Former Eagles star and NFL TV pioneer Irv Cross diagnosed with brain disease CTE
Cross, a staple on the NFL Today on CBS in the 1970s and '80s, was the first Black person to work full-time as a sports analyst on national television.
For a generation of football fans, Irv Cross was at once a pioneer and a familiar face — a two-time Pro Bowl cornerback for the Eagles during the 1960s, a panelist on CBS’s The NFL Today during the 1970s and ‘80s, the first Black man to co-host a sports program on a national television network. As of Tuesday, he is the latest member of a grim fraternity, another statistic that testifies to the sport’s cost to the men who play it.
On the second anniversary of Cross’s death, at 81, his family gave Boston University permission to reveal that he had suffered from the severest form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the brain disease that has been found in recent years to have afflicted hundreds of former NFL players.
» READ MORE: The Inquirer's Irv Cross obituary
Cross and his family had agreed, before his death, to donate his brain to the university’s CTE Center and Brain Bank. Caused by repeated trauma to the brain and head, CTE can be diagnosed only posthumously.
Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and the center’s director, said in a statement that Cross had multiple CTE lesions in the furrows along the surface of his brain and dense tangles of neurofibers in his brain stem, diencephalon, and temporal lobe.
Cross suffered from mild cognitive impairment while he was alive, McKee said. The disease’s other symptoms include loss of memory and motor function and changes in behavior and mood.
The center has studied the brains of 376 former NFL players and diagnosed CTE in 345 of them.
“Brain tissue analysis is the quickest path to discover ways to diagnose CTE during life and develop effective treatments,” McKee said. “Through his brain donation, Mr. Cross’s legacy will be to help increase our understanding of CTE in living contact sport athletes and others who have experienced repetitive head trauma.”
A native of Hammond, Ind., and a seventh-round draft pick out of Northwestern in 1961, Cross spent nine years in the NFL, six of them with the Eagles. He was selected for the Pro Bowl after the 1964 and ‘65 seasons and finished his career with 22 interceptions. He worked for CBS from 1971 to 1994, and he was the 2009 winner of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television award.