It’s a scene that has played out hundreds of times before, heard by millions but seen by only a small roomful of people. Bruce McAvaney, adopting the unshakable postural arc of a veteran racing caller, stands from his chair and stoops forward slightly in the Seven broadcasting booth, binoculars firmly pressed to his eyes as he motors through another rapid-fire description of the action unfolding beyond the glass. His voice deepens to the kind of ecstatic growl every football fan knows well. The growl is the same whether McAvaney’s calling the opening bounce of a cut-throat final or junk time in a pre-season blowout.

Calmly seated beside him is Dennis Cometti; immaculately blazered, liberally hairsprayed and laconic. From his chair Cometti alternates between a panoramic view of the ground, his carefully-prepared notes and a small TV monitor on the desk in front of him. He absorbs McAvaney’s description through his right ear, mentally limbering up for his own entrance. The opening is something Cometti can sense from decades spent as McAvaney’s co-pilot on hundreds of football broadcasts but also by his colleague’s cadence – sometimes wearied and flagging but with McAvaney, just as often a spittle-inducing parabola whose upward peak pushes the limits of human oxygen intake. When Bruce’s bolt is shot, his left arm comes down and he tags his offsider into the fray with a collegial hand on the shoulder. Dennis Cometti is away.

So endures Australian sports broadcasting’s premier double act, or so it has, until this weekend, when at the conclusion of the AFL grand final Cometti peels off his headset, rolls back his chair and rises next to his favourite colleague one last time. After 49 years in broadcasting – 30 of them calling AFL football on network television – Dennis Cometti himself is tapping out.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Cometti interviews Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson before an AFL game in 2014. Photograph: Morne de Klerk/Getty Images

‘You can go back to the place but not the time’

To fully understand Dennis Cometti you need to start with family. To do that you have to begin with the lowlight of Cometti’s life: the sudden death in 1969 of his father James, the son of working class Italian migrant Giovanni, who travelled to Australia in 1909 from Tirano in the Northern Italian Alps and walked 800km through blistering sun from Perth to find backbreaking work and a new life in the harsh, dust-swept terrain of the Meekatharra goldfields.

When James Cometti collapsed on a Perth street and died of a heart attack his 18-year-old son and only child was busy training with WAFL team West Perth. Dennis was by that point a teen sensation. The winter before he’d kicked 60 goals and played alongside the club’s legendary captain-coach Graham “Polly” Farmer in a league semi-final.

Expectations for Cometti’s fledgling football career were lofty, and the father-son bond shared by James and Dennis had been strengthened by the game. It was James Cometti who passed on so many of the fundamentals that would later appear in his son’s oft-quoted commentary. Their conversations, and all the long afternoons spent sitting side-by-side at the footy had become a roadmap for Dennis Cometti’s understanding of the game.

The day before James Cometti died, he and his son had what seemed at the time a trivial argument. Dennis returned home late from a night on the town – not the commitment to his burgeoning sports career his father expected of him. Their disagreement was not a screaming match and there were no histrionics, just disappointed silence. What they didn’t know was that they’d never speak again.

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“It lingered on until the next day and I didn’t see him in the morning and he passed away that afternoon,” Cometti tells me as we look back on his life. “I always felt that was a terrible thing to have happened because the relationship was so close. I was an only child and he was more a mate than he was my Dad, and just a really good bloke. I felt that I’d let the team down a little bit by doing that.”

The manner in which Cometti learned of his father’s death has always stuck with him, too. Razzed onto the training track by West Perth players, a young police constable accommodated his nerves by laughing at the gibes as he approached the lanky young spearhead. It was a misleading portent. Guided to the sidelines, Cometti was bluntly presented with the news: “By the way, your dad is dead.” Shocked, he left the ground and had to identify the body to spare his mother Dulcie the task.

After his father’s death Cometti drifted from footy, withdrawing into himself and pushing the game away. Meanwhile, the gravitational pull of his alternative life as a rookie FM radio disc jockey was proving strong, so he only half-heartedly committed himself to West Perth and wouldn’t return to the fold properly until well over a decade later, in a middling three-year stint as coach.

