Legendary Australian broadcaster Dennis Cometti to be celebrated in special documentary Centimetre Perfect

A decade after Dennis Cometti hung up the headset at Channel 7, the legendary sports commentator will be celebrated in the documentary Centimetre Perfect, named after one of his memorable one-liners. For generations Cometti’s voice provided the soundtrack to sports biggest moments as a staple of the Seven Network. He began as a radio announcer in Perth in 1968 and for the next four decades called thousands of iconic sporting moments across AFL, WAFL and Olympic games, where he specialised in the swimming. His call of Kieren Perkins ‘rare gold’ at Atlanta in 1996, when he won the 1500m final as a lane 8 underdog, is still one of the nation’s iconic moments. But for most Australians football and Cometti were like a pie and sauce. It was hard to imagine one without the other — for decades. It has been 10 years since Cometti last called an AFL game on TV, finishing up after the 2016 grand final when the Western Bulldogs broke a 62-year premiership drought. It was a match tinged with emotion for the affable Cometti, who spent 1971 on the Bulldogs list and always retained a soft spot for them. Few know Cometti better than fellow Channel 7 commentary great Bruce McAvaney, the pair having called about 450 AFL matches together. McAvaney said sport fans especially footy supporters would love the recollection of arguably the best to ever call AFL. “There’s so much affection for him and respect. We haven’t heard him for a decade now in terms of the national AFL coverage on Seven, so it’s been a while and people that listened to him over the years... they’re going to love it because we love nostalgia,” he told The West Australian. “We know how much joy he brought to the game. He’s a unique person and a unique commentator, so I think 10 years is a really lovely punctuation mark to reflect on the enormous contribution he made to sports broadcasting in our country. “We’re talking about a Hall of Famer, we’re talking about someone who has pioneered a style of broadcasting. “So we’re not just talking about anybody, we’re talking about someone very special.” While famous for his one-liners which became known as Cometti-isms, McAvaney said it was his friend’s knowledge of the game which made him so great when the microphone was switched on. “You have to understand the nuances of the game and he played it at a high level, coached it at a high level and he really did get football. He could read the game as well as anybody,” he said. “Then he decided at some stage in his broadcast career that ‘I’m going to do it in a way that really suits me and is a little bit different to anybody else’. “And so he perfected this style which was quirky, and humorous and the words that he was able use at the right time, it was different to anyone else. “We all do it in our own way but Dennis did it in a way that was DC. And it was a breakthrough, it was an outlier, it was ‘Wow, did you hear that last night?’. “He created a conversation around his conversation. People would laugh and talk and think ‘How did he do that?’ and ‘How clever was that?’ “This is what he was able to do and it’s not easy.” Centimetre Perfect will be broadcast on Seven and 7plus later this year.