Merit award: Commentator Kelli Underwood has earned the respect of her peers.
EAMON GALLAGHER
Kelli Underwood doesn't have a Facebook page. Not in her name, or that of anyone else. Nor does she tweet or visit online message boards and forums, which is probably a good thing because, in the eyes of many, she has committed the most serious of crimes and therefore is worthy of serious and repeated vilification.
And that “crime” would be? Being female and being a football commentator.
The AFL might well have done a brilliant job in preaching the wrongs of vilification of any sort at all levels of the game, from the elite levels through to Auskick, but the message has yet to hit home with the neanderthals who hold court on the game (all anonymously, of course) in various online forums and who believe Underwood is fair game.
But the first thing you should understand about Underwood is that she has the hide of a rhinoceros. She knows she is the subject of plenty of discussion among AFL fans, plenty of it uninformed and much of it unfair, but it only makes her more determined to forge her trailblazing path through the demanding and uber-competitive world of sports media.
Of course, Underwood is not the first high-profile woman in the football media. Corrie Perkin was the first accredited woman football writer with The Age in 1981, and the Spencer Street paper made sure that everyone knew that Perkin wasn't just a trailblazer but was good at her craft. Caroline Wilson started covering the VFL, as it then was, the following season, and today she is the chief football writer at The Age and a regular on TV and radio as well.
The AFL estimates that women now comprise about 15 per cent of all media personnel who are accredited to cover the game.
But Underwood is the trailblazer, the first not to just cover training sessions and tribunal hearings or to report from the boundary line, but to sit in the commentary box and call the play. Just like Bruce McAvaney, Dennis Cometti and Tim Lane, and before them, Lou Richards, Peter Landy and Mike Williamson.
Underwood grew up in Adelaide in a family where sport was a constant factor. Basketball and cricket were popular but football, which her father Michael played and still umpires, was king.
And, like many who end up working in the football media, her fascination growing up wasn't just with what happened on the ground. Underwood was consumed by the industry that covered it — who wrote the big stories and who called the games.
“I loved watching it and got right into the broadcasts.
I was intrigued by who was calling and who was offering special comments. Not just of the AFL, but all sports. I watched the tennis because Bruce McAvaney was commentating,” she said.
Underwood studied journalism in Adelaide but ended up coming to Melbourne to work in the newsroom at 3AW. She moved to the sports round before too long and soon became the match-day reporter for AW, which involved covering what the presidents said at their pre-match functions through to coaches comments and injury news after the matches.
She wasn't the only woman doing this at the time. Fiona Darmody had worked on radio in a similar capacity, while Tiffany Cherry was flying high as a reporter and presenter for the now-defunct Fox Footy Channel after also having started at AW.
Underwood knew she had the ability to graduate from reporting to calling but, like other women, presumed the opportunity would never come her way. But enter Rex Hunt and a crashingly boring late-2005 clash between Essendon and Carlton.
It was a rare Bombers-Blues match that had nothing riding on the result. Both clubs were set to miss the finals and with Essendon en route to a 99-point win at the MCG, a bored Hunt turned to Underwood who was watching from the back of the commentary box and asked her to call some of the action. No preparation. No study. No time even to clear her throat, suck on a lozenge and limber up her vocal chords.
“As soon as I started, the people sitting in front of the box in the MCC members turned and stared,” she recalled. “It was supposed to be just a bit of fun but I found it all a bit overwhelming and traumatic.”
It was also the start of something.
Underwood moved to Channel Ten as a reporter the following year and transferred her radio allegiance to the ABC, again working as a boundary rider and reporter. But she had a couple of allies at the national broadcaster who believed she could offer a bit more than that.
Setting aside the giggle-and-hope exercise with Hunt in 2005, both the executive producer of Radio Grandstand, Susie Robinson, and lead caller Gerard Whateley believed Underwood had the goods to call games. And in August 2008, with most of the ABC's first-choice callers otherwise occupied at the Beijing Olympics, there was the opportunity.
Underwood commentating in round 10 when the Cats took on the Demons at Skilled Stadium.
THE SLATTERY MEDIA GROUP
Sydney versus Geelong on a Sunday afternoon at Homebush was perfect. It was to be broadcast only to a small market in New South Wales. “I had an enormous amount of trust in them and I knew they wouldn't make a song or dance about it,” she said. “They were able to ease me in and see how I did.”
Underwood called it beautifully and, as it turned out, under considerable duress when her co-commentator, Rob Cross, had to call it quits at three-quarter time after his voice packed up, leaving her to call the entire final quarter on her own.
