They’re Checking the Standings Before the Ledger : Pat Bowlen: Bronco owner has knocked heads with the old guard with an unabashed style. His technique is working.

How to describe Bronco owner Pat Bowlen . . .

Visionary in blue jeans?

A players’ owner, the Bronco without a number?

Gentleman athlete, who finished Hawaii’s Ironman Triathlon?

Overage fraternity kid on a never-ending spring break?

Yeah, that’ll do for a start. After decades of owners whose basic philosophy was, “No comment,” who had the color of an ice cube, meet one of the leading spirits of the New NFL Wave. If these guys consolidate their beachhead, this game isn’t ever going to be the same.

Bowlen intends to, get this, bid for free agents . So forget that cozy gentlemen’s club; there goes the neighborhood.

Bowlen wants to clean out the Rozelle Gang, outgoing Commissioner Pete’s band of loyal bureaucrats. Bowlen has referred to the once-hallowed league office on swank Park Avenue as “a rabbit warren,” noted it was “living in the Middle Ages” and said of Rozelle, himself:

“Pete was basically Godzilla.”

And decorum?

Let’s just say Art Rooney never had a week like this:

--Item: Bowlen jokingly refers to Jerry Rice as “a Chinaman.” Rice, China, get it?

San Francisco’s Chinese-American community didn’t, and Bowlen was obliged to apologize.

--Item: Bowlen calls Super Bowl week in New Orleans “an adult experience.”

The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce noted the city’s many family activities. Bowlen got away without an outright apology but has had to explain he didn’t mean it that way.

--Item: At Pascal Minale’s, a restaurant chock-full of press, Bowlen sent a young woman to the table of 49er owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr., his good friend. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the woman produced a 49er pennant from beneath her garments and offered it to DeBartolo’s right-hand man, Carmen Policy. Policy embraced the woman fondly.

What was it to be this time--apology, explanation?

“Well, don’t write about it, unless you want to get me in a bunch of trouble,” Bowlen said.

In all, no one has had a Super Bowl like this since Joe Namath. Oh yes, Bowlen also predicted a Bronco victory, distressing Coach Dan Reeves.

As omens go, that’s about the best you can do for the Broncos, but every little bit helps.

Appearances notwithstanding, Bowlen was to the manor born, or at least the oil patch.

He is descended from a Canadian pioneer family. His grandfather was lieutenant governor of Alberta. His father was an oil baron. Pat was educated at the University of Oklahoma, where he also tried out as a walk-on for the football team. He didn’t make it and isn’t expansive about the experience. He liked to jump in his car Thursday night and drive to Vail or Aspen.

We’re talking p-l-a-y-b-o-y.

“I was hell-bent for leather in every way,” he once said. “If anybody was in trouble, it was me. I did the general things that boys do. As I got older, it got worse.”

He became a lawyer, worked in his father’s business and branched off into real estate development. His company built Edmonton’s Northlands Coliseum.

In his 20s, he ballooned to 210 pounds before undergoing a conversion. He stopped smoking and began jogging. Now at 45, he’s a lean, mean, bicycle-riding machine of 6-2, 178 pounds.

In 1984, he bought the Broncos from the Kaiser family--for $70 million.

“The Kaisers were strictly business,” said Jim Turner, the former kicker who is now a talk-show host and Bowlen’s bike-riding buddy.

“Get the equity up and get out. They bought it for $29 million, held it for 23 months and sold it for $70 million.”

Bowlen reportedly had to overcome his father’s objections to buy the team. There have been reports that the purchase price, the high overhead and the oil slump left Bowlen in a liquidity crunch, and there was speculation from the day he arrived that he might sell.

Bowlen said he borrowed from the league but would never sell.

He was a leading figure in last season’s fight to limit training camp rosters to 80 players. Teams such as the Raiders customarily brought in 120. Nor did he ingratiate himself to the old guard when he stopped preaching fiscal responsibility long enough to hand Buffalo’s Bruce Smith a $7.5-million, five-year offer sheet.

