Mike Brady, Paul Kelly, and the second Bronson — how Greg Champion’s That’s What I Like About Football became an AFL icon

An exuberant voice bursts from a crackling radio in a suburban living room in Melbourne’s inner-east.

In the background noise of the commentary, a wave of cheers ebbs and flows from the stands of a stadium, bellowing in unison at the footy players on the ground below.

It’s early 1994, and it’s the era of the spectacular. It’s Tony Modra climbing on the backs of his opponents. It’s Plugger Lockett intimidating his foes into submission. It’s Rex Hunt screaming ‘Yaabblettt’ at the top of his lungs whenever Gary Ablett does whatever Gary Ablett is wont to do.

In his Ashburton home, a skinny bloke with a heavy mop of curly hair absent-mindedly plucks away on his guitar. A footy fanatic from his time growing up in Adelaide, he hums a tune to himself as he listens to the action from the ground.

Football and music. They are two of his life passions. He taps his foot. A team kicks a goal. He strums a chord. A player takes a screamer.

He mumbles a few words and strums his guitar, inspired by something that’s just been relayed to him from the ground via the radio.

“That’s what I like … about football,” he sings to himself under his breath.

In that moment, a football anthem that inspired a generation of Aussie Rules fans is brought to life — but without the help of a pair of Australian music icons, it may never have seen the light of day.

From the Catacombs to the Coodabeens

Greg Champion is a serious songwriter with a less than serious back catalogue. 

He speaks with passion about the writing process, and the musical notes and chords that float through his head every day of the week.

“These ideas, the music, these things happen to me all day, every day,” Champion says.

“I run songwriting workshops at festivals quite often. It just starts with a small moment or idea and then you just take it from there.”

Discovered in the 1970s while playing in Adelaide’s Catacombs — a hippy club that celebrated folk and country music — Champion fronted several bands in South Australia before making the move to Victoria in 1979.

Along the cold streets of inner suburban Melbourne, the windows of drinking establishments glowed with the warmth of a burgeoning folk music scene that sung in harmony with the iconic pub rock movement.

The twang of the acoustic guitar sound tracked a city that was establishing itself as the beating cultural heart of the country.

It was the perfect place for an aspiring musician to be.

“The way I approach everything in my music career is that I always just let things happen,” Champion says.

“I’ve never found myself being absorbed by things when they go right, or when they go wrong.

“I just keep on drifting through.”

With guitar case in hand and the buzz of the hotels calling, the pull of the drift would chop and change with the wind that blows in off Port Phillip Bay, before Champion found himself dropping anchor in 1981 in the most unlikely of places — the much-loved community radio station 3RRR — embedded with the Coodabeen Champions, a comedy sports show on a meteoric rise.

“It was another one of those things that I just let happen. You don’t plan it. You don’t plan to end up doing what people would call parody ditties on the radio,” Champion says.

“But that’s what we did. I’d write my own songs, I’d sing the songs that our listeners would provide.

“I’d been doing gigs for years before the Coodabeens came along — serious gigs.

“But I try to just never take these things too seriously, you just roll on.”

Through his performances on the show, Champion would create a catalogue of cult favourites.

‘I Made A Hundred In The Backyard At Mum’s’ would be one of his first big hits in 1984 — complete with a video clip that featured famous names like Ron Barassi, Derryn Hinch, David Rhys-Jones, and Robert Dipierdomenico — while parody footy songs like ‘Amazing Daics’ and ‘Go Plugger Go’ would roll out over the ensuing decade and feed a growing fanbase of young and old.

But as he sat in his Ashburton home in 1994, the footy coverage crackling in the background, Champion’s funny bone was set aside for a rare moment, as sentimentality for the game he loved flowed through him.

“I can’t remember what it was exactly, but something happened on the call where I just started singing to myself ‘that’s what I like about football’,” he says.

Champion had been a prolific writer of footy songs. Some he knew were better than others. But this one — this one he thought was something special.

It just needed that extra polish.

Almost 15 years after arguably the greatest Aussie Rules anthem — Up There Cazaly — was recorded, Champion approached songwriting legend Mike Brady for a bit of advice and to help him finish the tune off, leaning on the genius of a man who could almost intrinsically capture the colour and feel of what footy fandom was all about.

If anybody could understand what Champion was trying to do with his song, it was Mike Brady.

“I didn’t like it much,” Brady says.

“I probably shouldn’t say that.

“But I guess I’ve put it on the record now.”

Brain worms and faxes to Paul Kelly

Mike Brady was the indisputable bard of footy from the moment Up There Cazaly was released.

