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Sporting News, The, Dec 14, 1998 by Michael Knisley

You see the NFC on his network. You see his baseball team at Dodger Stadium. You see your teams on his regional sports channels. If you're a sports fan, you see, Rupert Murdoch is a part of your life every day. And the scary part is this: You ain't seen nothin' yet.

I can't keep a secret. At least not this secret, which is probably the no-brainer of the year anyway. Anyone who cares to guess can figure out that Rupert Murdoch is going to be the Most Powerful Person in Sports in THE SPORTING NEWS' 1998 list of the 100 top movers and shakers. Why try to deny it? So during the course of some of the innumerable conversations that go into the compilation of this list, I don't. Somebody asks, I spill the beans.

And I surprise exactly no one, least of all the people with whom Murdoch competes in the convergent business worlds of media, entertainment and sports. Especially the people with whom Murdoch rubs elbows (albeit the wrong way, at times) in that high-stakes arena. They're the ones who know best what Murdoch has done since last we published this list. They're the ones who know best what Murdoch can do if he chooses to push the status quo even closer to the edge of upheaval than he already has pushed it.

This, essentially, is their reaction: Murdoch is No. 1? Tell me something I didn't know..

"It isn't even remotely a race. You could make him Nos. 1 through 5," says NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol.

"There's no question. All you have to do is look at the NFL and Major League Baseball and the world soccer situation and ownership of the Dodgers," says Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball.

"I think there's a frank admission among most people at Turner that on a worldwide basis, he's certainly the most aggressive and has accomplished the most in terms of both ownership and regional distribution of sports television," says Turner Sports president Harvey Schiller.

And this, too, from an executive who shall remain unidentified beyond the hints that he is on the list himself and doesn't work for Murdoch: "Why don't you just say that you're going to name a trophy after him and then he'll no longer be eligible? He's been No. 1 for, what? Three out of the last five years? Make up a new rule. If you're No. 1 for any three out of five years, the trophy is named for you for the next five years and you are no longer eligible."

The TSN Power 100/Rupert Murdoch Trophy. I'll take it up with the boss. It'd be a good way to put some drama back in this list. Of course, we'd have to find the proper trophy pose to cast in bronze, or gold, or million-dollar bills. Maybe it'd be an Oscar-like figure with arms folded, its bespectacled head looking smugly out at the conquered landscapes of television and sports. Or maybe it should be something bigger than that, something more suitably representative of the size and scope of Murdoch's sports universe, something with the bulk of, say, the Stanley Cup--although, come to think of it, Murdoch's bloodthirsty reputation, while slowly abating in this country, probably rules out any trophy design that resembles a loving cup, as Lord Stanley's tankard does.

Better yet, perhaps we'd craft a Heisman-type pose, in which a helmeted Murdoch stiff-arms the rest of the television networks on his way to the end zone of another mega-bucks acquisition. This is an idea that has some merit.

Murdoch was such a slam-dunk to top the list this year, and being on top of it is apparently so "old hat" to him by now, that he didn't deem it necessary to work our customary interview into his schedule. For a while there, we were getting to be old buddies, Rupert and I. When TSN named him the Most Powerful Person in Sports for the calendar year 1994, and again in 1995, I met with him in News Corporation's swanky Manhattan viewing room, a place built to dazzle advertisers, television critics and pickers of powerful sports people during Fox's Sunday NFL telecasts.

This time, in the days and weeks leading up to our publication deadline, Murdoch apparently was single-minded about an initial public offering of stock in 18 percent of News Corp.'s American film, television and sports businesses. There was time for little else, including me. But no matter. The developments in his empire since the last time we put this list together speak for themselves.

* In January, Murdoch committed $4.4 billion to keep the National Football League's NFC games on the Fox network through the 2005 season. That's a price hike of around 30 percent, annually, over the stunningly high NFL contract Fox signed in December 1993. Seems steep until you figure that CBS paid more than twice (again, on an annual average) what NBC ponied up for the AFC's television rights in the previous contract, and that the ESPN and ABC prices Disney paid for the Sunday night and Monday night packages are more than three times greater than their annual payments were under the December 1993 agreements.

* In March, Murdoch finalized Fox's purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of professional sports' pre-eminent franchises, along with Dodger Stadium and the land around it. It cost him $350 million, which at the time was a record price for a pro team. But, hey, if that extra land ends up being the site of a new football stadium and home to an NFL expansion team, as some think it will, you've got to figure it's worth a few bucks.