“With my Dad not there, because we’d really had an adventure together with footy from when I was about 11 and we’d had a lot of fun with it, I think I was able to drift a lot more readily,” Cometti says. “Had he been there I’m sure he would have pulled me into line. I respected him greatly and I would have felt that I was letting him down. When he’d gone I let my standards slip because he wasn’t there to safeguard my standards.”

What kind of man did Dennis Cometti become as a result of the events of March 1969? Perhaps it’s best to consider a pair of facts from the life he made following his father’s death. The first is that at some point, adapting the lyrics to an obscure song called Waking Up Alone by 1970s singer-songwriter Paul Williams, Cometti settled upon a revealing credo for his life: “you can go back to the place but not the time.”

The second is that despite the fame and millions of dollars that his career in broadcasting has brought him, Dennis Cometti still lives in the house he grew up in – Jack and Dulcie Cometti’s family home in Perth.

‘You know he’s in the room’

When you speak to people who’ve spent a lot of time around Dennis Cometti you encounter a few recurring observations; nobody who has ever worked alongside him has a bad word to say about the guy; his preparation for every broadcast is exhaustive – whether it’s a NAB Challenge pre-season junket in Dubai or a finals blockbuster – and that the retiring broadcaster is an irreplaceable talent.

Colleagues also talk about his presence, a statesmanlike aura that makes even champion footballers self-conscious in his company. “You know he’s in the room,” his Triple M and former Channel Seven colleague Michael Roberts says. “And when he speaks, people listen.”

Cometti is tall, gangly and easy to imagine as his youthful self – flying high into the backs of defenders for pack marks. His long, crooked nose bends across his face like a crow swooping down from a streetlamp, a Cometti family trait he’s traced back to the old country. His ears are long and droopy, lending him the air of a friendly basset hound. That face, unmistakable to old-timers when he’s out and about, is a type you don’t really see on TV anymore. Cometti is the Toby jug commemorative version of a 1970s newsreader.

Most who know him mention Cometti’s unique and occasionally flamboyant dress sense, which would probably sit somewhere between a comfortably unhip veteran rock star and Alan Partridge; carefully pressed denim, sunglasses and leather jackets. Older colleagues remember the youthful era in which the jeans were subbed out for outrageous leather pants. “They were fashionable leather pants, if leather pants can be fashionable,” laughs Cometti’s former Seven commentary colleague Drew Morphett. “He was a product of the rock ‘n’ roll era. You wouldn’t see Jonathan Brown or Jason Dunstall or anybody else going out in leather pants. It became a bit of a signature for him.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Cometti quits as West Perth football coach.

When Cometti lobbed at Triple J for an appearance in the late 90s, the station’s staff were delighted to note that the commentary legend not only travelled with a leather man-bag tucked under his arm but that it contained a miniature can of hairspray. Cometti’s never been shy about the haircare routine. Before he goes on air he will confer with make-up artists as to the specific brand they’re using, often carefully applying the finishing touches himself. The Cometti barnet is now almost as iconic as the voice – a perfectly sculpted helmet of hair. “He’s rock n roll,” says Roberts. “You know him in a crowd.”

As his retirement heralds the end of an era, Cometti is also one of the few remaining denizens of Australian showbiz whose employers consider worthy of limousine service. He’s only ever been late to a game once, after a cancelled flight to a Sunday fixture in Adelaide, for which he didn’t arrive until quarter time. His Melbourne driver, Raj, has ferried Cometti and his wife Velia around town for years. When a network boss joked that Seven were paying Raj more than some of Cometti’s co-commentators, the broadcasting icon shot back: “Well you should be paying your commentators more.”

Co-workers consider a ride in the Cometti limo a bit of thrill, though none can claim an anecdote as colourful as that provided by Seven boundary rider Jude Bolton. “One day we left Etihad stadium and I jumped in, myself and Dennis with Raj,” Bolton tells me. “I’d eaten something really dodgy at Etihad Stadium during one of the calls and I just turned green. Literally green in the face.”

“I started getting the cold sweats and I said, ‘I’m just going to jump out at the first terminal and I’ll walk to our spot.’ And Dennis said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do it in Raj’s car.’ So I ended up having to get out of the car and he’s jumped out with me and he’s helped me through it as I’ve just vomited on the side of the road, and he’s handing me water and telling me he hopes I’m alright.” Then, as Bolton gathered his composure, Cometti appraised the scene in signature style: “Centimetre perfect.”