“I just remember getting through the game and there being this enormous sense of relief that I had done it,” she remembers. “The scary factor is that you don't know the words are going to come and what you are going to say. I guess you have to have enormous trust in yourself because you can do all the preparation in the world but at the end of the day, you just don't know what's going to come out of your mouth.”
Whatever did come out was good, and Whateley, who caught snippets of it in Beijing, was delighted. In fact, he never had any doubts.
“Kelli has a good voice for it and her language is right because she knows footy so well. It's a difficult craft to master, but when I looked around at all the emerging and aspiring young football reporters, she had the most promise of anyone – male or female,” he said.
Another who shared that opinion was Channel Ten's head of football, David Barham. He heard the call and was convinced enough to give Underwood a shot at the biggest game in town – calling an AFL match on TV.
“I listened to the call and it was very clear, and I felt that out of all the young people at the network she was the most deserving to be given an opportunity to call,” Barham said.
Her TV debut came in round 16 last year when Geelong and Hawthorn met in a grand-final rematch at the MCG. The match was a corker, with the Hawks leading all day, only for the Cats to come back hard in the final quarter. The game's final act determined the outcome as Geelong's James Bartel marked the ball in the forward pocket moments before the final siren with the scores level. Underwood called the kick as Bartel slotted through the point that gave Geelong a win in the most dramatic of circumstances.
Writing in The Age, respected sportswriter Richard Hinds gave Underwood a big tick of approval, saying: “Underwood rose to the occasion. In fact, by the time she described Jimmy Bartel’s match-winning point in appropriately excited tones, you weren’t hearing a female commentator, just a commentator, which — for a rookie – is the ultimate validation.”
Underwood called several more games and grew in confidence with every call. She looked at colleagues in the industry, compared her ability to theirs and realised she belonged.
“I had come through the ranks and done the yards – radio news, TV news, match-day reporting and boundary riding, so calling games was the logical next step in a sense. I?d seen other colleagues do it really well so I thought, ‘Why not me?? That's what it came down to, which is why I have taken the female element out of it.”
Her experiences became the same as those who have been in the business for much longer – the exhilaration that follows the final siren when the call is over, and the “hangover” that invariably follows the next day, such is the concentration required over three hours.
But with the frequency of the calls came the criticism – she speaks too fast, speaks over the play, doesn't anticipate what might be coming and, surprise, surprise, she's never played the game.
Never mind that the media in every sphere are full of those who have never practised whatever it is they report on, when it comes to football, there are some who only rate those who have pulled on a jumper.
Thankfully, it is a sentiment not felt at all within the industry, and Underwood was swamped with well-wishers after making her calling debut. Sam Mostyn, one of two female AFL commissioners, sought her out, as did McAvaney. One of the first to offer encouragement was Tony Charlton, a doyen of the sports media and one of the biggest media figures in the game when stations first started to televise football.
“Footy must have voices who haven't played the game,” says Whateley. “There will always be a place for people who haven't played the game in the media, and women are really placed to bring a fresh perspective.
It's not just a men's sport any more.”
Underwood's strategy with the haters is to block them out. She doesn't go near BigFooty, the massive online messageboard in which every football news item – big and small – is debated for weeks and months. Facebook is not for her and if it was and she bothered to do the maths, she would discover there are 17 different groups? pages purely created to belittle her. And while she reads the sports pages avidly – in her job she has no choice but to – she has learned to avoid other parts of newspapers, such as the letters pages of The Age's Green Guide.
“When Dave Barham approached me to do it, I knew it would be seen as different and I knew it would polarise people, and particularly in football because when anything different comes along, or whenever there's change, it's generally followed by uproar.”
Yet despite all the criticism, it is the widespread passion for football that Underwood finds so appealing and that has drawn her in.
“I love that people are so opinionated about the game and, obviously, my joining the commentary team would bring out this passion and strong feeling either way about my involvement. I'd be pretty naive to think that it wouldn't. Initially when I did the four games in a row last year, I found it so overwhelming and the negatives did get to me. But the positives outweigh someone writing a letter to the editor to criticise me.
“But you have to get used to it. The Geelong-Hawthorn game I called last year had nearly a million people watching it. As someone said to me, that meant there were nearly a million people out there who had an opinion on my work. You just have to put your head down, try to get better with every match you call and listen to the people who really matter to me.”
Which is part of the plan. Forgetting the gender part of it, Underwood is still a rookie caller. She bats at No.5 on the depth chart at Ten, behind Stephen Quartermain, Anthony Hudson, Lane and Michael Christian, and with two games a weekend each requiring two callers, she is part of a rotation. And at the ABC, she is a casual caller, with Whateley, Drew Morphett and Dan Lonergan on staff and, therefore, the first-choice callers for matches in Victoria.
