JUSTIN LANGER: Dennis Cometti’s on-air magic was not a fluke — greatness never is

Magic comes in many forms. Some in a hat, some in a pack of cards, others through mystical illusion.

In other cases, magic reaches us through words and the great orators, singers and poets.

This week I sat in a pitch-black theatre and listened to a voice I have known my whole life. While the images on the screen told one story, they were brought to life by another.

That voice belonged to the late, great Dennis Cometti.

Channel Seven’s documentary Dennis Cometti: Centimetre Perfect screens this Wednesday night, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the premiere.

I walked in expecting a highlights reel. I walked out thinking about friendship, partnership, craft and the long shadow a good man casts over the people who come after him.

There was the magic of his Olympic commentary.

“The heart of a lion, in the heart of Dixie!” describing Susie O’Neill’s startling 200m butterfly gold medal in Atlanta in 1996.

After Kieren Perkins miraculous 1500m swim from lane eight in the same Olympics as the O’Neil triumph, Dennis cried: “This is all about courage.” And later: “This is rare gold! The best kind of gold!”.

Or when, in the 4 x 100m freestyle relay where Michael Klim broke the world record in the first leg and Ian Thorpe chased down Gary Hall Jr. on the anchor leg, Dennis’ rising crescendo captured pure, unadulterated sporting pandemonium on home soil.

“Thorpe is coming in after Hall. They’re matching strokes now. Thorpe on terms with Hall, they’ve got about 15m to swim. Thorpe is overhauling Hall! Hall and Thorpe. Thorpe’s in front! Thorpe and Hall. Thorpe goes in! Australia wins!”

For those of us who grew up here, Dennis was never just a commentator. “He was the soundtrack” as Kieran Perkins fondly described him.

A Geraldton boy who played 38 games for West Perth, Dennis coached, was behind a microphone at 6KY at 18, and was calling Test cricket for the ABC at 23, the youngest in the country at the time.

Then three decades of football television, three Olympic Games, and a career that stretched across more than half a century; it is no wonder he was “the soundtrack” of so many wonderful and inspiring sporting memories.

His résumé, whilst breathtaking, doesn’t uncover what Channel 7’s masterful documentary does.

First there were the partnerships. Dennis and his wife Velia, daughter Ricki and son Mark.

Then there was Bruce.

Through the documentary, it was the outstanding Bruce McAvaney that captured the essence of partnership and friendship.

Watching those two talk about each other, was more than just talent. It was about a partnership.

Two men at the top of a brutally competitive profession, who spent decades making each other better, and never once appeared to keep score. This is rare.

I know a little about this. I opened the batting with Matthew Hayden for the best part of six years, Ricky Ponting came in at No.3, and the thing nobody tells you about a great partnership is how little of it is about runs.

It is about rhythm. It is about the walk to the middle. It is about knowing, without a word, when your partner needs you to talk and when he needs you to shut up. It is about being genuinely happier when he gets the hundred than when you do.

Cometti and McAvaney had that. You can hear it in old calls if you listen for it, the way one would leave a beat of silence because he knew the other had something better coming.

The generosity of the handover. No jostling. No ego about who landed the line that made the nation laugh.

Great partnerships in any field — business, medicine, the arts, a football broadcast box — seem to share the same ingredients. Trust built over a long time. Complementary strengths rather than duplicated ones. And a decision, made early, and never revisited, that the partnership matters more than the individual.

Such partnerships are also fragile. Most people never find one. Dennis found his, and he looked after it for 30 years.

Then there was the craft.

Chris Judd tells a beautiful story in the film about having a cup of tea with Dennis and realising, slowly, that the great man was quietly workshopping one-liners across the table. Testing them. Filing them away.

I had the same cherished experiences on several wonderful occasions.

Over coffee with Kim Hagdorn, Steve Malaxos, Dr Clay Golledge, Basil Zempilas and Dennis, we would talk sport, solve nothing, and hear those velvet tones from one seat away rather than through a television.

Good memories. I always left entertained, suspecting that not one word of it was accidental.

Because here is the thing about “centimetre perfect”, it was not spontaneous.

It looked spontaneous. That is the whole trick, the magic. Few were as prepared as Cometti was. His magic wasn’t a fluke. Greatness never is.

Heath Shaw’s smother on Nick Riewoldt in the 2010 Grand Final replay is now remembered almost entirely through Dennis’s call of it: “He came up behind him like a librarian, he never heard him”.

Peter Wilson rising in the 1992 decider was “Like a cork in the ocean”. Those lines arrive in less than a second of live television and yet they are the visible tip of thousands of hours of reading, listening, noting, discarding and rehearsing.

I have seen this in every genuinely excellent person I have worked with.

Adam Gilchrist’s hands looked effortless because of the balls nobody watched him take at training.

Shane Warne’s theatre looked improvised because he had thought about the batsman for a week. The work is invisible by design. That is what makes it look like magic.

And notice what Dennis never did with his wit. He never used it to diminish a player. He laughed with the game, not at the people in it.

Humour is the easiest weapon in sport and the hardest gift. He chose the gift, every single time. Richie Benaud mastered the same classy art.

He also knew when to say nothing. When Kieren Perkins came home from lane eight in Atlanta, when Susie O’Neill was at her peak, Dennis gave the moment room to breathe.

Anyone can shout. Knowing when your own voice is the least interesting thing in the stadium is a discipline most of us never learn. Therein lies the beauty of the best TV commentators.

Dennis, like other ‘greats’ was also a brilliant mentor.

A thread that stayed with me through the documentary was Basil Zempilas.

Basil is now the Leader of the Opposition in Western Australia. Before that he was Lord Mayor of Perth, and before that he spent three decades in broadcasting.

Watch him closely and Cometti’s fingerprints are all over him, the timing, the phrasemaking, the strut, the refusal to say in 20 words what can be landed in six.

That is what a mentor gives you. Not just technique, but standards through example.

I have written before about mentors like Rod Marsh, Dennis Lillee, Allan Border, and my old man. None of them ever sat me down with a manual.

What they did was set a bar, live by it themselves, and let me work out that the standards were not negotiable.

Cometti seems to have done exactly that for a generation of West Australian broadcasters. He was generous with his time. He made people want to be better at the job.

There is a lovely irony of Dennis’s last calls.

A boy from Geraldton, 30 years of television football, and a soft spot for the Western Bulldogs, his final call on Seven was the Western Bulldogs premiership after 62 years of waiting. Of all the games to finish on.

“And Franklin was run down… Tom Boyd’s got it, Tom Boyd goes long. How will it bounce? The stadium holds its breath… it’s a goal! And the western suburbs erupts.”

Followed up with: “Their day. Their year. Their joy.”

Dennis then bowed out on radio at the 2021 AFL grand final at home here in Perth with his son Mark producing the stats beside him. The Dogs didn’t win that game, but still a fitting end.

Talking of Mark, a star in himself, Dennis’ family come across superbly in the documentary. Warm, funny, proud.

Channel Seven made this in-house, which is unusual in sports documentaries. The creators told me it was a labour of love, and you can feel that through the screen.

When a network makes something about one of its own, it can easily become a corporate exercise. This is not that. It is a room full of people who loved a bloke, trying to explain why.

Legacy is not the numbers. It is not the games called or the awards on the shelf. It is the way people talk about you when you are no longer in the room, and whether the standards you set are still being lived by people you may never have met.

By that measure, Dennis Cometti was millimetre, not centimetre, perfect.

Dennis Cometti: Centimetre Perfect airs Wednesday, September 23, 8.30pm on Seven and 7plus