“Unbelievable,” Bolton laughs. “Just one of my highlights along the way.”

Cometti’s rock star transport arrangements also featured prominently in his colleague Matthew Richardson’s first day in broadcasting, a story that also highlights the fastidiousness of Cometti’s preparation. “I remember rocking up to my first game at Subiaco,” Richardson tells me. “I had a coffee with him the day before. I remember being told to make sure I did my homework, so I had three or four pages of notes and I thought I was going pretty well.”

“I pulled up in the old yellow cab there outside the gate at Subiaco feeling pretty good about things, but there was a big black limousine in front of me and out jumped Dennis Cometti. He’s always got the sunglasses on and looks immaculate. He’s a very cool-looking man. And here I am with my four pages of A4 notes and he gets out of this black limo with his massive briefcase of notes and immediately I just thought to myself, ‘Gee I’ve got a long way to go’.”

Yet Cometti doesn’t sweat football 24/7, and rarely seeks conversation about the game when he’s off the clock. Richardson says they normally chat about music, pop culture and news. When I speak to Cometti myself we talk at length about gonzo journalism, The Carpenters, various JFK assassination conspiracies and his aborted documentary on the latter, which he’d started tackling in his final year at the ABC.

Cometti has diverse reading tastes and a lot of time to indulge them on long-haul flights between Perth and the east coast, on which most colleagues think he also dreams up many of his signature commentary quips. His favourite writers are Hunter S Thompson and PJ O’Rourke, and he revisits Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas every year. It’s rarely noted, but Cometti has been for most of his career a prolific writer himself – not just his fastidious pre-broadcast notes and Rodney Dangerfieldesque one-liners but newspaper, magazine and online columns, plus books.

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If he’s given to invoking the past, with his nods to The Easybeats and Big Bob Johnson, Cometti might also be the least sentimental romantic in the business. He fulfilled radio obligations on the night his father died and read Perth TV news the night his mother passed. “That doesn’t make me a cold person,” he once said. “But what it does, it probably understands that life and the job run side by side.”

Cometti also missed the births of both his daughter Ricki and his son Mark due to work commitments. Mark, now a professional wrestler, was born as his Dad called a Sheffield Shield cricket match (“We named him Mark, because you’ve never heard of a kid named handpass or kick,” Cometti told listeners).

He is avowedly apolitical in his broadcasting, an approach that has had the unintended consequence of courting trouble at times. He was on the mic when Sydney Swans great Adam Goodes performed his famous war dance towards Carlton fans in 2015, and drew stinging criticism for suggesting that he wouldn’t have done it himself before claiming that it wasn’t in Goodes’ best interests either, but he has paused to consider the incident since.

“There was nothing sinister in it,” Cometti says. “I don’t think I fully understood what that was all about. It was certainly going to make him the centre of attention in perhaps a difficult way for him, and it turned out to be that way, although I think in the end he got more support than opposition and that was a good thing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Cometti was criticised for his reaction to a war dance performed by AFL legend Adam Goodes against West Coast in 2015. Photograph: Tony Mcdonough/AAP

“I think I said at the time that I wouldn’t have done that, probably at the time not fully understanding what was involved. I didn’t think it was as significant as it perhaps played out to be. But that’s the problem with live television sometimes. It was the opposition cheer squad, so I thought it was provocative in that way, but it was one of those situations looking back that I probably should have bitten my lip.”

The question of keeping schtum on his own views is a recurring theme for Cometti, who prefers to remain a neutral observer. “I just don’t think sporting commentary is the place for them, to be honest. That’s just a personal view,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a forum. The audience is certainly widespread in its political views and its views on most things in live in general, so to go too deeply or too far down that track probably does the broadcaster no good, the organisation he represents no good.”

To understand Cometti’s reticence on loaded issues like gender and race, and their intersection with sport, it possibly pays to acknowledge the two people who most obviously influenced his early philosophies in life: his mother Dulcie, who was an aspiring novelist when she met Cometti’s father, and his Aunt Esme Fletcher, who opened Western Australia’s first child daycare centre and also a women’s refuge. The strength of the women in his family had an impact on his outlook in life.

