PEOPLE Multi-Media Mouth

PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN REincarnation say each lifetime has a purpose. We’re here once again to resolve an issue that’s torturing the soul or to contribute something significant to the world.

Skip Bayless believes in rein-carnation, but he says he’s been told he came to this life with no un resolved issues. So why has he been reincarnated as an opinionated, sometimes controversial, multi-media sports journalist in Dallas, Texas?

“To teach,” Bayless says. “My constant prayer is for God to use me… to help other people open their eyes to some things, to keep things in some perspective for them in a society run amok in the idolatry of professional athletes.”

Open their eyes? If he has to, Bayless will pry them open. Remember, this is the man who, in hi; two books on the Dallas Cowboys (God’s Coach, The Boys) revealed that Tom Landry is not perfect and predicted that Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones were headed toward bitter divorce. This the self-styled “Dr, Bay” who says, “I think what I do is just as important as what Troy Aikman does. Maybe it’s more important sometimes.” This is the man who says the Dallas Times Herald’s closing in 1991, which left him jobless, was the best thing that ever happened to him.

That’s because, after the Herald, he was reincarnated as a cross-medium personality-and in this professional lifetime, he has conquered the demons that vexed him in his newspaper days.

“It saved me from myself,” Bayless says while lounging in the condo he shares with two laptop computers, three exercise bikes, and a treadmill. “I was burning out from the pre; sure of it, the sameness of it.” He had been writing three to five columns a week for Dallas newspapers since 1978, for the Times Herald since 1982. “I got a chance, by force, to explore other things.”

And create other things. The ink was hardly dry on the Herald’s final edition when his column became available via fax-a first in sports. Today, Bayless’ column is the centerpiece of the thrice-weekly, fax- and e-mail-delivered The Insider and is syndicated to several newspapers, primarily in the Southwest. He was the first on-air personality hired by 1310 KTCK-AM (The Ticket) and signed on at the station at 6 a.m. on January 24,1994.

“I’ve always been a crusader, a cutting-edge kind of guy,” he says. “I’m always out at the very end of the limb.”

He ventured far enough out to challenge KLIF-AM morning sports icon Norm Hitzges and beat him in the 8 to 9 a.m. slot in the fall and winter Arbitron ratings. “So many in the media told me I would be embarrassed by Hitzges,” Bayless says. “But I am officially not embarrassed.”

Don’t forget TV. Bayless is a regular on two ESPN shows, “The Sports Reporters” and “NFL Prime Monday.” He occasionally hosts Prime Sports’ “Sports Talk’1 and last football season did a bit on the syndicated “Pat Summerall Show.” He’s been talking to Prime Sports about an issue-oriented, “Nightline”-style show.

And talk about multi-media: An “Insider” World Wide Website could debut soon. Starting this year, he will also write columns for an ESPN-backed magazine meant to compete with Sports Illustrated. Simon & Schuster, which published his two books, wants him to write another Cowboys book-“my first love,” he says, All that’s missing is a workout video with weightlifting partner Larry North.

Skip Bayless. Skip, do more.

Though he laments his lack of time and detests the fact that he, an acknowledged night owl, must awaken at 4 a.m. each weekday for his 6 to 9 a.m. radio show, Bayless is happy with his post-Herald reincarnation.

“When you’re typing and doing columns and hooks, it makes you introverted,” he says. “When I do radio and TV, slowly hut surely I’m coming out to where I can be myself more.”

Bayless has learned the different demands and possibilities of the various forms of media. He acknowledges that radio interviews such as his memorable 1994 encounter with Arkansas basketball coach Nolan Richardson, which covered everything from jump shots to racism, wouldn’t have worked in print. “It just wouldn’t have had the electricity,” Bayless says.

Bayless likes radio more than the soundbite world of TV because the medium lets him develop his thoughts more deeply. That freedom plays to Bayless’ strengths…or his weaknesses, it you ask his critics.

“I have the courage to cut against the grain, and when 1 really believe something needs to he said, I’ll say it,” he explains. “And a lot of things in this city need to be said.” He prides himself on doing his homework. “I’m not a shoot-from-the-lip guy; I’m not an ax wielder,” he says.

