On June 11, 1947, from a villa in Florence, the bohemian Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote to the legend of English cricket commentary, John Arlott.
"My dear John," wrote Thomas. "Thank you for writing. It was very good to hear from you. Though I hear your voice every day from Trent Bridge, at the moment. You're not only the best cricket commentator - far and away that - but the best sports commentator I've heard, ever; exact, enthusiastic, prejudiced, amazingly visual, authoritative, and friendly. A great pleasure to listen to you: I do look forward to it."
Dennis Cometti claims Fyfe is not in the best 25 players in the AFL at the moment.Credit: Simon Schluter
That, in my opinion, is an excellent description of a great sports commentator. The only word I don't understand is prejudiced. To be prejudiced is to pre-judge. A sporting commentator who pre-judges incidents in a game is, in my book, a poor commentator since he's not open to what is special and potentially unique about each moment.
Arlott spoke in what is usually described as "a rich Hampshire burr" with a glass of red wine beside him. He wrote on cricket and wine, introducing Ian "Beefy" Botham to the latter pleasure. Beefy visits Arlott's grave each year on the anniversary of his death, opens a bottle and has a glass with him. Arlott was a serious man politically, championing coloured South African cricketer Basil D'Oliveira in the 1960s against the apartheid government.
But he also had a sense of humour that was interfused with the slow rhythms of his gravelly voice. My favourite John Arlott story concerns New Zealand bowler Bob Cunis. Bob couldn't be described as medium pace because he wasn't quick enough. But he couldn't be called a spinner because he didn't spin it. And so, at the end of a long's day play, several bottles drunk, Arlott advised his listeners, "And, as for Cunis, his bowling, like his name, was neither one thing nor the other."
And so I look around the local scene and ask – do we have a great commentator? Do we have one whose best lines will be thrown about in 50 years like John Arlott's are? The person with the best chance is Dennis Cometti.
The first thing I would say is that, when he chooses to be serious, Cometti is astute and concise. I trust his reading of the play at big moments. He delivers two of Dylan Thomas' requirements – he's exact and authoritative. Normally, I have a problem with commentators who talk too much, who put themselves between the viewer and the play. Such people belong on radio.
Cometti is the exception to the rule. When he heads off on a verbal riff, you go with him because in terms of deft images and humorous asides he has the score on the board. In fact, there's daylight between him and second.
When Heath Shaw smothered Nick Riewoldt in the 2010 grand final, Cometti intoned, "He snuck up on him like a librarian." The best commentators don't merely record the fact, they record the sensation. Lesser commentators try to imitate the sensation by shouting clichés, but that image of Cometti's has a poetic touch.
Some of his lines are pre-prepared, which can give them a stagy feel, but part of what makes his lines funny is the mock-serious manner in which he delivers them. When a pack formed with Collingwood's present No.11 somewhere inside it, Cometti, echoing the old Playschool song, declared: "There's a Blair in there."
But the outright winner when it comes to Dennis Cometti one-liners was inspired, it is said, by the Western Bulldogs' Tony Liberatore, father of 2014 best-and-fairest winner Tom Liberatore: "He entered the pack optimistically and emerged misty optically." That goes beyond mere witticism and approaches a philosophy of life. Who among us has not entered a pack of some sort optimistically and emerged misty optically? Some of us still have misty optics years after the event, but the people you love to watch, in sport and in life, are the people who keep throwing themselves back into the fray.
I found myself thinking of Dennis Cometti when I watched a replay of Hawthorn's comprehensive demolition of Sydney in this year's grand final. As we all know, that result was orchestrated by the Hawks' midfield quartet of Lewis, Burgoyne, Mitchell and Hodge and the greatest of these, in the opinion of most, was Hodge.
There's a moment late in the game when Hodge is paddling about flat-footed in the defence. He kicks the ball to begin the process of moving it forward. Seeing no immediate solution to the puzzle of how to advance, the player Hodge kicked to, kicks it back. Cometti: "And the ball comes back to Hodge like an obedient dog." Sums up the day, really.