“I think it’s safe to say that Esme and my mother were feminists, perhaps before feminists were invented,” Cometti once told SBS. “What do I think about it? Well I think they were both admirable people. I mean, I agree with what they were on about, there’s no question about that. Sometimes, it needs to be said, they saw men as the enemy and as a young man in that environment you needed to be careful.”

“Most of what I have I owe to them ... a lot to be thankful for.”

‘Dennis will know him back to front because he’s watched the videos’

What they say about Dennis Cometti’s swotting before games is true: for as long as he’s been calling football on TV he’s spent 15-20 hours per week watching game tapes in a room dedicated to the task. Sometimes he sits and makes notes, studying patterns of play or doing reconnaissance on new players. Other times he does a workout as he watches, chugging away on an exercise bike or the treadmill set up in front of the screen.

Not only does this habitual process enhance his knowledge of form, tactics and precisely what he can expect from the games he’ll be calling, it pays practical dividends, enabling him to nail the basics like correctly identifying players, a fundamental component of broadcasting expertise in which he often puts younger colleagues in the shade. “Sometimes a bloke runs straight at you and you can’t see a number,” notes Drew Morphett. “You know he’s got blonde hair and bandy legs or something like that, but you think ‘Who the hell is that?’ if he’s playing game number five or something, but Dennis will know him back to front because he’s watched the videos. Dennis is fantastic at that.”

“He’s been doing it for so long and his preparation is just second to none,” says Matthew Richardson. “The amount of work he puts into each game is probably the thing I noticed right from the start and probably something you take away – that someone who has been doing it as long as him but was still putting in as much time as anyone on the preparation. I guess that’s what makes him so good.”

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However Cometti’s quest for knowledge doesn’t extend to fraternising with players or getting to know them on a personal level. “Certainly I try to avoid planes with teams on them,” he tells me. “Obviously there’s not many planes to Adelaide, so you get what you get. I get on well with the teams but there’s so much small talk and you sort of get tired of that.”

Sometimes Cometti has taken that separation of duties to a level that amuses colleagues. Morphett remembers waiting for him at Adelaide airport before a Crows game against West Coast. Cometti arrived on the same flight as Eagles players but went missing when Morphett was trying to find him at the baggage carousel. “I’m thinking ‘where the hell is Cometti?’” he remembers. “All of a sudden he appears out of the dunny after half an hour. I said ‘where have you been?’. He says ‘I don’t like talking to the players. You’re bumping into them all the time’.”

“He flies by his own rules a little bit.”

‘Spinning the platters that matter’

It’s impossible to see that an AFL broadcasting talent of Dennis Cometti’s versatility and widespread appeal will emerge from the present media landscape, and now probably unfair to expect it. That’s partly because the culture and times from which Cometti sprang – the Fleetwood Mac double shots, vaudeville wisecracks and unapologetic schmaltz of 1960s FM radio – no longer exists.

Neither does the regimented ABC of Cometti’s 14-year stint running from 1973 to 1986. On FM radio Cometti found his inner court jester. From the national broadcaster’s Perth offices on Adelaide Terrace, he painstakingly learned his trade as a broadcast journalist from some of the best teachers and practitioners the country has ever produced. At the ABC there were standards to be maintained and structure to be adhered to and a proper way of doing everything; in cricket, batsmen were always named before bowlers.

Cometti’s first foray into radio was spinning the platters that mattered for Perth station 6KY, which in the late-60s battled head-to-head with 6PR for the loyalties of Perth’s Top 40 radio listeners. In those formative years there was no rulebook and no internet resources to crib his style from, so Cometti imported cumbersome reel-to-reel tapes of America’s best rock DJs and studied them for hours once they’d finished their six-month sea freight journey to Perth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A 1980s promotional photograph of Network Seven AFL broadcaster Dennis Cometti. Photograph: Seven Network

Cometti’s first proper radio gig, in mid-1968, fell into place when an old school friend forwarded his “less than sophisticated audition tape” to veteran 6KY announcer Alan Robertson, who in turn got it to the station’s program director John Lehman. The early days were a bit of a lark but not always smooth-sailing. In one gaffe, Cometti mispronounced a live-read ad for an incense boutique, which he described as “specialising in incest”. For Cometti, each weekend brought the chance to run out onto football grounds alongside Polly Farmer and during the week he was not only lost in music, but in love. In his first summer of broadcasting he also met Velia, who he would marry.