Hired to record VFL’s answer to cricket’s C’mon Aussie C’mon — in what was essentially a jingle battle between Channel 9 and Channel 7 — Brady wrote and recorded the song with Pete Sullivan, before putting it out as a single credited to the The Two-Man Band in July 1979.

It would go on to be the highest selling single by an Australian artist that year, before eventually becoming the highest selling Aussie single ever at that point in time three months later.

It made sense, then, that Champion would go to Brady with his own idea for a pulsating, fan focused anthem.

“We’d done a few jobs together when he was with the Coodabeens and we were just having a chat after one of the shows — and I forget who brought it up — but one of us said we should do something together,” Brady says.

“And Greg followed up. He had this song he wanted to play me, and I was working in a studio in Richmond called RBX and I told him to bring it in and I’d have a listen.”

The night before, Champion had been feeling restless.

The partnership with Brady had given him an opportunity to get the song down on tape, but he wasn’t satisfied with what had written so far. He was desperate to wow rather than underwhelm.

So as he paced around his Ashburton home, he picked up the phone and punched in the number of a songwriter who he thought could help capture the essence of the religion that was Aussie Rules.

The number belonged to Paul Kelly. 

“Paul and I started out in Adelaide together and we both moved to Melbourne, so I vaguely knew him from around the traps,” Champion says.

“I call up his number and I get told he’s in Adelaide. So they give me a fax number instead.

“So I grab a piece of paper and write to him that I’ve got a session tomorrow, I don’t quite have my lyrics sorted, and here’s the idea.

“It’s pretty late at night so I’m not really expecting anything.”

When he woke the next morning, a fresh piece of paper was sitting on his fax machine, with three verses written by the master of Australian songwriting himself.

Words penned in the very hand that pulled together Aussie masterpieces like To Her Door and Dumb Things.

“I ended using one line of it,” Champion says.

“It was ‘I’ll meet a friend outside the ground’.

With Kelly’s lyrics in hand, Champion packed up his guitar and hopped into his car, heading west over the Yarra to meet Brady in the Richmond recording studio.

The two sat down and Brady listened intently as Champion worked in the new lyrics from Kelly, strumming away at a song he believed had the potential to be the next big thing in footy music.

“He played me the bare bones of the song and to be really honest with you, I didn’t like it much at first,” Brady says.

“It didn’t do it for me because it seemed to go on and on forever. And I told him that.

“I don’t know whether I offended him, but he took notice of what I was saying and he said, well, see what you can do with it.”

As the weeks rolled by, Brady approached the song with the heart of an artist — procrastinating to the point that the deadline for the record was knocking on his door.

He still felt the tune was flat. Boring, almost. A sense of monotony to an otherwise perfectly decent song.

With the day of record upon them both, Brady had an epiphany while driving to the studio.

“It needed another hook,” he says.

“And Ross Wilson (of Daddy Cool fame) had told me that if you put a ‘na na na’ or a ‘la la la’ in a pop song you had a 90 per cent chance of writing a hit.”

That theory in mind, Brady ‘took the long way around’ to get to the studio, adding a few extra minutes to his journey to nail down the hook in his head.

It wasn’t a la la la or a na na na — but it was a whoa ohhh oh oh.

“Greg had worked out some very clever key changes and I had nothing to do with that, but he had asked me to produce it and I suppose adding something like that was the best way to break the monotony of the original song,” Brady says.

“Now that’s very subjective by the way. It’s not objective. It was just something I thought the song needed.

“All I wrote was that. The whoa ohh oh oh part.

“People call it the ‘worm’. It’s something that you can’t get out of your head. A lot of people have cursed me when they found out I wrote that part of the song.”

As a result of the ‘worm’, Brady joined Champion and Kelly on the song writing credits.

“Brady gets about 20 per cent of the royalties,” Champion says.

Secretly, while Brady had been trying to figure out what the song was missing in the lead up to the final record, he had approached an old friend at Channel 7 to get his thoughts on the track.

The Channel 7 ‘decision maker’ had been a key player in bringing Up There Cazaly to life on television.

“Greg doesn’t know this, but I had a chat with an old friend from the network as we were trying to figure out what the song needed,” Brady says.

“And he felt the same way. That it needed something else to make it really sing.”

That man was Gordon Bennett, legendary producer of World of Sport and one of the architects of the modernisation of sport on Australian television.

“The first time I heard it,” Bennett says.

“I didn’t like it much either.

“Now? I sort of like it more than Up There Cazaly as footy songs go.”

‘Have you listened to the whole thing?’

Gordon Bennett was an office boy when he started out in the television industry in 1956.

Described by newsreader Peter Mitchell as “part of the furniture” at the Seven Network, Bennett’s career morphed and evolved over the years from roles as varied as camera operator and producer, to eventually becoming the general manager of sport.

