EXCLUSIVE: Bruce McAvaney reveals he is battling leukaemia
EXCLUSIVE FEATURE: Bruce McAvaney and his wife Annie reveal the moment he was diagnosed with leukaemia and how he is “feeling well” and excited about the upcoming AFL season.
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CANCER won’t beat Bruce McAvaney.
The Seven Network sportscaster, 63, has the same belief in his ability to win against the greatest of odds as the champion athletes whose careers he has so famously called.
“It is quite strange to say I have leukaemia because I feel well,” McAvaney says at his Adelaide home, with his wife of 23 years, Anne Johnson, sitting next to him.
“I feel healthy. So far so good.”
It is McAvaney who calls the greatest battles in our sporting history with meticulous precision, thanks to countless hours of research and a near photographic memory.
There was intense speculation about him missing this year’s Australian Open tennis.
McAvaney says his health was a big factor in why we didn’t hear the most recognisable voice in the country leading what he described as “probably the greatest Australian Open, maybe even the greatest grand slam ever”.
“It had been building for a little while, but last year was a bit of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says.
“The timing wasn’t right for me. I’d done 26 of them. It wasn’t a reflection of my lack of interest in the event, but of where I’m at in my life.
“I looked at my schedule, I can’t give the football up as it is 26 weeks of heaven. Horse racing is my first love. Then in the mix we have Commonwealth Games and Winter Olympics next year, Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 ... ”
More sporting events are reeled off, but we get the point. Something had to give.
McAvaney will no longer call the Australian Open, lessening his workload to lengthen his career.
The boundless energy and passion McAvaney displays on air is just as robust away from the camera.
He needs exercise at least once a day or he feels like he will burst out of his fair skin.
“Keen exerciser” is putting it lightly. He let slip, much to his wife’s horror, that he had gone out for a run that morning at 4.30 wearing only his “shorty pyjamas” after doing a bit of track and field research.
“I didn’t want to wake you up,” he says, with obvious love.
“Oh my God, Bruce, what would people think? Those PJs have puppies all over them,” Anne exclaims.
It was the running and fair skin that compelled McAvaney to visit his GP regularly for full check-ups for skin abnormalities and cancers.
“My blood counts came back a little unusual with the white blood cells up, so they sent me to a specialist,” he says.
The two-week period that followed was harrowing.
“I’m not going to lie, it was tough,” journalist Anne says.
“We knew it was a form of leukaemia, but not that it was this one.
“We were so relieved. That’s the one you want to have if you are going to have it.”
Bruce says it was those vulnerable two weeks in December 2014 that made him think of the bigger picture.
“I feel for the first time there is probably an end game, rather than just a game,” he says.
“When we first went in to see the specialist it was a bit daunting.
“I wasn’t quite sure what the result was going to be. We went in with a lot of optimism, but a tiny bit of trepidation.”
But the news wasn’t all bad. Bruce was suffering from Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia, one of the most common types of the disease.
He says about 25 to 30 per cent of people diagnosed need no treatment.
“This is where I am at,” he says.
“It could be very serious, It could jump out of the ground at any moment. I don’t expect it will. But I’m living a complete life with no restrictions.”
He requires no treatment for the disease, just monitoring his white blood cell count with six monthly check-ups.
“I’m not going to underplay it,” McAvaney says.
“I get more tired than I used to. I think my immune system is not quite as good as it was and that is probably part of the reason last year that I got very tired. I’m aware of that.”
With a workload like McAvaney’s, anyone would get tired.
There is talk of the R-word (retirement), but perhaps 10 years down the track.
“It’s very important to me that when I do leave the business it’s with dignity and in a position that I have left still working well,” he says.
“I’m 64 this year. I have a real fear of failure. That’s in all of us. But in a job like mine your failures are public so they are even harder to take.
“That’s the challenge, that I maintain the enthusiasm for the hard yakka that goes into the good stuff.”
A chance meeting on a plane in 1976 with Adelaide race caller Kevin Hillier resulted in his break calling races.
Now dubbed Mr Olympics, he has been a host or caller with Seven in every Summer Games since Moscow 1980.
A torchbearer several times, a Sydney Olympic torch sits in a vase next to another from Beijing 2008.
The house is filled with sporting memorabilia.
Illustrated pictures of Flemington adorn the walls next to artwork by a subject of one of Anne’s future documentaries.
Books of stats and sporting moments line the shelves. A life-sized horse they call Black Caviar serves as a towering sitting room lamp.
HAMISH MCLACHLAN WALKS THROUGH BRUCE MCAVANEY’S SPECIAL CAREER
Parents to son Sam, 22, daughter Alex, 19, and their cavador, Frankie (not Cyril as has been rumoured), the couple don’t watch sport at home, “which is probably why we are still together”, Bruce laughs.
They binge on “Scandi noir” crime thrillers, or listen to crooners like Tom Waits and Nick Cave.
“I’m a Tom Waits fan,” McAvaney says.
“You know when I’ve had one glass too many, Heart Attack and Vine comes on.”
They now have separate studies because Anne was almost driven mad by the races on the radio or TV all day.
But she says she turns on the TV when Bruce is interstate working, which is often.
“I have the TV on with him on it, so he is sort of there,” she says. “If I hear his voice raise I will have a look because I know something exciting might be happening.”
“Is that true?” Bruce asks, with that excitement in his voice we all hear from the TV.
McAvaney says he knows how lucky he is at the moment with his diagnosis, and that others are not so fortunate.
“There are a lot of people who have CLL and a lot of people live with it forever and die from something else, but for some people it does turn nasty,” he says. “So it is not something to be sneezed at.”
Anyone would be depressed when told they have a life-threatening illness, but not the eternal optimist that is Bruce.
“I generally don’t suffer from too many lows,” he says.
“In very simple terms, every morning I wake up and there is a football match to look forward to, there is a race meeting, there is an Olympic Games coming up — it’s ridiculous, but it’s the way I live.
“My children, Annie, great music, they are parts of it too, but my core is sport and they are the things I look forward to.
“I’m a simple bloke, I’m a simple man — if you keep things like that life doesn’t get too complicated.”
The excitement, energy and passion bounces again when talking about the footy season.
“I may be the eternal optimist, but we had such a remarkable season last year with the Bulldogs and all those fairytale endings. The hopes for this year are enormous.”
He has long been regarded as one of the most professional and thorough sportscasters.
Pedantic to the bitter end, he admits to being obsessive (“about everything”, Anne mouths) and says the calls keep him up at night. “I reckon I’m about half as good a commentator as people think I am and twice as good as what other people think I am,” he says.
“I know on a Friday if I’ve done a good job. I go back to the hotel room thinking of all the things I should have said and I’ll think of all the things I did say and shouldn’t have.
“I’ll get my head on that pillow and I won’t rest easy, let me tell you.”
He was disappointed by what was arguably the biggest call of his career, although no one else would agree.
Cathy Freeman ran to glory in the 400m at the Sydney Olympics, the hopes of a nation bound to her flying feet.
McAvaney remembers his last line — “What a legend, what a champion” — and says it should have been the other way around. Athletes are champions who then become legends.
In the case of Bruce McAvaney, the champion sportscaster is an Australian legend.
McAvaney will host Channel 7’s Golden Slipper coverage on Sunday, call the Carlton v Richmond match on Thursday night and Collingwood v Western Bulldogs on Friday night
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