But if Robertson taught Cometti the fundamentals of preparing for a broadcast, and instilled in him the idea that he couldn’t just fly by the seat of his pants, he also might have mentioned that nobody in broadcasting is invincible. Between Cometti’s 6KY debut in 1968 and his move to the ABC in 1973, his CV “read like a greyhound bus schedule.” No job was safe.

In 1971 a lack of opportunities in Perth sent him to Melbourne, where he balanced an oddball football comeback in the reserves at Ted Whitten-coached Footscray with the weekday night shift and Sundays on 3DB, Victoria’s home of footy, racing and Top 40 hits. For the day job he’d leave training early and jump on the 6:15 to Flinders street. “Mr Part-time,” Whitten would call him. Seven or eight reserves games and his best-paid year in radio behind him, he was back in Western Australia.

The sidestep into sports broadcasting didn’t come until ‘73 and in unexpected circumstances: a late call-up to play second fiddle to 3KZ footy stalwart Ian Major for the Victoria-WA state game at Subiaco. Soon he was regularly calling games with WA broadcasting star Oliver Drake-Brockman (“Oliver could make dogs weep,” Cometti once said).

ABC program director Jim Fitzmaurice came after him not long after, with a view to the young gun calling sport full-time. Given the tumult of Cometti’s previous five years the security appealed. “We were middle class and I was an only child and my mother wasn’t working, so there was, if you like, a realisation that I needed to be careful with my next step,” Cometti tells me.

In the following 14 years at Aunty, Cometti refined the impeccable broadcasting habits that would form the basis of his calling style over the next four decades. At the ABC’s Perth headquarters he shared a tiny office with fellow newcomer Drew Morphett. “It was 12 feet by 20 feet or something like that,” remembers Morphett. “We lived in each other’s pockets early on.”

Cometti was an instant hit. Morphett jokes that having slaved away trying to climb the ladder himself, he was immediately leapfrogged by his new colleague, and was told by Fitzmaurice to work around Cometti’s Sunday league football coaching commitments. “He was always the favoured son,” Morphett laughs. “He had it over me right from the word go.”

Experienced help was always at hand. “Our superiors were broadcasters,” Morphett says, pointing to Fitzmaurice as a key mentor. “He was a legendary broadcaster. When Jim tapped you on the shoulder and told you you were ready to go, it was coming from a good source.”

“We were all taught the basics of broadcasting. He (Cometti) didn’t need much coaching to do football broadcasting because he was a coach and a former player. He got a very early nod to be the ABC’s Test cricket caller on radio. I thought at the time it was a very quick elevation.”

Though it was an odd fit at first, Cometti rose to the challenge of calling cricket beside Alan McGilvray and former Test captain Lindsay Hassett during the 1974-75 Ashes, starting a lifetime habit of over-preparing to avoid any chance of being caught short. Each morning he’d arrive with a long list of headlines to work from; weather, the toss, the batting order and other stories of the day. “He did it almost by indexing,” says Morphett, “so that if he ran out of something to say, he went to the next topic.”

To this day, Cometti still tenses up at the start of broadcasts the same way he did back then and delivering the opening monologue to camera has always been something of an ordeal. “Even this year, I think he still probably gets nervous,” says Matthew Richardson. “That’s probably what makes him so good. He’s not taking any call for granted no matter where it is, whether it’s a big game or a final, or maybe a game between teams on the bottom of the ladder.”

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As late as the early 90s, Cometti remained so concerned about nailing his opening lines that he instituted his own homespun autocue. “Dennis set up this little system,” says Morphett, who adds that Cometti would be mortified by people knowing. “He had a piece of dowel. He put it across the lens of the camera and he had two pieces of paper left and right of the lens, and on them he’d have headlines.”

“The first line would be ‘Hi, I’m DC’. Second line would be ‘West Coast v Richmond’. Third line would be, ‘fighting for a finals berth’ or whatever. I used to say, ‘why have you got to write down – ‘Hi, I’m DC’? It was a piece of wood across the lens of the camera and two foolscap bits of paper. This was just his way of getting under way without making any blues right from the start.”

