Baseball’s Time Is Past: NFL Rules : Football: Evidence is overwhelming that the pro game has become a virtual obsession throughout the country, binding people like no other sport.

We never spoke much, me and the 63-year-old guy with the thick hands and voice.

He lived in the Midwest. We were related by marriage, separated by planets.

Last fall, suddenly, his wife died. For the first time in 40 years, he was alone.

He walked the house. Sold her clothes. Drank whiskey at the Moose hall. Sat at his kitchen table at 6 a.m. and wept.

One such morning, I phoned. Didn’t know what to say.

But he did.

“How about those Lions?” he said.

We talked about Wayne Fontes and Barry Sanders. Geez, said the guy with the thick voice, you give me $11 million, I could throw as good as Scott Mitchell.

By the time we hung up, we had talked longer during one phone call than in 10 previous years combined.

I called my father-in-law again on Thanksgiving, from the Texas Stadium press box. He heard the roar that accompanies the Dallas Cowboys’ annual holiday game.

His best friend was gone, some days were hell, but through his receiver he could hear sounds of a life still filled with excitement and promise. And he laughed.

“Five bucks on Green Bay,” he said.

He flew out for a Charger game in San Diego on Christmas Eve. We sat in front of the television to watch his beloved Lions on Christmas Day.

And now, he is going to his first Super Bowl.

He can’t afford the $200 ticket or the air fare to Miami but is going anyway.

“Once in a lifetime,” he said.

And during a Super Bowl week that will be as frenzied as ever, the question will be asked more than once:

Has professional football become our new national pastime?

This is difficult to ascertain without defining national pastime.

Is something a national pastime when, for half the year, it becomes our common language, our second currency, our community wallpaper?

Is something a national pastime when rituals are born of it and identities of entire communities are created by it?

More than 68,000 people fill a stadium in San Diego to cheer for their team on a night when there is no game.

A factory worker in Youngstown, Ohio, claims that if there were no playoff game that weekend between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns, the suicide rate in his town would skyrocket.

A 63-year-old man is helped through the worst winter of his life by knowing that every weekend there is another game, another escape, another promise kept.

From August to February, the answer to the question of pro football having become our national pastime resounds loud and often. It is yes, yes, yes!

*

We believe, because we have looked into the wild eyes of Marty Schottenheimer, coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.

It was the second Sunday of this season. He had left his home 2 1/2 hours before the start of the game for a short drive to the stadium.

If he hadn’t driven on the shoulder of the road, amid honking horns and obscene gestures, he would have missed the kickoff.

“What is happening around this league on Sunday mornings lately amazes me,” Schottenheimer said later. “The traffic, the people, the tailgaters . . . If you don’t leave three hours before a game, you’re in trouble.”

In his complaint can be found probably the best reason pro football has become so popular. It is no longer a game, but an event.

Partyers fill and close the parking lots in Pittsburgh four hours before a game. Some fans in Green Bay arrive early and reserve two parking spaces--one for the car, and one in which to polka.

On game mornings in Dallas, so many fans walk around wearing custom blue game jerseys with writing on the back that you are soon convinced half the town is named Aikman or Irvin.

Then there were the two young preppies who attended Mass in San Francisco last Saturday evening wearing Deion-style do-rags.

“There is no question that professional football is our national pastime,” said Jon Mandel, senior vice president of Grey Advertising in New York.

In gauging public opinion as a way of getting the most for his clients’ advertising dollar, Mandel is a numbers guy.

If nothing else, pro football has all the numbers.

“People vote with their eyes (TV) and their pockets,” he said.

Some recent tabulations:

* In a Business Week/Harris poll, 25% of respondents chose pro football as their favorite sport. Ranking second was major league baseball with 11%.

Other polls have shown pro football to be at least a co-favorite in virtually every category of age, race and sex.

* According to Team Licensing Business, $3 billion worth of NFL merchandise was sold in 1993, $2 million more than in any other sport.

* Networks pay an average of $1.1 billion a year to televise NFL games, nearly four times as much as any other sport. And they consider it a good investment.

The average NFL regular-season game has better ratings than other sport’s postseason games.

The average cable rating for NFL games is 9.5, double the rating of the three other major professional sports on cable combined.

The last two regular-season games on “Monday night Football”--one meaningless, and another with only one team giving full effort--were the highest-rated prime-time shows those weeks.

More than twice as many people in the United States watched last year’s Super Bowl on TV as any other single sports event that year.

“The best example I can give is when the replacement players were used in the NFL for three games (in 1987),” Mandel said. “That year, those games got better numbers than even baseball playoff games held at the same time.

“Imagine that. The worst players in football attracted more viewers than even the best of baseball.”

Successful businessmen have recently voted with the money they paid for franchises.

Malcolm Glazer, a Palm Beach, Fla., financier, refused to buy the San Diego Padres when the asking price rose above $75,000,000.

He then bought a similarly downtrodden franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in what he considered a good deal.

The base price: $175 million. And the difference? The Buccaneers are in the NFL.

After all, the 68,000 attendance at the Chargers’ homecoming from Pittsburgh last Sunday night was better than the combined attendance of the last five Padre games there.

The list goes on.

In 1993, Peter Angelos bought one of baseball’s marquee franchises, the Baltimore Orioles, for a record $173 million.

Less than a year later, Jeffrey Lurie bought a mediocre NFL franchise, the Philadelphia Eagles, for $185 million, the most anybody has paid for a sports team in history.

And then there’s Georgia Frontiere and the selling of the soul of St. Louis.

“The people of St. Louis did not agree to do this because they thought football was second rate,” said Roy Adler, professor of marketing at Pepperdine University. “The fact is, football has become larger than life.”

That is one reason experts agree that the game has long since surpassed baseball in popularity.

“Football players are larger than life. They do something heroic every 30 seconds,” Adler said.

Football players do not have a labor dispute. Because of strict blackout regulations and a short schedule, football players are not on TV so much that we get sick of them.

“One of the keys to football is that they give us enough to keep people happy, but not too much,” Mandel said. “You don’t want to leave a lot of food on the table, and football doesn’t.

“Now with baseball, well, why should I watch this Yankee-White Sox game on TV tonight? There is going to be one on tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday.”

In an era when Britain’s royal family is trivialized, pro football has not lost its importance. Each game is a drama.

We respect those who feel otherwise, and remind them not to be late for their Super Bowl parties.