There are voices in sport that do more than describe the action. They make you feel it. Dennis Cometti was one of those voices, and on Wednesday his family confirmed that Australian sport had lost its finest practitioner of the art. He was 76.
Cometti passed away overnight in Perth at the age of 76, leaving behind a legacy that stretched far beyond the boundary lines of any single code or era. Best known for his AFL commentary, Cometti worked in the media for 53 years between 1968 and 2021. For generations of Australians, his voice was the sound of the big occasion.
Cometti was born in Geraldton, Western Australia. He started as a radio announcer in Perth in 1968 while also trying to forge a playing and coaching career with West Perth in the Western Australian Football League. He spent 17 years involved in club football as a player and coach, scaling to the heights of the WAFL with a 63-goal season in 1968 as a forward under AFL legend Graham 'Polly' Farmer. Sport, in other words, was in his blood long before the microphone found him.
He joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1972, where he concentrated exclusively on sport, broadcasting his first Test match in 1973 and becoming the youngest in ABC history to do so at just 23, before spending the next 13 years alongside Alan McGilvray. From there, he went on to work for the Seven Network from 1986 to 2001, the Nine Network between 2002 and 2006, and returned to Seven from 2007 until his full-time retirement in 2016.
Across a five-decade career in radio and television, Cometti combined accurate and incisive calling of the game with wit and humour, forming a legendary partnership with fellow Hall of Fame member Bruce McAvaney in their Grand Final calls for the Seven Network. That pairing became one of the most celebrated in Australian broadcasting history; all up, they called over 450 games together.
The calls themselves entered the language. "It came up behind him like a librarian. He never heard him" remains arguably his most memorable line, lifting a significant moment in Collingwood's 2010 grand final replay victory into folklore and quickly entering Australian sporting vernacular. Channel 7 was in the process of producing a documentary about Cometti, titled Centimetre Perfect, at the time of his death.
Cometti covered three Summer Olympics for Seven: Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000, specialising in swimming and calling more Australian gold medals than any previous Australian television commentator. He was behind the microphone when Kieren Perkins won his iconic gold medal in the 1500m at the Sydney Games. The breadth of that CV set him apart from peers who were specialists in one code alone.
He bowed out of full-time television after the 2016 AFL Grand Final, the 16th he had called. His last match as a commentator was the 2021 grand final between the Melbourne Demons and Western Bulldogs, which he called for Triple M. His son Mark produced stats for that final coverage, a fitting family footnote to an extraordinary career.
The tributes came quickly and warmly. AFL Commission Chair Richard Goyder said Cometti "was a voice for our game for more than 50 years, and he captured the moment perfectly every time and made it fun along the way." Former Demons player and Seven presenter David Schwarz put it simply: "He just had a voice that made you enjoy football."
Cometti was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2019 and the AFL Hall of Fame in 2020. In 2019, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the broadcast media as a sports presenter and to the community. He was voted the Television Caller of the Year by the Australian Football Media Association a record 11 times.
What made Cometti exceptional was not just the one-liners, though those were plentiful. It was the rare combination of deep football knowledge, a broadcaster's instinct for timing, and the kind of easy authority that can never be manufactured. His smooth voice, dry humour and quick wit became his trademark across a career spanning 51 years. He made the difficult look effortless, and for half a century he gave Australians the words for their greatest sporting moments.
He is survived by his family. The Sport Australia Hall of Fame is among the many institutions that will honour his memory in the days ahead. The microphone, as they say, has gone quiet. But the calls will echo for a very long time.