How the bromance kicked off between radio odd couple Jonathan Brown and Sam Pang
They’re Melbourne’s radio odd couple who, with co-host Chrissie, delight listeners every morning with their banter. But it was one classic jab when Sam Pang and Jonathan Brown met that kicked off their bromance from the very beginning.
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With a knack for telling a story, Jonathan Brown took a punt on a broadcast career when he was tapped by a radio bigwig in Brisbane who saw something in him while he was still playing footy.
Brown always thought he’d “just end up coaching like every other footy player”, but the Nova boss urged him to give radio a crack after he hung up the boots.
However, it was wisecracking comedian Sam Pang who became his bigger challenge.
The story goes that Pang was a bit wary of the sports jock and gave him a verbal one to the ribs in the audition for their proposed Nova breakfast show — Chrissie, Sam & Browny — to see how he’d pull up.
“He said to me, ‘Oh, you had a great 13-year career, big fella’. I said, ‘It was 15 years, Sam’ and he said, ‘Geez, I didn’t realise we were counting the last two’.
“He got me straight away. It was a classic and we had a good laugh about it. I think he thought at least I could take a joke.
“Sometimes us footballers can be a little bit too earnest. That was the ice breaker.”
The two have since become Melbourne’s odd couple, spending more time on the golf course each week than they do on radio each morning.
“We thought we needed a little project together and we took up golf. The rest is history,” Brown says about their obsession.
“It’s fair to say we spend a bit of time together.”
The members of the Kew Golf Club weren’t too sure when the pair barrelled into their club last year and took out the top trophy, much to Brown’s delight. Once a competitor, always a competitor.
When Jonathan Brown retired as the Lions’ king, he thought the jeering little man on his shoulder had dropped off.
The Brisbane Lions’ three-peat premiership star even named the doubting voice inside his head “Little Browny” and was happy to see the back of him after 256 games and 594 goals.
But Little Browny is back.
As Big Browny prepares for the gruelling New York Marathon in early November, Little Browny’s bullying has become so relentless, the footy legend has resorted to buying earphones to help drown him out.
“He has returned,” Brown declares.
“I thought I got rid of that little man forever, but Little Browny is back. In full force.”
During Brown’s Brisbane Lions reign, Little Browny would chastise the 195cm key forward for being “a soft bugger” who couldn’t summon the courage to back into the pack for a mark.
Usually he would just whisper there was no way Big Browny could kick the goal.
That insistent voice drove the big man to prove him wrong.
Now the little man is again taunting Brown as he pounds the pavement in the final stages
of training for the punishing 42km marathon.
“It’s a funny old feeling,” the Fox Footy presenter and radio host says.
“It’s not like when you’re playing a game of footy and your lungs are blowing up. It’s your legs that are like jelly after 15km.
“There’s also a lot of time when you’re in your own head with the little man on your shoulder telling you to stop running.”
Completing a marathon was on the 37-year-old’s bucket list post retirement. So was golf.
Brown laughs about golf buddy Pang, saying he gets nervy before heading to the course. Pang rides shotgun with Brown in the driver’s seat.
“One night I was driving him home and said, ‘C’mon, we’ll go and have a quick beer at mine’.
“We walk in and there’s no beer, which is very shameful for a Carlton Draught ambassador,” Brown says.
“But there are two pink hibiscus kombuchas. So Sam and myself sat up at the kitchen table that night drinking pink hibiscus. So much for the real macho world we’re living in.
“He turned to me and said, ‘Big fella, don’t mention this to anyone’.”
Carlton tragic Pang can also be blamed for turning Brown’s eldest daughter, Olivia, 9, into a Blue Bagger. A gifted footy player like her father and her grandfather, Brian Brown who played for Fitzroy, Olivia and her dad play kick-to-kick most nights on the street outside the family home.
But after Olivia met Carlton AFLW star Darcy Vescio and was asked to lead the team out at Princes Park for the inaugural AFLW round against Collingwood two years ago, Blues blood runs in her veins.
“Liv was the Carlton mascot for that famous game,” Brown says.
“Sam got wind of it. He’s obviously a crazed Carlton supporter and he just showers her with Blues gear now.
“That’s how you recruit. I often say to Liv, ‘Do you realise if you play for AFLW you will be playing for Brisbane under the father-daughter rule?’ She says that’s fine, but she’ll still barrack for Carlton.
“If I haven’t won her over now I don’t think I ever will. But I love watching her play. She gives it a crack.”
It was moving to country Victoria “as a little tacker” after his father retired from footy that planted the AFL seed in Brown.
Brown senior had coached the local Colac team to victory and something was unleashed in his son as his father held him up with the premiership cup.
