KNOWING IT ALL

Keith Olbermann can’t stop talking.

The words flow in undulating paragraphs, complete with semicolons and parenthetical asides, as he eats Sunday brunch. He speaks at a pace more measured than his TV delivery--which is slightly slower than frenetic--and softens his familiar baritone, roughened by years of cigars and pipes, to a lawn mower’s purr.

“Previously, sports was a diversion and an area for hero-worship,” he says, his Groucho Marx eyebrows bristling as he digs into his granola yogurt and berries. “Now sports has become a secret code by which we debate the really important matters in society. Look at South Carolina. That damn Confederate flag has been there since the Dixiecrats, for 50-plus years. But they didn’t take action until [football coaches] Lou Holtz and Tommy Bowden and a bunch of other guys you previously thought were well back on that ‘I’m-going-to-stick-my-neck-out-for-something’ line, well behind Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, who were dead silent on this . . . those guys participate in a little rally [against the flag] and the New York Knicks cancel their training camp and Serena Williams says she won’t play at Hilton Head . . . .”

It’s Keith Olbermann, unplugged. And if you’re listening, he’s talking. Maybe he’s right. Maybe sports is bigger than the final score, maybe it does reflect and help shape society. Or maybe he’s full of it. Maybe sports is just sports. Maybe he gets away with it because his audience (to put it delicately) isn’t terribly informed or doesn’t take it seriously when someone dresses up the incidental as profound.

The debate over this colorful 41-year-old broadcaster is as acerbic as his reputation. Is he brilliant? Does he suck every last bit of oxygen from a room? Can both sides be right? Regardless of your answer, there is one indisputable truth about Olbermann: He’s the most independent thinker in sports broadcasting, the modern heir to Howard Cosell. Olbermann’s opinionated insights, backed by an Ivy League education and an encyclopedic knowledge of sports history, meld into a style that’s made him a pivotal figure in the titanic struggle for supremacy between sports broadcasting giants Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Sports Net and Disney’s ESPN.

In 1998, Fox Sports Net signed him to a three-year, $8-million contract, plus a car and driver, not so he would merely narrate daily sports replays. No, Olbermann was expected to supply the network with a face, an attitude and, most important, a bellwether voice.

And so, with little prodding, Olbermann does what he was hired to do and what he was born to do: he talks and talks and talks. To sit with him for an hour, which stretches to 90 minutes and makes necessary two additional interviews because his lengthy tangents lead to so many follow-up questions, is to sit with the brainiac from junior high, complete with nerdy glasses and ever-present smirk.

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WE ALL KNEW KEITH OLBERMANNS IN SCHOOL. THEY WERE THE smart ones, maybe a touch shy or smart-alecky, who would have traded IQ points for a chance to score on court. They didn’t have the size or quickness to make the team, but they picked up on the lingo and the locker room humor. At Tarrytown, just outside New York City, Olbermann never rose above intramural sports in high school, aside from appearing for a single at-bat with the freshman baseball team. After that, he resigned himself to being student manager and statistician for the team.

Yet he never lost his fascination with sports, especially baseball, even if he loved it more than it loved him. He’d grown up on New York Yankees baseball and Rangers hockey broadcasts, and the enlightened sportscasts of former-Yankee-pitcher-turned-announcer Jim Bouton. Something of a prodigy, Olbermann embarked on his own broadcast career before the age of 13. At his high school radio station, the student sports director, a big lunk named Chris Berman, now better known as ESPN’s ubiquitous “Boomer,” needed someone to do play-by-play broadcasts of hockey and baseball. Soon Olbermann was at the mike, developing the basic skills of a play-by-play announcer.

His on-air shtick came later, while he was a freshman at Cornell University. There, while gathering material from the wire services one night for his sports show at the student radio station, he listened to a local sportscaster and realized that the content of their shows was identical. He needed something extra.

“I knew that there were people who spoke better than I did, more mellifluous and more announcerish,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe if it makes me laugh, it might make them laugh.’ So I told it the way it was. In the middle of my sportscast was 31/2 minutes of Howard Cosell, not sugarcoating anything, and then I’d end it with something that amused me, something I found ironic, a punch line that both filled the need to tell the story and made a point or made a laugh.”

