from the search committee.

DeBartolo instantly raised the roof, stirring up those who were at first only tepidly on his side. And in the end they defeated Establishment candidate Jim Finks, facilitating the election of Paul Tagliabue.

Feisty but friendly and more candid than most owners, DeBartolo, a short, swarthy businessman is a man who knows what he wants. And today, of course, what he wants is a Super Bowl victory.

At 2:15 p.m., in the packed Superdome crowd, he will be one of the two spectators who want it most. The other is the owner of the Denver Broncos, Pat Bowlen, 45, who got his law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1968, the year that DeBartolo, 43, graduated from Notre Dame.

That DeBartolo already has three Super Bowl rings--to Bowlen’s none--hasn’t kept the 49er owner from striving for one more.

“It isn’t much fun if you don’t win,” DeBartolo said at his New Orleans hotel the other day. “The only reason you’re in football is to win the Super Bowl.”

FOOTBALL MAN

On some clubs, there has been grumbling this season that DeBartolo is using his fortune to buy Super Bowl championships. There is a perception that teams owned by some of the NFL’s poorer millionaires don’t have much chance against a billionaire.

And it is true that the bottom line isn’t DeBartolo’s first consideration in San Francisco.

Whenever he gets a chance, he lays out large sums for more talent, although the 49ers have lost money in each of the last two seasons while fielding championship teams that sold out Candlestick Park in 16 consecutive games.

Ten months ago, DeBartolo was a big player in the Plan B market, paying more than $2 million to a group of five NFL castoffs.

Next, he outbid other owners for two useful veterans, starting linebacker Millen and nose tackle Jim Burt, who played for the New York Giants in the 1987 Super Bowl.

Is he taking advantage of the NFL with his wealth?

“If you’ll think it through, I think you will agree with me that any (NFL owner) can compete this way,” DeBartolo said, noting that a lot of franchise holders have a lot of money.

He noted further that pro football’s astronomical expenses are the ones that are more or less fixed--the basic payroll, for instance. Around the league these costs are similar.

“The (free agents) and the other extras we get don’t add that much,” DeBartolo said. “It’s like buying insurance.

“But I’ll tell you this. If it weren’t for Millen and the other (depth) we had this season, there’s no way we’re in this Super Bowl. We lost some really great defensive starters to injury--Jeff Fuller, Riki Ellison, Jim Fahnhorst, Michael Carter.”

Earlier in the ‘80s, the loss of such talent is what kept the Chicago Bears, New York Giants and even the 49ers from contending for repeat titles.

This time, the champion 49ers made it back in large part because of a policy change funded by DeBartolo after the decision was made by Bill Walsh in his final years as their coach, a decision to acquire gifted backups at any cost.

Walsh’s objective: to keep a quality team on the field even if half the team goes down with injuries.

“We don’t have the NFL’s highest-paid starters,” said 49er General Manager John McVay. “(Free safety) Ronnie Lott is the only guy we have who leads the league in salary at his position. But we have the league’s highest-paid backups.”

One of the splendid examples, McVay said, is Terry Tausch, a 49er guard who has often played as a regular this season since coming over from Minnesota in Plan B.

Anyone offering a $5,000 reward to any fan correctly identifying Terry Tausch last year might never have had to pay it. But in the esoteric regions of the NFL, he was widely admired because he played backup for the talent-rich Vikings.

Accordingly, when Minnesota cut him loose, San Francisco got into a bidding war with five teams. Talking about it last week, Tausch said: “(The 49ers) called and said to go and see the (five other) teams, and then see (DeBartolo) at the end.”

At the end, DeBartolo topped them all with a $1-million offer, including $350,000 this season in salary and signing bonuses.

That’s where DeBartolo’s money goes. And as he said, that’s why he’s here.

Said Millen: “In the short time I’ve been with (the 49ers), the thing that’s struck me is the way they go out and get anything they need.”

Former NFL coach Sid Gillman said: “But that’s not buying a pennant. You can’t buy pennants. The Red Sox, Angels and others have tried it.

“The 49ers have made the Super Bowl by (identifying) the right personnel to go after-- not by throwing money around. They waste less money on bad decisions than most teams.”

COMPANY MAN

Eddie DeBartolo is a man of two families, one in San Francisco, one in Youngstown. On Sunday afternoons, he is more fond, perhaps, of the 49er family, but the rest of the year he’ll take Youngstown.

He was born there, went to grade school and high school there, married a high school girlfriend there and has always lived there.

“It’s home,” he said. “It’s a small Midwestern city, a good place for raising children, a place where you can appreciate the change of the seasons. My oldest friends are my neighbors. The best guys I know, I went to school with in Youngstown. Some of them still live on my street.

“They say that you can’t go back, and I guess you can’t. But you can stay, and I’ve stayed.”

It was in high school that DeBartolo began dating Candy Papalia, who became his wife and the mother of his three daughters.

A half-century ago, Candy’s father ran a grocery store in a Youngstown suburb.

A century or so ago, DeBartolo’s grandfather was a paving contractor who put in many of the streets and curbs of Youngstown.

In time, DeBartolo’s father--E. J. DeBartolo, Sr., 78--branched out, first into the construction of duplexes and houses, and then, after World War II, into shopping malls. “My father got into (malls) at just the right time, just when America was ready for such an evolutionary (development),” DeBartolo said.

Over the years, their corporation has built about 100 million square feet of retail shopping space in malls from coast to coast. It’s a cash-rich family, financing its own projects. “We own and operate everything we build,” DeBartolo said.

His father, who preceded him to Notre Dame and recently contributed $30 million to Notre Dame, still heads the company from an office in Youngstown.

At 14, DeBartolo began at the bottom, shoveling snow and mowing lawns at a Youngstown mall. He joined full time after college, and at 32 advanced to president and, eventually, chief administrative officer of a corporation with 14,000 employees and associates, many of them engineers, architects and lawyers.

Said DeBartolo’s father: “The two of us run the company together.”

They operate, among other things, a private airline for company executives. All, including Eddie, spend too much of their lives aloft, they frequently say.

The 49ers were priced at $17 million when DeBartolo bought the team. He and the 49ers both turned 30 that year. Thirteen winters later, the franchise is worth an estimated $100 million. “Eddie was here before Bill Walsh or any of us were here,” said another Notre Dame man, Joe Montana. “He had some tough years at first (with four different coaches in four consecutive losing seasons.) But he learned how to win.”

Having learned, DeBartolo has made the playoffs the last seven years. He is the only owner who has. Can he keep it up?

“Winners draft low, and that’s supposed to make it tough,” he said. “But we’ve had a lot of practice drafting low. We’re experienced at it now. We have the same scouts. We’ll meet the challenge.”