Adrian Barich: Goodbye Dennis Cometti, one of WA’s finest, a broadcasting icon and soundtrack to our weekends

It’s been a sad time in Barra-Land.

The week got big on me with the sad news about one of WA’s finest, Dennis Cometti.

I’m not entirely sure how emotions work (like a lot of blokes, I suspect), but when I first heard Dennis had passed away, I think I went into a bit of shock.

I knew he’d been unwell. But I don’t think many of us expected it to happen so quickly.

Wednesday was already a heavy day. It marked the anniversary of my dad’s passing, a date that never slips by unnoticed.

And I’d also been reflecting on four years since Shane Warne’s heart attack (the spin king was probably Dennis’ favourite cricketer).

Sport has this way of stitching itself into our lives, and when the voices and heroes you grew up with leave, it feels deeply personal.

Then the phone rang.

And just like that, the week shifted again.

Dennis wasn’t just a broadcaster. He was the soundtrack to so many of our weekends.

The calm in the chaos. The wordsmith who could make the ordinary sound poetic and the extraordinary sound inevitable.

For many of us in WA, he wasn’t just one of Australia’s greatest sports callers . . . he was ours.

Shock gives way to reflection. Reflection gives way to gratitude.

But that first moment? That was just silence.

I didn’t shed a tear at first. It wasn’t until I spoke to my friend Mark Duffield, an award-winning journalist who is as tough as they come, that it caught me. When his voice faltered, I had to put down the phone too.

Dennis was a complex fella. Thoughtful. Wry. Deeply sentimental beneath that dry exterior. He had an expression he loved, so much so he used it as the title of one of his books: “You can go back to the place, but not the time”.

It became something of a personal credo.

He adapted it from lyrics in the Paul Williams song Waking Up Alone. The line reflects on the impossibility of truly recreating past moments, even if you return to the exact spot where they happened.

Dennis used it to describe his approach to life, to nostalgia, and to his long career in football broadcasting. Fittingly, he lived in the same family home he grew up in. The place remained. The time, of course, moved on.

It was considered a guiding principle for him, particularly after the death of his father in 1969.

The phrase was so poignant it reportedly ended up on the locker room walls at Greater Western Sydney after Dennis shared it during a pep talk to the Giants’ young players in 2011.

That was his gift — wisdom wrapped in simplicity.

Of course, to most Australians, he’ll always be remembered for the words.

“Centimetre perfect.”

“Working in a phone box.”

And for Peter Wilson’s goal, snapped over his head in the 1992 AFL grand final, “like a cork in the ocean”.

Lines that still float around the game today.

Yes, he was a unique individual, and we were lucky to have him. The media facilities at Optus Stadium rightly bear his name. May they, and his “Cometti-isms”, live on forever.

But I think the true measure of the man sits in the final paragraphs of his book Back To The Place, Back To The Time.

Asked that obligatory dinner-party question — if you could invite anyone who’s ever lived, who would it be? — he didn’t choose a statesman or a sporting hero.

He wrote: “I’d like it to be my family. Jim, Dulcie, Velia, Ricki and Mark . . . and we’re all 40.”

He would be getting back to the place, and the time.

And that, more than any perfectly delivered call, tells you exactly who Dennis Cometti was.