He began integrating the verbal flights of fancy of his comedic heroes--Monty Python, Soupy Sales and, most significant, Bob and Ray. He interned at a television station while in college, and after earning his degree in communication arts at age 20, he began working for radio networks in the New York metropolitan area. Next came CNN, where he stayed for three years before moving to Los Angeles in 1985 as the KTLA sports director. There he quickly became known as a quipster, the guy who once delivered the sports report while eating prime rib.

He was edgy and funny, but he had a depth few others in the business possessed. Behind every crack was a bank of knowledge, giving him a style that melds Mencken-esque commentary with enlightened reporting. He’s not alone in his pointed commentary. NBC’s Bob Costas serves up his share of pithy analysis, as do Fox’s Jim Rome and several others. But Olbermann is the feistiest and the most unfettered.

He also comes the closest to upholding the legacy of Cosell, the sportscaster who dared to question the power system of sports, which he dubbed the “jockocracy.” Cosell brought chutzpah to the press box. But “Humble Howard” developed a reputation as a bombastic know-it-all, with ego and temper to match. By the time ABC pushed Cosell off the air in the mid-1980s, he’d alienated almost everyone in the business.

With his penchant for making enemies of the brass, Olbermann is following a perilously similar path. He also has a trait Cosell did not: He is restless, never staying with one network or job.

After three years at KTLA, Olbermann jumped to KCBS, where his reputation as a perfectionist and wiseacre flowered. When his three-year contract ended, so did his tenure at the station. “He made political enemies,” says Jim Lampley, an HBO sports commentator who was then KCBS’ news anchor. “If there was any hint of corporate pressure, he bristled. And he bristles loud when he bristles.”

Olbermann, it turns out, had another option--one that dwarfed the traditional two-minute sports report on local news stations. The all-sports network ESPN had started in 1979 like a garage band, with much enthusiasm and little money. By the late 1980s, however, ESPN had usurped ABC’s mantle as the country’s premier sports network, revered by sports fans and athletes alike.

Olbermann moved to ESPN in 1992, and his partnership with co-anchor Dan Patrick changed the face of sports television. Patrick is stolid in the manner of Harrison Ford--unflappable, with a deadpan delivery and sly wit. He proved to be the perfect “tag team” with Olbermann: think Trapper John and Hawkeye Pierce.

Hip and irreverent, the two anchors wrote their own material, infusing the highlights with lingo you began to hear at the gym. Patrick trademarked “en fuego,” for a player whose game was sizzling, and the basketball term “nothing but the bottom of the net.” Olbermann chimed in with his own samplings, many of which were homages to radio greats: a long basketball shot “from way downtown . . . bang!” came from the Celtics’ play-by-play man Johnny Most. “He hit the ball real hard” was gleaned from a Bob and Ray sketch.

“The partnership just worked without us trying to make it work,” says Patrick. People magazine put them among “The 40 Most Fascinating People on TV,” and the two wrote a top-selling book called “The Big Show.”

In 1993, Olbermann helped launch ESPN2, the Gen-X stepchild devoted largely to non-mainstream sports. But “The Deuce,” as the new channel was called, was a splashy mess and Olbermann didn’t mesh with Suzy Kolber, his peppy co-anchor, who says she lost confidence in him, believing he wanted to abandon ship. “I adored him initially, I thought he was great,” Kolber says in New York Times reporter Mike Freeman’s new book, “ESPN: The Uncensored History.” Shortly before the show was launched, “when everything got rocky, he quit,” Kolber continued. “That was the first time I realized that he didn’t understand what being captain of the team meant.”

Olbermann insists that his “resignation” was a stunt planned to fix a chaotic situation. “I staged that,” he says. “We were within weeks of going on the air and they had not scheduled any rehearsals. I was waiting for an opportunity, and when it came--and I don’t even remember what it was over--I just started screaming. I came back two hours later and said to Suzy, ‘Whaddya think?’ Within a day, they scheduled rehearsal time.”

After six tumultuous months, Olbermann leaped back to Patrick and “SportsCenter.” The show continued to thrive, but Olbermann felt increasingly unhappy. ESPN’s studios are in the small town of Bristol, Conn. Olbermann found Bristol remote, especially for someone single and unable to drive a car (a freak head injury suffered while he was running for a subway left him with poor depth perception).

