SUPER BOWL XXVIII / BUFFALO BILLS vs. DALLAS COWBOYS : Switch Is On for Newton : Pro football: The tackle brings his own style, way of looking at life and unique spirit to the Cowboys.

Nate Newton welcomes you to his world with a burp and an apology.

“Excuse me,” he says, “I got in kind of late last night. Was out doing Hot lanta. Wherever it was happening, I was happening.”

Nate Newton welcomes you to his world by announcing that there will be communication in seven languages.

“I speak ghetto, ghetto style, ghetto black, Negro league, Bahamian, Jamaican . . . and that BS language that all reporters put in their newspaper,” he says.

Newton also says that a dress code will be strictly enforced.

“My shoes are from Apex,” he shouts to a bystander wearing multicolored tennis shoes. “Looks like yours are from P.T. Barnum and Bailey.”

Grooming, too, is a matter of pride.

“Just called my barber the other morning because I needed a haircut, and he needed the money,” he says, running his hands over his newly shaved head. “This is my Michael Jordan look. I ain’t got his jack, and I can’t jump, but I still want to be like Mike.”

The Dallas Cowboys hope he just stays Nate. America’s player for America’s team: Overweight, slow, self-deprecating . . . but possessing the kind of spirit that prompts common men to do uncommon things.

It is no joke that Newton has made the Pro Bowl for two consecutive seasons. Or that he has started 105 games, more than anybody else in the Cowboy offense.

And the San Francisco 49ers were not laughing Sunday in the NFC championship game when Newton and his fellow offensive linemen shoved them backward for four touchdowns in their first five drives.

He is one of the reasons the Cowboys are favored to defeat the Buffalo Bills on Sunday in the Super Bowl. Not that he doesn’t respect the Bills.

“Bruce Smith is a heck of a man, a heck of a player,” Newton says. “I just pray he doesn’t line up against me. You hear that Bruce? I like you, so don’t get mad at me.”

Not that he will be saying those things to Smith on the field.

“When it comes to joking, the guy has this switch that he turns off and on,” fellow guard Kevin Gogan says. “When he’s around us, working, that switch is off.”

The rest of the time, well, sometimes it seems as if he’s auditioning for a career in television.

“Of course I am!” he says. “Why else do you think I kiss up to Lesley Visser like I do? Why else do you see me bow at John Madden’s feet.”

Nothing is as abundant in Newton’s world as honesty.

He is the only athlete here who says to black reporters, “Hey, minority, how you doing?”

He is also the only one who chides them for standing in the back of the group.

“It’s the same way on this team, the black guys sit in the back of our bus,” he says. “So one day I sat up front and told (Coach) Jimmy Johnson, ‘I’m a man, and I got every right to be here.’

“But then I look and Jimmy has his name on his seat. So I say, ‘OK, you the man,’ and I go to the back.’ ”

Not many things are frowned upon in Newton’s world, but formality is one of them.

“When I first got to the Cowboys, I couldn’t believe that about 70 of them carried briefcases,” Newton says. “One day I looked inside one. You know what I found? A pair of underwear, a toothbrush, and a playbook.”

There are times when everything seems right in Nate Newton’s world, when he is surrounded by smiling faces and the jokes are hitting and the legend is growing.

But then there are the other times. There are jokes about weight in Newton’s world, but he doesn’t laugh at them very long.

“Everybody focuses on my body mass,” he says. “You make it a joke . . . but I’ve got to deal with it.”

With his 330 pounds on a 6-foot-3 frame, Newton will never remind anyone of a professional athlete.

He is the league’s only player whose gut is circled by diagraming TV announcers. He is referred to not only as fat but sloppy.

But it used to be even worse.

As a star at Florida A&M; in Tallahassee, he wanted to play both offense and defense, but coaches wouldn’t allow it.

“They decided I was too fat to play defense,” he says. “I would have been a dominating force, too. I would have been the No. 1 pick in the draft. Ahead of Russell Maryland. Ahead of Bruce Smith, too, although I hope Bruce don’t take that the wrong way.”

After signing with the Washington Redskins as a free agent in 1983, Newton was assessed as a good athlete with an outside chance. But he ballooned to more than 380 pounds and was cut on the final day of training camp.

He knew it was coming and that upset him, so he tried to hide so the Redskins couldn’t give him the bad news. They finally caught up with him after he had bought a case of beer and driven his car off a nearby road.

He spent the next two years with the Tampa Bay Bandits of the United States Football League. His career there was most notable for his part in a documentary about one year with the team.

The movie, locally released and entitled, “The Final Season,” featured one scene in which Newton was sitting at a restaurant, proclaiming that he wanted to eat every item on the menu.

When the Bandits folded, he was given a tryout by the Kansas City Chiefs. It lasted less than six seconds.

“I pulled a hamstring running the 40,” he says. “Can you imagine that?”

After signing with the Cowboys and being prodded into shape, he lost control of his weight again before mini-camp in the spring of 1992.

“I will never forget walking into my office on the first day of mini-camp and finding a letter on my desk,” recalls Tony Wise, former Cowboy offensive line coach who is credited with turning Newton into an All-Star. “The letter was from Nate, who said he had gone to Florida and enrolled in a weight program because he couldn’t take it anymore.

“The guy was too embarrassed to tell me himself.”

A month later Newton returned, minus about 20 pounds. Less than a year later, Newton had his first Super Bowl ring.

“When I got here, people only looked at him like a fat guy,” says Wise, now the line coach with the Chicago Bears. “He has finally changed that.”

How?

“A lack of potatoes, man,” Newton says.

Not that he still doesn’t have problems. Every other week during the season, the Cowboys make him stand on a scale. They fine him $25 for every pound over 320.

He has been fined every week. But he has proven that he can succeed at around 328, so he pays his money and Johnson looks the other way.

“I give them so much money, they have a hell of a Christmas party with it,” Newton says. “But what am I supposed to do? I’m a human being.

“And it’s not how you look or how your breath smells. It’s how you play.”

The jokes about his weight still motivate him. Some would even say that behind all of his joking is a desire to hide that weight.

He wants people not to think of him as a fat guy, but a blessed guy.

“I think of players like Jackie Slater playing 18 years and never winning one and I think, ‘Man, I’m going to enjoy this,’ ” Newton says. “I remember all those teams that used to pound us and I think, ‘Man, I want to pound teams forever.’ ”

And so he behaves, unlike 99% of the Super Bowl participants, as if he wants to laugh forever.

“I remember when I was just watching the Super Bowl,” he says.

From where, he is asked.

“From behind a bucket of fried chicken,” he says.