Crossing Over : Three-Time All-Pro Lineman Is a Hit in Broadcast Booth

For Randy Cross, 1982 began with “the Catch,” the Joe Montana-to-Dwight Clark touchdown pass that turned the San Francisco 49ers into America’s new team. But, for his life after football, something more important happened to the former Crespi High offensive lineman that year.

The Break.

He broke a leg at an amusement park in Redwood City. And found a career.

While recuperating, Cross broadcast a few minutes of sports each morning on a Bay Area radio station. Once back on the field, he hosted a Monday night radio talk show, adding a Saturday television show the next season. He sent tapes to the networks, and, in 1989, when he left the game, Cross went straight into the CBS booth. He had paid close attention to guidance counselor Bill Walsh.

“He always explained how temporary sports really is,” said Cross, who lives in an Atlanta suburb. “It isn’t your life’s work.”

Cross, 40, is wrapping up his sixth season of commentary, his first with NBC. On Sunday, he will team with play-by-play veteran Charlie Jones on the pivotal matchup between the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers, broadcast locally at 1 p.m. on Channel 4. Now this is his life’s work.

“I’m having as much fun doing this as I did playing football,” Cross said. “I’m doing something less then 20 people in the whole world do.”

Broadcasting makes perfect sense for Cross. He must perform in front of the camera on a weekly basis, much like his late father, Dennis, a television and film actor who played the good guy in Westerns. Young Randy often came home from school to see daddy gunned down by the bad guys. “I grew up watching him die on TV,” Cross said.

Cross doesn’t want the same thing to happen to him. He pours over game films each week. He develops sources throughout the league. Live television doesn’t allow the luxury of second takes.

“A lot of people will look at just one game, but Randy will look at the last three or four games,” Jones said. “He’s very prepared.”

Football, however, is not a science. Each game assumes a unique character that often bears no relation to patterns and trends. “The game has to come to us,” Cross said. “You might not use most of the stuff you had prepared, but in the end, what matters is how we covered the game.”

Which is quite well, according to Jones. “He’ll suggest isolates and replays on the right people,” Jones said. “He knows the tendencies very well.”

Nobody taught Cross how to announce. That doesn’t happen in this business. The network puts you in a lifeboat to see if you can swim. If you sink, there’s always another former offensive lineman who needs a job.

The hardest part of announcing isn’t dealing with the players. It’s dealing with the producers.

“You have to deliver a coherent thought while a producer is talking in your ear,” Cross said.

Naturally, his years with the 49ers gives him a feel for the game they don’t teach you in broadcasting school. The fact that he played with winners and losers--the 49ers were 2-14 in 1978 and 1979--makes it easier for him to spot the differences in the teams he covers. Look at their faces, Cross said.

“You can see if everyone is giving up some piece of themselves,” he said. “That’s what winners do.”

Cross is also very familiar with the game’s mental and physical toll, especially on players going downhill. Football is brutal that way. One day, “you’re the man,” he says, the invincible star who owns the city. The next day, “somebody else is the man,” and “they push you off the edge of the pool.

“Empathy is a very important thing in what I do,” Cross said. “You have to relate to the guys on the crummy teams, to the second and third-stringers.”

Cross was lucky. He didn’t have to be pushed out of the game. He jumped. He was 34. He quit near the prime of his career, announcing his retirement just days before he played in the 49ers’ Super Bowl victory over the Cincinnati Bengals in January, 1989.

Walsh, the 49er coach, tried to talk him out of it, but Cross would settle for playing at nothing below his Pro Bowl standards.

Cross made the Pro Bowl three times. “Because I left on my own terms, it was so much easier to deal with the entire process of leaving it,” he said.

He has missed playing only twice. The first time, the 49ers were playing the Minnesota Vikings in a 1990 playoff game and Cross knew “I could be here.”

The second time, a few weeks later, was more traumatic. The 49ers had just routed the Denver Broncos to win a fourth Super Bowl, and Cross was interviewing running back Roger Craig. “You should’ve had this, too,” Craig said.

Thanks, Roger, just what he needed to hear. “I just missed the fourth Super Bowl ring,” Cross realized.

That was it. Since then, he hasn’t looked back.

“I’m a real believer in that the best time is now,” he said. “Memories are fantastic, but I’d hate to think that when I’m 65, that the highlight of my life would be something I did 40 years ago.”

Cross doesn’t want to restrict himself to pro football. This year, the former UCLA star covered two games at Notre Dame. The unfortunate part was that his father wasn’t around to see it.

“He got to see me from Little League to the Super Bowl,” Cross said, “but it was hard not to think about my father when I was in South Bend. He was a fantastic Notre Dame fan.”

Cross will cover the Irish in the Fiesta Bowl against Colorado.

Nor does Cross want to restrict himself to football. He already has covered wrestling and skiing events, and his NBC contract calls for him to do some Olympic coverage in his new home, Atlanta.

Cross moved his family there from Northern California two years ago. He found a gated community bordering a Jack Nicklaus golf course in Alpharetta, about 25 miles north of Atlanta.

“It reminds me a lot of the Valley when I grew up,” said Cross, who lived in Pacoima and Tarzana. “That’s when Porter Ranch was a ranch, Chatsworth was a park, and Calabasas was a stagecoach stop.

“I walked half a block to grammar school, and my kids get on a bus, walk a block, and they’re at grammar school. It’s like the kids are in Disneyland.”

Still, just as he pursued perfection on the line of scrimmage, Cross is after the same goal on the line of communication. He wants to be the commentator on NBC’s No. 1 team, a job held by Bob Trumpy.

It’s hard for him to tell how he’s doing because the results aren’t nearly as tangible. On the field, he always knew if he kept Lawrence Taylor from getting to the quarterback. In the booth, nobody keeps official score.

“Friends and family will always tell you you did great,” Cross said, “but how do you know?”