An integral cog in the creation of the annual Good Friday Appeal and the coverage of sport in general, it’s difficult to find anyone who doesn’t marvel at what Bennett has achieved over his long career.

“It’s a case of they don’t make them like Gordon Bennett anymore,” Champion says.

“He is a beautiful soul. And he’s really where the story takes off.”

For years Champion had been sending in bits and pieces of music to Bennett for consideration on the footy coverage.

And for years, Bennett had listened patiently before politely declining each one of them.

“Greg had supplied us with a few songs for use on various shows on Channel 7,” Bennett says.

“And he kept bringing stuff in. And I’d listen to it with him.

“And I’d say ‘now look, Greg, the problem here is that we only need 30 seconds. We don’t need an introduction. We don’t need three and a half minutes. We need 30 seconds’.

“So he’d take the songs away, and come back with something else, and each time it wouldn’t be appropriate for our coverage.

“And then he sent me That’s The Thing About Football.”

After Brady’s initial consultation, the next Bennett had heard of the song was when it arrived via a cassette in an envelope on his desk.

Bennett already knew it had faced some issues. And with Champion’s track record of writing tunes that leaned more towards folk poetry than jingles, he wasn’t filled with confidence as he loaded it into the tape player.

As he shut the cassette in and pressed play, Bennett stood and listened for about 20 seconds, before clunking down the stop button and returning to his day.

“I put it on out of respect for Greg and listened to it,” Bennett says.

“And the introduction was exactly what I said we didn’t want, because it was a very slow lead up to the start of the story in the song.

“It wasn’t what we wanted, it wasn’t what we needed.”

The next day, as his nervous anticipation got the better of him, Champion picked up the phone and called Bennett to see what he thought of the song.

It wasn’t the good news he had hoped for.

“So Gordon says to me — and I think he was looking for another Up There Cazaly — he says ‘you’re trying to tell too much of a story, you need to condense it, the intro takes too long’,” Champion says.

“And I said to Gordon ‘have you listened to the whole thing?’.

“He tells me he hasn’t, so I ask him to listen to the whole thing and then get back to me.”

Bennett was intrigued by the call, but cautious.

“He told me he had Brady singing the chorus,” Bennett says.

“And I hadn’t got past the first 20 seconds. So I told him I’d go and have a listen and get back to him.”

Against his better judgement, Bennett hung up the phone and immediately returned to the tape player to press play, starting the song from where he had stopped it the day before.

Around the 30 second mark, Bennett’s ears pricked up as Brady’s iconic ‘worm’ popped it’s head out for the first time. 

At the 50 second mark, Bennett’s eyebrows raised as Champion’s first key change kicked in, with Brady’s backing vocals hammering through with gusto.

And at the 57 second mark, Bennett smiled as the iconic chorus pumped out of his speakers for the first time.

“Greg was right. It was a great song,” Bennett says.

“With Brady backing, the sound of it was all just terrific for what we wanted. You could cut it down to 60 seconds, we could cut it down to a 30. The way it was structured gave us so many options.

“And so I rang him back and said ‘we really like this, we’ll have a play with it and get back to you’.”

For Champion, it was both a moment of relief and of vindication.

He knew the song was good. And it was going to get the airtime it deserved.

“Very few people in the position of someone like Gordon Bennett are going to admit that they didn’t listen to the whole song when pushed on it,” Champion says.

“They’re going to fluff it out, they’re going to defuse, they’re going to lie and say they listened to all of it and that it still wasn’t what they wanted.

“But Gordon was a man of such integrity that he admitted he hadn’t listened to it, and went back and listened to the whole thing just because I asked him to.

“That changed everything for me.

“Now I do say that if I was a smarter man, if I’d been a Mike Brady, I’d have sent him an edit with just the big finish, because execs are busy people. But in the end I just got lucky that Gordon Bennett is a sweet, sweet soul and he listened to it all.”

Glamour shots and the second Bronson

The next day Champion received a call from another Channel 7 executive, who offered him $5,000 for the right to use it on the broadcast during the rest of the 1994 season.

Champion took it without a second thought.

Within days, That’s The Thing About Football was being used as a backing track on the introduction to footy replays, and at the end of the match as the final scores were being shown.

“You start with a short clip of it at the start of the coverage or the end of the coverage, but then you hear that people really quite like it, so you use it a little more,” Bennett says.

“Then 10 seconds becomes 30 seconds. Then 30 seconds becomes a full minute at the end of the Saturday night footy.

“It just grew and grew in popularity,”

By the end of the season, the single of the song had peaked at number 31 in the ARIA charts and finally handed Channel 7 the Up There Cazaly counterpart they had been searching for.