Yet no amount of preparation could prevent the chaos around him. When a nervous Cometti took the chair for his first ever stint at the mic in a Test, during the Perth Test of 1974, he was mortified when he turned and realised his expert offsider Hassett had picked up his trademark pipe and wandered off into the distance for a smoke. “In many ways that day was helpful,” Cometti later noted, “if for no other reason than to illustrate how isolated and vulnerable broadcasters could be.”

Cometti himself has grown into a thoughtful and generous colleague, ever-conscious of injecting his less experienced co-workers into the broadcast and putting them at ease. Before Richardson’s debut broadcast as a Seven boundary rider and knowing he was nervous, Cometti and McAvaney walked down to the fence together and reassured him that he’d be fine. “Right from day one I was made to feel welcome by Dennis,” Richardson says.

That extends to the call itself. “He always throws down to you in a great way and brings you into the conversation with a perfect little lead-in,” says Seven newcomer Jude Bolton. “That’s made my transition as easy as possible.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Cometti calls the 2011 Meredith Gift.

Such grace and care for co-callers also helps Cometti’s own image, says his long-time colleague Michael Roberts. “He’s looking after you, looking after the brand, and looking after himself,” Roberts says. “There’s blokes that I work with that just get their kicks out of putting you on the spot and getting a laugh out of seeing you stuff up. But Dennis is all about looking after you. He’s a team player. He looks after his team-mates and he makes sure that the brand is winning.”

At the ABC Cometti was actually being groomed as McGilvray’s long-term replacement, though his bosses might have known that jig was up when he knocked back a chance to accompany the cricket broadcasting great on an Ashes tour, preferring instead to focus his energies on the WAFL season at hand. It’s rarely mentioned these days but Cometti’s cricket broadcasting days spanned from that fiery 1974-75 Ashes through the World Series schism and the troubled early seasons of the Border years, and he’d also return for Seven in the 1990s, calling Australia’s 1997 tour of South Africa.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Cometti calling Australia’s 1997 Test tour of South Africa.

Cricket was also the scene of one of his rare tantrums. Ray “Slug” Jordon once recalled an ABC call of a New Zealand-Sri Lanka one-day international at Bellerive Oval, for which the ABC was provided 30-minute shifts each from the travelling Nine TV broadcast team – Richie Benaud, Bill Lawry, Tony Greig and Ian Chappell.

To get into the broadcast area both sets of callers needed to ascend a narrow and amateurishly-constructed piece of scaffolding, which gave the operation the feel of a tree house. Chairs, desks and broadcast equipment had been lifted into position with a rugged pulley system. Cometti started to baulk. Come the morning shift, Benaud hit his head on the scaffolding as he climbed a rickety ladder.

“That was the end for Richie,” said Jordon, “and Dennis spat the dummy in sympathy. Richie retreated to the luxury of the channel Nine box while Dennis headed back to his hotel room and locked the door.” By 1987, when Cometti departed the ABC to star in Broadcom’s VFL football coverage en route to Seven, his days of schlepping around on a public service budget were done.

We forget it now, because his name is synonymous with AFL, but Cometti has been a versatile caller in the past two decades, an adaptability that came from those days at the ABC. His calls of Kieren Perkins’ 1500m gold medal and Susie O’Neill’s triumphs at Atlanta ‘96 are classics in the annals of Australian sports broadcasting. As ever, success came from preparation. “He just did the homework and worked hard at it,” Morphett says. “He would just find a little corner in the broadcast centre and just be poring over notes and preparing himself perfectly.”

‘He was a very quiet man’

If Dennis Cometti will be remembered best for his iconic one-liners, what will be missed most is his voice – a deep and humming baritone that croons its way through football matches. When Dennis Cometti calls upon his entire vocal range and enunciates it’s as though the words are echoing up from the bottom of a French oak wine barrel.

Cometti is not really sure where that voice came from, but says there’s some similarities with his father’s. “He was a very quiet man,” he says. “It’s not to say he didn’t have a deep, manly voice, my father. It was hardly ever raised in anger or raised in any way. It was just a different time.”

“He didn’t like me getting too loud at the footy and I suppose that tempered my view in terms of when I do the broadcast now. I certainly don’t have any skin in the game. I don’t barrack for teams. As a result I find that helpful. He sort of imbued me with that in the early days when I’d get a little too vocal.”