That’s the one constant thread in Bayless’ multi-media career: reporting. Whether writing a column, doing a radio interview, or preparing far a TV debate, it all boils down to information gathering. Jeff Neuman, his editor at Simon &. Schuster, calls Bayless “a dogged reporter.” ESPN producer Joe Valerio says he sees Bayless working the phones until air time of “NFL Prime Monday.” “The key is, he’s a good reporter.”

Some disagree. When The Boys was published in 1993, coach Jimmy Johnson claimed Bayless had only one 15-minute interview with him for the book. Bayless, who says he spent exponentially more rime with the Cowboys coach, believes that Johnson resents his giving Jones too much credit for the team’s resurgence. That debate led to a celebrated verbal battle between Bayless and Dallas Morning News columnist Randy Galloway on a since-canceled TV sports show.

Galloway, whom Bayless believes “got to be a Jimmy buddy of sorts,” aggressively questioned Bayless’ facts and report-ing-especially about the Jones-Johnson rift. He charged that Bayless hadn’t been around the Cowboys every day as Galloway and his Morning News colleagues were. Bayless defended his reporting and said the book was based on extensive interviews and on four years of observing what he called the “Jerry and Jimmy Show.”

Cowboys fans, too, thought Bayless was woozy from a Charles Haley sack. Jimmy and Jerry on the outs? Can’t happen. That would be like the wife tunning away with the neighbor. Maybe worse. Of course, Bayless turned out to be right.

“This city has a way of attaching its self-image to the Cowboys,” Bayless says. “That’s pretty dangerous. So, I’ve always thought there are times when some perspective needs to be lent to a situat ion that often has none.”

It’s the standard journalist’s dilemma: the audience’s need to know vs. its want to know. “I don’t care if they want it or not. I’m going to do it,” he says. “It’s worked for a long time. I feel very accomplished in this city.”

Bayless is mesmerized by the power of sports as escapism. He wonders what might have happened had Timothy McVeigh, the prime suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing, been a football fanatic in his upstate New York hometown. “Maybe his frustration would have been salved a little bit by immersing himself in the Buffalo Bills,” he says.

This is obviously not the stereotypical sportswriter. “I bated that stereotype of the drunk, falling-down-the-steps sports-writer who was on the take from the team,” says the extremely fit Bayless, a nondrinker and nonsmoker, while eating Met-Rx. It’s why he calls his radio show “sports talk for the thinking fan.”

That’s also why Bayless is the nation’s eyes and ears on the Dallas sports scene. “Arguably, he is the best-known Dallas media person in the country on a national basis,” KTCK owner Spence Kendrick says-though Bayless had no general-audience Dallas media base for a year before The Ticket premiered. On any given day during the NFL season, a dozen radio and TV stations around the country may call him for the inside story on the Cowboys. Bayless laughs when he recalls football fans in Philadelphia and Washington asking him for his autograph- “I get recognized here, but people don’t ask me tor my autograph,” he says,

“Skip just doesn’t see the issue in terms of regional impact,” ESPN’s Valeric says. “He sees it how the country would see it.” But Bayless believes he has become a part of Dallas’ fabric. He may have a national following, but he’s a Dallas man-at least for now.

It’s part of what Bayless calls “the single hardest question I’ve struggled with in my life.” The question: What’s his job title? “My mom keeps telling me,’You’re a writer at heart; that’s what you ultimately will do.’ Butthere are times I’m not sure that’s true.”

He just doesn’t know. He says he may leave Dallas someday for another newspaper column-writing gig. Or he may become a novelist and screenwriter. He says he has completed one-fifth of a novel. Longbow Productions purchased an option on The Boys and wants Bayless to help with the screenplay if it gets that far. He recently bought a copy of the Pulp Fiction script to see how it looked on paper.

Bayless says his novel, which has a baseball backdrop, “has the potential to be by far the best thing I’ve done,” though he admits that Simon & Schuster editor Neuman doesn’t think it would work. Neuman wouldn’t repeat his doubts for print, but he hesitated before saying very carefully, “I have no doubt,..he could write a very good…entertaining and..-worthwhile novel.”

Perhaps novels and movies are Bayless’ future. Maybe he’ll go back to newspapers. Who knows? He doesn’t.

But remember: Skip Bayless believes in reincarnation-metaphysically and professionally.