For the 1995 season, Bennett decided the song needed a full film clip to help introduce the round of footy.

“So we head down to Werribee to shoot some film because it has an iconic sort of grandstand,” Bennett says.

“And I think we filmed a little kid with his dog? That’s right, he had a football with him and we filmed him walking along to introduce the clip.” 

That kid was a 12-year-old Jeffrey Walker, best known then as the second actor to play Bronson in the hit kids show Round The Twist.

Walker — who confirmed to ABC Sport it was him in the clip via one of his agents — politely declined to be interviewed for this story because he was busy directing his new Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar, having worked as a director on other major shows like Modern Family and The Artful Dodger.

“That was the start of the clip — the rest of the clip was filled with highlights of the games and shots of the crowd,” Bennett says.

“The shots of the trams, and wide shots of the MCG, I filmed those myself. The Herald and Weekly Times used to sponsor a half hour version of the grand final to be sent to the people in Papua New Guinea, and I used to go out and get those shots to help fill that half hour.

“Then we filled it up with action shots and fans in the crowd, always trying to be as balanced as possible with how many shots we had of the various teams.”

In the 1995 version, iconic moments like Ablett’s mark of the century and Kevin Sheedy’s jacket wave were cut in with glamour shots of players posing for a slightly risque calendar, in a deal Bennett remembers now as being a little odd.

In the 1997 replacement, the calendar shots were gone, replaced in favour of more fans and more highlights.

Across the two, future stars of the game like Jobe Watson and Gary Ablett Jr are featured as kids with their famous dads.

The film clips helped take the song to another level.

“Eventually after a few years we decided to change it and go with something new altogether, a new song,” Bennett says.

“And I had a school teacher call me up and started berating me because her kids used to march into school on a Monday singing it, and they were devastated that we had cut it.

Having dismissed the song on first listen, Gordon Bennett now acknowledges the power that Champion’s tune brought with it to Channel 7’s football coverage in the mid-90s.

It’s a song that he says he now almost likes more than Up There Cazaly.

“It’s got a sort of a softness to it, whereas Up There Cazaly is a hard-hitting song,” Bennett says.

“They both have their place and Up There Cazaly will always be the main anthem. But I have a lot of time and fondness for That’s What I Like About Football.

“I am glad I listened to it right through in the end. And I’m glad Greg had the strength of his convictions to make me do it.”

Soundtracking the magic of football

Champion believes he has a catalogue of songs that are as good as, if not better, than That’s The Thing About Football.

But he says they just weren’t as lucky to be sprinkled in the magic dust of Gordon Bennett and Mike Brady.

“I could send you six, seven, eight songs that I think are better than that one song,” Champion says.

“But time and place always play their part, and time and place played their part with this song.

“And I’m glad they did.”

Via corporate and club gigs, Champion is often invited to play the song to a captivated audience, but while Brady will once again appear in this year’s AFL grand final entertainment, Champion’s appearances on that one Saturday in September have been few and far between.

At half-time in 1987 he performed with the Coodabeens doing a set of parody songs. In 1995, he returned to play That’s What I Like About Football for the first time. Then in 2002, he did it again, this time with Brady by his side.

Since that day 22 years ago, Champion hasn’t performed his iconic tune on the AFL’s biggest day.

“I’d happily do it again. I just haven’t been asked,” Champion says.

“But it feels like every year the momentum builds. Every year there’s just that little bit more of a push from people on social media to get me back there playing the song.

“I hope I do get asked again.”

In the meantime, Champion continues to play festivals and carry out songwriting workshops. In one instance, he was booked as a surprise for the groom at a wedding, who knew the words to every song Champion played.

It’s a groundswell of fondness that comes from that one generation of football fan.

The generation that is now getting married, becoming parents, and doing all that adult stuff that adults do in a chaotic, exhausting world that just feels like it never stops.

But when That’s What I Like About Football comes on it somehow manages to stop time, and takes them back to that one magic moment of their childhoods.

A time of watching arguably the most spectacular era of the AFL, squinting at the old CRT telly as Ablett took a speccy, or Buckley bustled through the middle of the ‘G, or Modra kicked an impossible goal.

A time when the best thing that could happen was getting a shiny sticker in your 20c Select sticker pack, and the worst thing that could happen was getting your Auskick footy mixed up with someone else’s Auskick footy during markers-up at recess.

A time when things were simpler. 

A time when Greg Champion’s song soundtracked the magic of Aussie Rules.

“These things, these songs — they have a way of working their ways into our lives,” Brady says.

“Memories. These things become quite important to your lasting memories as you get older.

“And that’s important. This song is an important one. I hope Greg knows that. 

“I’m just lucky that I got to play my small part in it.”