He also says he clashed with John Walsh, ESPN’s most powerful executive. “We had a meeting with Walsh after the NBA Finals in ‘94, and he told us that everything we were doing on the air was despicable, ruining his reputation, destroying the network,” Olbermann says. “I think Dan was devastated because he wasn’t confident enough in what we were doing. I’m always confident enough to presume that whoever in management is telling me I’m wrong may not be there next week, and that I’m more likely to survive than they are.”

Walsh denies that their relationship was poor. “I thought we had a very good relationship. Sure, we had disagreements, the kind of stuff that’s considered part of the job. He gave us 51/2 great years.”

With Olbermann’s contract due to expire in 1997, the two sides began discussing a new deal. Olbermann says he wanted to reduce his commitment to ESPN--pairing with Patrick one night a week while branching out professionally by working for Court TV and other broadcasting companies the rest of the week. But the negotiations fell apart for several reasons, including Olbermann’s unauthorized appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” to promote his and Patrick’s book.

“Keith wasn’t the only villain,” Patrick says. “Both sides made mistakes that could have been rectified. Once Keith saw it as sink or swim, he chose to swim away.”

Olbermann then went to MSNBC in what seemed an opportunity to expand his horizons, just as Bryant Gumbel had when he left sports for the “Today” show. MSNBC made Olbermann the host of a current-affairs show, along with a chance to continue dabbling in sports. “They said magic words like ‘World Series,’ ” which NBC had the rights to broadcast, Olbermann says. But he later said he should have paid more attention to the offer. “I went, ‘Sure, and the other part of it is . . . a year cleaning out stalls in hell? Fine!’ I didn’t really hear the rest of it.”

“The rest of it” turned out to be an obstacle larger than Shaquille O’Neal: the saga of Monica and Bill, which broke in January 1998, soon after Olbermann landed at MSNBC. Olbermann says he did more than 200 consecutive shows about the White House scandal. “I yearned to say each night, ‘Shut your televisions off. What are you watching this for?’ ”

Olbermann vented his frustrations in a Cornell University speech that shocked MSNBC executives. “My network starts covering this story 28 hours out of every 24, and six days after the story breaks, more people watch my show than watch my old show” on ESPN, he told the crowd. “And while I’m having the dry heaves in the bathroom because my moral sensor is going off but I can’t even hear it, I’m so seduced by these ratings . . . There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depressed.”

Fortunately for Olbermann, someone else was knocking at the door. Fox Sports Net, which thrived on providing regional sports coverage, wanted to add a national sports show to compete with ESPN’s “SportsCenter.” Fox wanted a big name, a distinctive voice. They wanted Olbermann. When Fox offered to buy out his MSNBC contract, Olbermann breathed a sigh of relief and retreated to sports.

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FOX SPORTS NET WAS FORMED IN 1995, WHEN MURDOCH’S NEWS CORP. bought into Liberty Media’s family of regional sports networks, known as Prime Sports. Now Fox Sports Net comprises 21 regional networks. In Southern California, for instance, viewers can watch the Lakers, the Kings, the Angels, the Mighty Ducks and several local college teams on Fox Sports Net regional channels. Fans who own satellite dishes can also tune into all 21 regional Fox networks to follow teams from those areas.

The Fox Sports Net studio in Century City is a throbbing shrine to sports. Television sets blanket every inch of wall space, showing an endless succession of tomahawk dunks, skyscraping home runs and touchdown scampers. A bevy of retired-athletes-turned-TV-analysts, wearing sport jackets that arc over their oversized shoulders, gingerly wander the set, looking as out of place as journalists do in sweaty locker rooms.

Upstairs, Olbermann’s office overlooking Pico Boulevard is filled with mementos from a life in sports--a “Save Fenway Park!” bumper sticker from Boston, an original wooden seat from Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, an uncut sheet of Bowman baseball cards. (Olbermann’s latest souvenir? The handle from the bat New York Met Mike Piazza shattered during the World Series last month.)

Olbermann is beginning to shows signs of encroaching middle age. His thick black hair is flecked with gray and he has a noticeable paunch. As advertised, he doesn’t hesitate to show off the breadth of his knowledge, especially about baseball. (To the delight of his brethren at the Society for American Baseball Research, he once exposed several hundred errors in Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary that aired on PBS.)

In three separate interviews, Olbermann professed having found a small slice of nirvana at Fox. Within months, however, signs emerged that, once again, Olbermann and his employer were reevaluating their relationship.