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But the Cometti pipes have been passed on his professional wrestler son Mark, who could prove one of football’s great father-son selections if things go right. “He’s got a better voice than I have,” Cometti says. “I think he’s flirting with the idea of going into broadcasting and I’m trying to help him a little bit at the moment, because he’s back nursing a shoulder injury in Perth. He was supposed to be my superannuation package when I sent him away but now he’s back here.”

‘You can have a good time at the footy’

As he crosses the finishing line on a 49-year broadcasting career, Cometti is by such a margin the numero uno of AFL broadcasting that you forget it wasn’t always so. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a perception on the eastern seaboard, quite unfair, that he favoured his home-state West Coast Eagles. At times Seven overlooked him for key finals, and he certainly wasn’t the face of the network’s coverage.



He first moved to Seven in 1988, the season after his shambolic and strange year with Broadcom, joining the likes of McAvaney, Morphett, Sandy Roberts, Don Scott and Peter Landy as household names in AFL states. Though Seven still has the strongest claim on Cometti, it’s also true to say that through the 1990s, neither they nor the staid nature of sports broadcasting in Australia allowed him to emerge as the universally-loved caller we now know.

“There was no overt ‘you can’t do that’,” Cometti says of that period, “it was just that you understood the environment you were in, and it was very hardcore football.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A promotional photograph of Network Seven AFL broadcaster Dennis Cometti. Photograph: Seven Network

It was out of the great TV rights war of 2001 that Cometti was able to find a new gear and unprecedented levels of popularity where so many other callers of his generation faded from view or disappeared from our TV screens entirely. Drafted in alongside Eddie McGuire as a star attraction of the Channel Nine team, he spent six years reinventing himself as the most consistently entertaining caller in the business, an evolution in his calling style that Nine encouraged.

Cometti likens the transition period to a rediscovery of his lazy late-1960s days out at the footy, when he’d try to make his friends laugh on the banks of Leederville oval in Perth, whose amphitheater design allowed wisecracks to ring out across the ground. “You can have a good time at the footy,” he says. “Not to the detriment of the game and not pushing yourself up, but a few lines here or there in the course of the afternoon – particularly if the game is a little dull – doesn’t add up to much time compared to the game itself.”

“My recollections of the footy was that you went and had a good time and you made a lot of smart alec remarks about the players and whatever else might be happening. It’s probably an insight into my personality that I do like to do that. I probably am a bit of a smart alec, which may have come from being in the disc jockey business and trying to be funny. I had no trouble just trying to be me. I felt that sometimes I pulled back from that in the early days at Seven.”

By 2008, when Nine lost the rights and Cometti returned to Seven, the network’s bosses were more than happy to let him do his own thing. Entertainment was back on the agenda. “You can’t be making light of what’s happening too often,” he says. “It’s an interesting line to walk, and you can’t be disrespectful. The contest is the thing. It’s everything.”

But what Cometti has learned across his career is that a special kind of relationship develops between commentator and listener, one that needs to be tended to. Some callers, he says, prefer to keep the audience at a distance and not reveal much of themselves, but for Cometti it’s been a gradual process of letting people in. He wants his fans to know him, to see who he is.

“Sometimes you can watch a bloke on TV for 20 or 25 years and really be none the wiser about who he is,” he says. “That is not a criticism. That is a choice that someone has made and they can do it very well. I’m of the opinion, if I watch and invest so much time in somebody or something, I would like at the end of that to know someone I’ve spent all that time with a little better.”

“That’s how I view a relationship: you’ve gotta let people in. Some people say it’s not a relationship, but I think it is. For me, that was important. To have people say ‘he seems like a reasonable bloke’. When I finished I wanted to be better known to the people I was broadcasting to, especially if they’d put that time and energy into listening to me. I owe them a debt of gratitude.”

‘We don’t live in each other’s pocket but we work in each other’s pocket’

Of course Dennis Cometti’s disappearance from our TV screens means not only the loss of a singular broadcasting talent but also spells the end of his enduring double-act with McAvaney, with whom he’s formed a professional dynamic that will be impossible for Seven to replicate. Dennis and Bruce. Bruce and Dennis. They’re like an old couple, right down to the biscuits McAvaney brings to every game, always from the same shop on Flinders lane.