Between their respective TV and radio duties, the aforementioned callers get to commentate two and sometimes three games each weekend, and that's the frequency with which Underwood needs to start calling games. Forget her gender. It's time for her to hone the craft.
Whateley says: “One of the keys for any emerging commentator is to call games, preferably twice a week, every week. With every game she makes progress, but there are fundamental differences between commentating for radio and TV, and the more she does it, the better she will become.”
Says Underwood: “People criticise Tim Lane and they criticise Bruce McAvaney. It's a difficult craft and there's no such thing as the perfect call, and at the end of every match I know there are things I did well and things I could do better, and I go away and work on that.”
At first she didn't make much distinction between her TV and radio calls, with one sounding very much like the other. She only did three radio calls before her first TV gig, whereas some commentators call one or the other for years before changing media.
“Radio is very descriptive, while TV is very interpretative. You use a lot less words on TV but everyone has their different style. I've asked a lot of colleagues what works for them and I'm starting to feel comfortable with that, but I'm starting to know what works for me and sticking with it.”
In addition to calling the AFL, Underwood has also been a lead caller for her network's coverage of the ANZ Championship netball competition. She leads a hectic lifestyle – this interview took more than a month to arrange – travelling around the country to call netball games, football games and working in the Channel Ten newsroom three days each week.
She has grown to love netball, which she didn't follow or play growing up, and is an interested
observer as Channel Ten colleague and former Western Bulldogs ruckman Luke Darcy cuts his teeth as a netball commentator … and deals with similar levels of acceptance from that sport's female community.
Her future would appear to be secure, although in the finest football tradition, Underwood is taking things just “one call at a time”.
She has been slated for a role with Channel Ten during its coverage of the Delhi Commonwealth Games in October but, like many media professionals whose bread and butter has become the AFL, she is keenly awaiting the outcome of the league's forthcoming TV rights negotiations, which may lead to Ten losing the rights. If that happens, and depending on the whims of the new rights holders, it could spell the end of her calling career, at least on TV.
But for now she's not too fussed.
“I've found something I love. I'm really passionate about it and I'm having fun with it.”
Ashley Browne is editor of sports website www.backpagelead.com.au
Prominent Women in Football Media
Caroline Wilson
Forget gender for a moment, Wilson is one the most prominent people in the game full stop. She wears several hats, most notably as chief football writer for The Age, a position she has held since 1999. She also appears on TV on Nine's Footy Classified and the ABC's Offsiders and can be heard on 3AW on Tuesday evenings during Sports Today and the pre-game on Sundays. Wilson grew up in football – her father Ian is a former Richmond president – and brings to her media career a deep knowledge of the game, particularly its politics and its personalities. She has broken countless news stories and her Sunday Age column often sets the off-field agenda for the game for the forthcoming week.
Emma Quayle
Now that long-time AFL website writer Matt Burgan has gone to work for the Melbourne Football Club, Quayle has unquestionably become the No.1 media expert on AFL drafting and recruiting. Her day job is as lead football writer for The Sunday Age, but she comes to the fore about draft time, due to her in-depth knowledge of the best junior players in the country and her extensive network of contacts among AFL recruiters and junior coaches. She parlayed this into her critically acclaimed book The Draft, which chronicled the final year of junior football for several players and followed them through to the draft. More recently she has just completed the biography of former Essendon player and cancer sufferer Adam Ramanauskas.
Tiffany Cherry
The one-time physiotherapist moved full-time into sports media in the mid-1990s, working for The Age, 3AW and Channel Seven. In 2002 she became one of the main faces of the new Fox Footy Channel as a presenter, boundary rider and news reporter. When the channel closed, she moved to ESPN and was based in the US for several years as a news presenter for shows broadcast back to Australia. She has since returned to Australia and continues to freelance in sports media, including as a boundary rider for SEN 1116 during its Friday-night match broadcasts.
Samantha Lane
Lane started as a junior reporter for www.afl.com.au in 2002 and then moved to The Age in 2004, gaining a fine reputation for breaking news and for feature writing. But she is perhaps best known as a panellist on the Channel Ten's Saturday evening show Before the Game, where she attempts to add some football gravitas to what is often a very funny show. Lane, who is the daughter of leading football broadcaster Tim Lane, also appears on the ABC's Sunday AFL panel show, The Sunday Inquisition.
Susie Robinson
You will rarely hear Robinson on the air, but as the executive producer of ABC Radio Sport, she is the brains behind the national broadcaster's AFL coverage, which won the AFL's radio ratings. Robinson's job is to hire the callers, roster them for matches around Australia and oversee the prematch and postmatch coverage. And, because it's the ABC, it's all done within a budget a fraction of that available to the various AFL commercial broadcasters. Those who work with her say she's a shrewd producer.