“It awakened a flame in me,” Brown explains.
“I often reflect on that photo holding the premiership cup as a four-year-old boy. From that day on, that was my goal in life, so to actually achieve that was pretty amazing later in front of 93,000-odd people at the ’G.”
Slim Dusty sang about loving to have a beer with Duncan. Everybody wants to have a beer with Browny.
In a town where AFL is a religion and everyone has an opinion, you won’t hear a bad word said about Brown.
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He laughs again, admitting people do warm to him.
“I’ve been lucky like that,” he says. “I’m just a country Victorian boy though.”
Shielded from the spotlight in his Queensland retreat while he was on the field, moving back to Melbourne for the Nova show with Pang and Chrissie Swan in 2015 with his young family was an eye-opener.
“We lived on a farm in the hinterland of the Gold Coast,” he says.
“So even though we played in premierships and had so many footy memories, we were kind of removed from that celebrity lifestyle, if you want to call it that.
“We didn’t even have any phone reception out there. So coming to Melbourne was a little bit of a culture shock.”
Brown says it’s his family who keeps him grounded in life after footy.
“For us boys, what we find hard is we lose the structure in our life,” Brown says.
“From a young age, we leave home and we’re told what to do. It’s all organised and set out for us.
“Fifteen years later, you lose that structure in your life almost immediately, certainly when it comes to looking after yourself physically and mentally.”
Going to New York will be an anniversary of sorts. Brown hopes he might do a bit more for his wife, Kylie, this time around after their honeymoon there 10 years ago.
“We went to an AC/DC concert, an NFL game and a boxing world title match at Madison Square Garden.
“It sounds like the ultimate boys’ trip but it was actually my honeymoon.”
Kylie, a beauty entrepreneur, has a public profile of her own.
Six or so years ago, post-natal depression was a topic rarely discussed openly, yet Kylie talked candidly about her own battle, writing on her blog about the inner turmoil and shame she felt as she struggled with depression following the birth of Olivia.
Brown swells with pride as he talks about Kylie and their children, Olivia, Jack, 6, and Macy, 5.
“Back then it was big stuff to talk about,” he says.
“It was very courageous what she went through. It’s a bit of a heads-up to even the people closest to the one struggling.
“You don’t often see it yourself. Even for myself to read the words on her page, it was confronting.
“She is very, very brave, Kyles. She has come out the other side and loves it here in Melbourne.”
And he reckons Kylie is a saint for putting up with his many obsessions.
“First the golf, and now the marathon. My wife said to me last night, ‘Can you pick something not as time consuming?”
When the EB Research Foundation, a charity close to Brown’s heart, called to ask if he wanted to run in the marathon to raise awareness for epidermolysis bullosa, he took up the challenge.
EB is a life-threatening and rare genetic skin disorder and life sentence for children and families who live with the pain day in, day out.
Brown became an ambassador for the foundation after watching Olivia’s best mate, Otto, live with the debilitating condition.
“I see the little fella after school playing footy with his mates and he often ends up in a wheelchair because his skin is so fragile,” Brown says.
“It’s something people don’t know a lot about.”
Brown says a person born with EB lacks a critical protein that binds their layers of skin together. Without this protein, friction blisters form and the skin tears apart and shears off, leading to severe pain, disfigurement and open wounds that never heal.
Blisters form in the eyes, mouth and oesophagus, it damages internal organs, and often results in an early death.
“After seeing what my little mate Otto, his mum, Nina, and some of the kids down at the Royal Children’s Hospital have to go through, the marathon seems pretty easy,” Brown says.
“I look at him and think, ‘What an inspiring little fella’, and it helps you get through the hurt of training.”
When Brown says he’s going to give the New York Marathon a red-hot crack, he means it.
He is lighter than when he was playing footy and has a gruelling training regimen of running, boxing, weights, cross training and intermittent fasting — worked out to the minute.
“First thing I had to do was strip the weight off,” he says of his 10kg weight drop.
“I’m down to 97kg, which is the lightest I’ve been since I was 18 when I first went to the Brisbane Lions and my arms were like twigs.
“They are back to looking like twigs again, but I thought if I’m going to absolutely destroy my body, I might as well do it for a big one and you can’t get much bigger than the New York Marathon.”
Brown’s Nova team will travel with him, broadcasting from overseas for the first time since that audition five years ago.
They’ve largely remained in the top two in the FM brekkie show ratings wars since. Swan fuels Brown with batches of home-made soup while Pang helps with words of encouragement as he stretches his hamstrings after they come off air.
“He says, ‘You’re our golden goose, big fella, we’re all riding on you’.
“I’m running for a good cause. It’s a personal challenge, especially combating the little man Browny on my shoulder.”
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