Their longstanding rapport has been possible due to immense mutual respect and the kind of casual comfort among each other that allows them to sit alone at opposite ends of hotel dining rooms without acknowledging one another, lest they stifle their on-air chemistry. “We’re such good friends we can tell each other to bugger off,” Cometti once said. Another key to their partnership, he thinks, is that they never compete against each other for attention. Each caller knows his role.

When I talk to Cometti about the closeness of that bond, I mention a theory floated by ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser about his on-air partnership with his PTI co-host and friend Michael Wilbon; that the secret to the successful on-air partnership is like the old joke made by the Wimbledon groundskeepers when they’re asked how they keep the courts so green: you just start with 5000 years of rain. Cometti laughs. He and Bruce have had their 5000 years of rain, and they’re sad that it’s coming to an end.

“There’s never been a harsh word,” Cometti says. “We’re good friends. We don’t live in each other’s pocket but we work in each other’s pocket. It’s been a wonderful relationship. I’ve got the utmost respect for him.”

For those around them, it’s also the end of an era. “As long as I can remember, it’s been ‘Bruce and Dennis’, you know? You can’t replace that overnight,” says Matthew Richardson. “I’m sure it’s irreplaceable really. Not many Dennis Cometti’s come along in broadcasting. I guess it’s like a superstar footballer. They only come along once in a while. I guess it’s going to be the same with Dennis and that’s the challenge – finding that chemistry up in the box when he does retire.”

The only time Cometti seems anything other than comfortable in his decision to call it quits is when he discusses Bruce. “He is certainly the thing I will miss most from broadcasting footy,” he says. “I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life. I envy my replacement in that regard.”

‘I’m starting to punish myself now’

As his final game approaches, Cometti is at pains to point something out: he’s not quitting football broadcasting per se, he is just retiring from travelling. “The weekend before last I had three games in three states,” he says. “Now a man of my advancing years can’t be doing that too often.”

“I just feel that now I’m not enjoying it because of the travel. Once I’m at the ground and being with Bruce and watching the game, and Hamish and Basil on Sundays, it’s terrific. It’s really good fun. I’ve met some great people along the way, and that’s all good and well, but at the same time you think ‘I’m starting to punish myself now’. At my age it’s probably not the time to be taking the punishment.”

It’s been mooted that he wouldn’t mind calling some local games. “I could wander down to the WAFL and just sit in on the telecast,” he says. “I’d like that. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, because not many go to the WAFL, but that’s where my youth is. I’m sort of mired back in the 50s and 60s”. But he’s not so keen on learning nine new team lists and says “it’s all up in the air” for now.

“I could see myself being an ‘expert’ in inverted commas,” he adds. “As a failed coach I’m perfectly credentialed to do that.”

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Either way Cometti will continue his association with Seven, doing some blogging and filling the odd gap for Western Australian events. His mood after the grand final, he thinks, will depend on how his call has gone. “If I thought the broadcast has gone well, I’ll probably have a little elation after the grand final, you know, that you got through.”

“I think I’ve made the choice and I’m comfortable with it. I’m looking forward to the game, but I’m also looking forward to the Sunday night after it when I go out for dinner. I dunno what that tells me. I’ll be happy with the decision.”

Cometti is also happy for fans to remember him at his peak, rather than hanging on too long. “A lot of people are talking to me now, saying that it might be a Johnny Farnham retirement,” he jokes. “I use the analogy that sooner or later, if you stay out long enough, forget about Johnny Farnham, you become Meatloaf. So we don’t want to do that either.”

And that is more or less that. Though not quite. Just when I think I’m done sifting over Dennis Cometti’s life in broadcasting and finished speaking to the people who’ve sat beside him along the way, a phone call arrives one morning from the man himself. Our conversation has stirred a memory in him and his effort to call back and share it seems revealing of his professional generosity.

At this stage Greater Western Sydney are still a decent shot of making their first AFL grand final, and with that in mind Dennis has remembered an anecdote he thinks would work perfectly. In 2011, before the Giants had played a single league game, Cometti was receiving a tour of their training facilities when then-assistant coach Mark Williams roped him into giving the fledgling club’s young players a pep talk.

He hadn’t thought of it again until earlier this season when he bumped into Williams again, and the coach thought Cometti would get a kick out of knowing that the Giants had picked a choice phrase out of the motivational spiel and had it plastered over their locker room walls: “You can go back to the place but not to the time.”

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