Randy Cross Profile

While you wouldn’t necessarily call him a "surfer dude," Randy Cross still grew up with the Southern California attitude. That mindset kept the All-America offensive lineman from UCLA from becoming a Cleveland Brown and available for the 49ers in the second round of the 1976 draft.

"Their offensive line coach was a guy named Rod Humenuik, who had been a coach at a junior college near where I grew up. He called and said, ‘Hey, we’re getting ready to draft you in the first round. What do you think of that?’ I said, ‘Cleveland, Ohio?’ He said, ‘You don’t sound too excited.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know coach. It’s pretty cold there,’" Cross said with a laugh. "They ended up drafting Mike Pruitt out of Purdue."

#51 Randy Cross

San Francisco plugged Cross in at center during his first training camp and he stayed there for the next few seasons. However, a broken left wrist and left ankle put him right out of action for the final seven games of the ‘78 campaign. When Cross returned the following season, his fourth, he was playing for his fifth head coach - Bill Walsh.

"It made me quite the skeptic. I grew up in Southern California and was sort of naturally skeptical anyway and a little geographically prejudiced about Northern California. Bill was coming in from Stanford and was this hotshot offensive coach. He was going to make a huge difference. Those of us who had been there in ‘76, ‘77 and ‘78, in all that misery, we were like, ‘All right, we’re up for it, but let’s see what happens.’ Nobody was exactly doing cartwheels."

Although not acrobatically, Cross was moving nevertheless. After 33 starts at center, the new coaching staff shifted him to right guard.

#51 Randy Cross

"(Offensive line coach) Bobb McKittrick and Bill sat me down and Walsh explained what he wanted to do with his offense and how he wanted to use his linemen. With all the pulling and movement that he needed, he said that I was much better suited to be a guard in his offense than a center. Fred Quillan had been drafted the year before so it basically gave him four solid guys returning."

It didn’t take that long before Cross and his teammates realized that Walsh was solid as well. Once they had a hands-on opportunity to run the offense, they were impressed.

"Steve DeBerg was running the team then and they had just drafted Joe (Montana). And it became very clear, very quickly with Freddie Solomon and some of the guys that were running in and out at running back, specifically Paul Hofer, that this was a pretty good offense. We were pretty confident we could score 30 points on everybody. The problem was they were going to score 40," said Cross. "That was our whole story in 1980. I want to say we were the No. 6 offense in the league, and we were 6-10."

Things turned around a year later. Brilliant coaching added with just as brilliant personnel moves helped the Niners more than double their regular season win total and go 13-3. Cross got to play in two Bowl games in ‘81: Super Bowl XVI and the Pro Bowl. He left the field victorious in the one that mattered.

"That whole year, from week three when we (had) started 1-2 and ended up from that point 15-1, it was just magic. There’s no other words to describe it. It’s something that none of us ever felt again. That ‘81 team was young. I always refer to it as the ‘Happy Dummies.’ We were just smiling and having a good ol’ time. We knew we were going to win, it was just a matter of how."

Three seasons later, the 49ers won it all again by dumping the Dolphins 38-19 in Super Bowl IXX. Four years after that, they earned another Lombardi Trophy by after topping Cincinnati in Super Bowl XXIII. And so after 13 seasons, 199 games, three Pro Bowls and three NFL championships - Cross retired after beating the Bengals.

"I had decided (to retire) during the week before the divisional (playoff) game. I’ve got a picture of me standing on the sideline with about a minute left in the game, looking around. I remember what I was thinking. ‘This is the last time I’ll ever stand in this stadium. I hadn’t told anybody yet, but it seemed like it was time," Cross said. "I tell (current players) that and they look at me like I’m a Martian. ‘They didn’t cut you? You didn’t have to retire because you were hurt? You just quit?’"

Cross is still involved with the NFL. With 12 years experience as a television game and pre-game analyst with NBC and CBS Sports, the last three years in the studio with CBS’ NFL Today, he is returning to the booth this fall. Teaming with play-by-play partner Kevin Harlan, Cross is looking forward to the upcoming season.

"For all the pop and sizzle of doing a studio show, no matter how you prepare for it and I always prepared for it like I was doing a game, it’s still not football. You’re doing television if you’re doing the pre-game. Getting back to the games, go back to being on-site and seeing the players, seeing the coaches, the general managers, the owners - I just think it’s going to be wonderful."

Cross and his wife, Patrice, live in Georgia with their three children. Kelly, 18, who is following her dad’s footsteps and will major in communications as a freshman at Florida State; Crystal, 15, who will be a high school sophomore; and 12-year-old Brendan, who is entering the seventh grade.