Views Display output in tpl file not working
While not a direct answer, the best thing I've found to do in cases like these is to put a

&lt;?php drupal_set_message('&lt;pre&gt;' . print_r($rows, TRUE) . '&lt;/pre&gt;'); ?&gt;


in the template to see what you have to work with.  But if you are talking about the Display template, I am pretty sure by that point the $rows variable has been populated with HTML so you may need to look at another template if you want to get fancier with the output.