Rome’s Empire Grows : * Jim Rome has carved out a niche as one of radio’s hottest personalities. Now he has moved his sports-talk format into television.

“My hair is on fire right now,” says Jim Rome as he hustles around his squat radio booth. “If you could get inside my head right now and see what’s going on, you wouldn’t believe it. This interview, that interview, the TV show. This is crazy. Even by my standards.”

And by Jim Rome’s standards, it has to get more than crazy. He doesn’t oversee an asylum, however. Rome is gamekeeper of “The Jungle,” an ever-expanding, multimedia environment filled with sports talk. When Rome-talk reaches its pinnacle, it’s known as “smack,” and his “Jungle dwellers” deliver most of it when they dial up his weekday (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.) radio show on XTRA-AM (670 in the West Valley and 690 in the East Valley) or his 3-month-old live TV show, “Talk 2,” airing at 7:30 p.m. weeknights on ESPN 2, ESPN’s hip MTV-ized sister channel.

Rome is on the cusp of the hot wave in AM radio--sports talk, the extension, as he terms it, “of those guys talking it up in the sports bars, the ones who just can’t have enough.” Rome’s listeners--followers, really--are more than that. They include many women callers with a great interest in hockey (yes, hockey), would-be sports writers who send in faxes, vying for the daily “Huge Fax of the Day” prize, and an enormous number of Howard Stern fans, radio’s most ferocious listeners.

And, to think it all emerges from a humble corner of Fallbrook Mall, at the curious location of the tiny San Fernando Valley satellite station of Simi Valley-based KWNK-AM (leased as the Los Angeles station by San Diego-based XTRA, which is angling for a stronger L.A. presence). “High Above Hot Dog on a Stick,” in Rome’s intentionally cryptic sign-on phrase.

The Stern connection isn’t some imagined claim of sports-addled callers; Rome says he and XTRA management know that when Stern goes off the air at 11 a.m., many Stern listeners switch over to Rome. At one of Rome’s regular live appearances at the Charley Brown’s restaurant chain during the NFL season (what became known in 1992 as Rome’s “World Tour,” and which concludes Sunday in Universal City), passionate Jungle dweller John Johnson of Newport Beach insisted to this writer that Rome is “the Howard Stern of sports radio.”

Rome knows that Stern is hated by some, but that doesn’t matter; he considers Johnson’s remark a compliment: “Stern’s a little too crass, and I don’t need all that T & A, but he’s a very sharp guy, and he says things other people are afraid to say.”

Nevertheless, Rome’s radio is never below the belt. Compared to Stern, it is nearly puritanical. But compared to the rest of a sports radio world swamped in statistics and near-comatose athletes trying to verbalize in complete sentences, Rome’s show is a dazzling display of sarcasm, wit and wiseacre banter that blends well with the show’s signature tunes, Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.”

Welcome, maybe, but The Jungle isn’t easy to penetrate. The talk is steeped in “The Glossary,” a list of nutty, shorthand terms that can make new listeners think they’ve tuned into Radio Albania. “The University of Ed” is USC, for the school’s horse mascot, Challenger (“he’s like Mister Ed”). “Domers” are fans of Notre Dame, known for its golden-domed campus building. “Milk Carton” is Indianapolis Colts quarterback Jeff George, who, during his preseason holdout with the team, vanished from public view.

“Yeah, I know The Glossary alienates some people,” Rome says, though he’s amused when told that even ESPN 2 publicists don’t understand the lingo. “Just don’t tell me that you don’t like me the first day you listen. Give me two weeks. If you think I’m a jerk after that, well, we tried. And I’m going real soft with The Glossary on the TV show.”

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The latest attempt to compare Rome to some other media personality comes from Sporting News writer Bruce Schoenfeld, who describes him as “part Bob Costas, part Eric Bogosian.”

All this is a little much for Rome, a 29-year-old Hidden Hills native, who says that at Calabasas High School, “The incredible irony was, I was real shy. It was at UC Santa Barbara where I started to bloom. I was at the college radio station, a bigger fish on campus. ‘Watch this guy,’ they said, ‘he’s going somewhere, he’s got charisma.’ ”

After graduation in the mid-80s, Rome was going nowhere. He had dreams “of being in Yupville with the BMW and the condo” and figured he would take over his father’s textile company. He tried to sell the company’s merchandise, but he realized that his heart wasn’t in it--nor in the dictation and phone equipment he later tried to peddle.

Desperate, he called KTMS-AM in Santa Barbara, where he had interned during college. “I said, ‘Do you have anything, anything at all?’ I had to get back into radio, even if there was no money in it.” What the station had was a traffic reporter position at $5 an hour. Management pressed him so much for accident reports that he made them up (“Great practice at ad-libbing”) and he finessed his way into the sports call-in slot.

Rome relishes anecdotes of how he got from little KTMS to sprawling 50,000-watt XTRA: how he knew the right media friend who put him in touch with Sports Illustrated, which liberally quoted him in a story on sports talk radio; how he made sure he was at the KTMS news phone when other stations called in for information on the Santa Barbara fires of 1990 just so he could be heard in other radio markets; how he would pummel XTRA with faxes and tapes of his broadcasts.

Rome’s fit with XTRA’s brash, personality based philosophy now seems remarkable: After joining the station in 1990, he moved from a weekend show to weekly evenings, and in August of 1992, to the current midday slot. The ESPN 2 hiring compelled Rome to move back to his hometown, and with it, a firm spot as the most sizzling radio show emerging from the Valley.

“You know what listeners think?” Rome says between on-air interviews with such biting sports journalists as the Detroit Free-Press’ Mitch Albom and the Washington Post’s Norman Chad. “That I walk in here five minutes before I go on the air at 11. When I tell them that I start work at 5:30 a.m., they go, ‘Huh?’ I’m driven. I’m a grinder. I love the process of the preparation, the smack, the people. It’s a total work ethic . . . I’m running on a treadmill, and I can’t get off.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: Jim Rome’s “World Tour” live appearance, Charley Brown’s, 3620 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Universal City.

Hours: 5 p.m. Sunday.

Price: Free

Call: (818) 980-8132.