“He’s a major talent, but he comes across as pompous and condescending,” says Los Angeles Times TV/radio sports columnist Larry Stewart, who has feuded with Olbermann for years. “It’s this whole attitude of, ‘Gee, look at me, aren’t I clever?’ It’s a turnoff for a lot of people.”

HBO’s Lampley has a somewhat different view. “Some of us, myself included, are well-steeped in the corporate, political language aimed at promoting the event without obviously shilling for it,” Lampley says. “Keith is not good at that. He can’t do happy talk.”

Fox had hired him to help knock ESPN’s “SportsCenter” from its perch as a leading route to the minds of 18-to-35-year-old males and their billions in spending power. But problems emerged with the show, called “The National Sports Report.” The network kept retooling the package, pairing Olbermann with several co-anchors in a futile attempt to recapture the magic he had shared with Patrick. The set was redone. Sports analysts were added, then taken away. In the end, nothing pushed the show to the level of “SportsCenter.”

Since 1996, when Disney acquired ESPN with its purchase of Capital Cities/ABC, ESPN has maintained its status as both cultural icon and high-speed money-printer. According to Paul Kagan Associates, ESPN is now available in 77 million homes and generates $1.4 billion annually in license fees and ad sales. “SportsCenter” remains the crown jewel, generating an estimated $250 million to $300 million a year for Disney.

“Fox thought they could press a magic button and say, ‘We have Olbermann, we’re going to war with ESPN,’ ” says sports-media critic Phil Mushnick of the New York Post. “But it hasn’t been a nice fit because they don’t have an Olbermann-like sensibility,” which meant they did not pair him with another strong personality.

This summer Olbermann and Fox Sports Net agreed to cut their losses. Olbermann left “The National Sports Report” in exchange for hosting his own sports show, “The Keith Olbermann Evening News,” which airs on Sunday nights. Olbermann also agreed to forfeit half his salary.

The new show is a sideways move--one of his friends calls it “Keith’s on-air exit interview.” But as executive producer of the show, Olbermann gets to do his own thing. “It’s an old-style sports show in terms of content,” he says. “And on Sunday, I can be good counter- programming.”

As for his future with Fox, Olbermann professes not to know. “They may not need me after this year,” he says. “Regardless of what happens, [the parting] will be cordial. It won’t be, ‘You’re fired’ or ‘I quit.’ ”

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ASK OLBERMANN ABOUT his personal life and you will get a very short answer. “The private life we can clear up pretty easily--there is none,” he says. “All I do is work. I made this commitment [at Fox] to work for three years without pause or breath.” While he says his now-reduced schedule allows him to “breathe again,” his friends wonder if he’ll ever find happiness.

“He’s so clearly neurotic,” says Mushnick. “He lives to make himself miserable. He’s never going to be happy and that contributes to his allure.”

“I don’t think he’s unhappy, but I don’t think he’s content,” Patrick says. “Who knows how good he’d be if he were.”

Olbermann feels that he’s mellowed in this, his second stint in Los Angeles. He says he’s begun work on a novel, and he claims that therapy has helped smooth his rough edges. “A couple of my friends think, somehow, a happy personal life will make for a better professional existence,” he says. “I would contend it’s exactly the opposite. What makes me happy is a little--not better--rarer, more difficult to find and maintain than their happiness is. One friend constantly talks about how happy he is, has such a nice wife, huge family--and he goes out on the road and screws around on his wife. And I wonder if the ability to achieve the sort of happiness that they’re talking about is not the product of self-delusion and a lot of fear. And I feel sorry for them because I’d much rather be realistic than delusional.”

The conversation finds its way back to Cosell. Olbermann is wary of the comparison, but he clearly admires Cosell. Without him, “this would be an industry of shills, of ceaseless conflicts of interest never recognized. Every channel would be Dick Vitale, of guys with some sort of non-organic approach to selling sports. I’m going to get myself in trouble again: Everybody would be like Jim Hill,” the longtime sports anchor at KCBS.

“I’m not trying to win a popularity contest,” Olbermann continues. “If you’re in a public media setting and you’re not expressing something of yourself, turn it over to someone who will. Just get out. Just go away and put somebody on who has a point of view, because the most dangerous thing about TV is its equalizing factor, its lowest common denominator factor. And that’s what I fight against all the time.”