The late Tony Charlton, who called a dozen VFL grand finals and three Olympic Games, said sporting commentators should “produce words like bubbles in champagne”. There have been some sublime sporting commentators in this country. But no one in Australian broadcasting turned words into bubbles like Dennis Cometti. Few could match his repertoire of wit, timing and verve. And few were so professional, so versatile, so fully dedicated to their craft, so capable of meeting the moment.
In many ways, Cometti was an outsider. Yes, he’d played and coached in the WAFL. But he wasn’t a legend of the VFL who transitioned into commentary. He wasn’t from the eastern seaboard. He wasn’t some nuggety, phlegmatic former player. He looked like an Oscar Wilde character. He sounded like a man who’d just back-announced Boz Scaggs on the radio. He had to prove himself to audiences who’d never heard of him, and who weren’t used to such dulcet tones calling VFL football.
But he always stepped up. There’s few better examples of that than the 1989 grand final between Hawthorn and Geelong. In hindsight, he may have been a surprise choice to call that game. He would have been still relatively unknown to a lot of his audience. And it would have been an incredibly challenging game to call. Pandemonium was unfolding all around him. That included in his own commentary box, where Don Scott turned in a performance that strayed towards the negative. When Dermott Brereton was ironed out and Robert DiPierdomenico’s lungs were hissing, Cometti didn’t flinch. He was funny, accurate, erudite. He struck exactly the right tone. The game was played at breakneck speed but Cometti nailed its cadence, its chaos, its violence, its meaning.
And he was like that for the next quarter of a century. You look back at so many defining moments in football and he did them all justice. When Peter Wilson kicks a preposterous and match turning goal in the 1992 grand final, when Nick Reiwoldt takes one of the most courageous marks of all time, and when Heath Shaw mows him down in the 2010 replay, Cometti is there – never in your face, never off beat, never over the top.
And it wasn’t just football. He was a terrific cricket caller. He was right at home at the Olympics. It’s hard to overstate just how big Keiron Perkins’ win at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics was. It must be incredibly difficult to commentate a 1500 metre swimming race, especially when all the focus is on lane 8. But Cometti read the race and paced himself perfectly, producing a call they’ll be replaying for hundreds of years.
Every person watching and listening knew that he’d done the work, and that he wasn’t playing them for mugs. It was why he worked so well with Bruce McAvaney. They were such different personalities and broadcasters. For a magazine profile piece, I once had the privilege of watching them call a game from the Channel 7 box. Bruce carried himself a man preparing to run an Olympic final – a bundle of excitement, unable to sit down. Cometti sat there like a crack barrister, with a briefcase full of carefully colour coded notes. Bruce would watch through binoculars, bobbing from left foot to right. Dennis would watch off a small screen, and occasionally consult his scrapbook.
In those notes he had extensive details on the various players, potential one-liners, and various points of interest. And he barely used any of them. That was part of what made him so good at his craft. He was prepared within an inch of his life. But he was patient. He’d sit on those one-liners for decades. And at the perfect moment, in the heat of grand final, when we all least expected it, he would reel them off.
Russell Jackson profiled him for the Guardian prior to his final AFL game, a piece that it is mandatory reading for anyone seeking to understand where Cometti came from and the man he was. His dad, James, the son of an Italian immigrant, collapsed and died in the street when 18-year-old Dennis was at footy training. Jackson notes how a man who was so well known, so well travelled, the sort of man who could walk into any establishment in London and New York and immediately command the room, still lived in the Perth house he grew up in. A few days after that interview was published, Cometti had one of the best calls of his career.
To listen to Bill Collins or Matt Hill call a Melbourne Cup, Richie Benaud describe a leg break, or Bruce McAvaney call an Olympic athletics final, is to listen to masters of their craft. And that’s exactly how Cometti treated commentary – a craft. It was a craft you worked on, that you respected, that you mastered. He is gone now, but that craft endures, and his glorious voice lives on. And whenever there’s a sporting moment – sometime seismic, something unexpected, something absurd – we will still instinctively turn to Dennis for the words. But Dennis won’t be there.
