Growing up, Dennis Cometti was my hero. As a colleague, he was the main event

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes.

Dennis Cometti was my hero. And boy am I glad I met him.

In a cupboard somewhere, my Dad has a dusty camcorder tape of six-year-old me holding a toy microphone and pretending to be the great man, commentating an imaginary game of footy.

Two decades later, as a staffer on The West Australian’s website, it was my job to handle Cometti’s Monday morning online column.

It was one of the greatest assignments of my career, because I got to talk to Cometti each week.

Only the first half of the column was about footy.

In the second half, he’d indulge one of his other great loves: indie music.

Using the relatively new website YouTube, Dennis would unearth all of these unheard-of bands, mostly from the United States, and write a few lines of commentary. He fancied himself an amateur A&R man.

When he first pitched the idea, we met in person for coffee at a café near Newspaper House in Osborne Park. Dennis stepped out of his late model Audi sedan dressed in a black turtleneck; it felt like an audience with Paul McCartney.

Cometti’s love of music was a throwback to his first break in media, as a disc jockey with 6KY then 6PM.

He juggled spinning platters with playing footy for West Perth, then a move to Melbourne’s 3DB took him to the VFL and Footscray Bulldogs. He got on the list but work and injuries meant he never played a senior game.

Audiences older than me remember fondly his work calling Test cricket alongside the legendary Alan McGilvray at the ABC in the early 1970s.

A lover of Americana, Cometti was an enthusiastic study of JFK conspiracy theories.

He loved American sport and followed the Atlanta Falcons from the 80s.

This was way before pay TV in Australia, when games became freely available to watch live and the league’s popularity exploded. He followed it on VHS tapes sent back from America.

Atlanta was also the site of several broadcasting triumphs.

His call of Kieran Perkins’ unlikely runaway 1500m freestyle gold medal from lane 8 at the 1996 Olympics was legendary.

As was the line he dropped in the concluding stages of Susie O’Neill’s 200m butterfly gold: “The heart of a lion, in the heart of Dixie.”

Cometti’s footy witticisms are well chronicled, but he never failed to meet the biggest moments.

As Sydney’s Lewis Jetta tore off in pursuit of Cyril Rioli amid the cacophony of the 2012 AFL grand final, Cometti roared on instinct: “It’s a main event in any stadium in the world”.

If Dennis was calling, it was the main event. The greatest to ever do it, his presence behind the mic made it so.