The Bills’ owner, Ralph Wilson, obliged to match it to keep his player, was reportedly furious, although in old-guard style, he held his tongue in public.

“Listen,” Bowlen said, “first of all we’re in the game to win it. At the time we bid on Bruce Smith, we thought he was the best defensive player in football and certainly a guy who played a position we needed (to fill) very badly.

“If John Elway was out there as a free agent, I’m sure there’d be a number of clubs lining up to bid for his services. I expect that. I don’t accept the fact that there’s any kind of unwritten rule.

“My personal philosophy is this: We waste a lot of money on players coming into the league who can’t play the game. . . . But the star players, the John Elways, the Bruce Smiths, the Dan Marinos who have earned their spurs--I mean, they’re great players in the game. They’re entertainers. They should get paid whatever they can draw for their services. I don’t have any problem paying John the way I do ($2.1 million a year). I think John has shown he’s ‘the man.’ ”

Like DeBartolo, whose lavish spending has long alienated him from the old guard, Bowlen pays top dollar.

DeBartolo lined up with Bowlen and other new owners in the Paul Tagliabue-Jim Finks commissionership impasse, even though DeBartolo’s financial situation was hardly as perilous.

“If I had Eddie’s money,” Bowlen said, “I’d burn mine.”

Better times are coming. NFL teams expect at least a $10-million raise, above the $17 million they’ve been getting, from the new TV package. The owners who bought in during the high-priced 1980s are about to get over the hump.

In Denver, Bowlen is a good deal less controversial. Accessible and good-natured, he is well liked by the press and takes pains to put reporters at ease.

His players couldn’t wish for anyone better.

Receiver Mark Jackson remembers the first time he saw Bowlen . . . and blinked.

“He’s out on the field, he’s got on jeans and cowboy boots,” Jackson said. “He’s got this little red thing he pulls into a chair, and he sits out there and watches practice.

“And I thought, ‘Well, he’s a businessman, he’s got to be out doing something else.’ I mean, I wouldn’t expect him to be there at practice, and he’s there a lot of the time.

“I think Pat Bowlen is an athlete at heart. He runs marathons. I think--he told us, so I won’t say I think--he’s told us that he lives some of his fantasies through us.”

Nor are the Broncos often beset by contract problems.

“I walked out of camp for a day once,” Jackson said. “He called me up and said to come by the office. I went by, no agents or anything around. I was kind of afraid to do that. He assured me, ‘Hey, we’ll take care of that.’ He said, ‘I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know how you felt. You never came and talked to me.’ Sometimes you feel like that with an owner, like you can’t just go and talk to him and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a problem.’ But he’s not that type. He rectified the problem. Next day, I was back in camp.”

But this isn’t Denver, it’s New Orleans, and we’re having a wild week.

Bowlen may be high profile in restaurants, but he’s staying lowprofile with the press. He said he doesn’t really like the public aspect of his role, although he could have fooled anyone the day after the AFC title game, when he hippity-hopped up to reporters and made his Chinaman and it’ll-be-an-upset-if-we-lose declarations.

At midweek here, Bowlen granted a lone group interview but he seemed subdued.

Was he gun-shy?

“I don’t consider a football team to be a toy,” Bowlen said. “I look at it as very much of a business. It’s the entertainment business, like I imagine, being the head of a movie studio would be. But it’s a business first. If guys are in football because it’s a toy or for their own egos--that might have been the case before I got involved.

“Now they’re no longer considered toys. You can ask the last five, six guys who came into the league if they think they just bought a toy. They’re trying to make enough money to make ends meet.”

And his loose-cannon week?

“I don’t like to think of myself as a loose cannon,” he said, smiling. “Although I have to admit that every once in a while something comes out of my mouth that you guys can . . .

“It’s never the important things. It’s always the stupid things--boom! There they are in the headlines.”

Sadder but wiser, a rising power in the NFL faces the ‘90s. If only he can make it through the weekend.