Then Eastlake suffered another heart attack. He eventually recovered and kept calling right up until his retirement in 2005.
The big man with the bigger voice finally shuffled off this mortal coil on Tuesday morning. He died at a nursing home on the Central Coast after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease and emphysema. He was 75.
RIP: Big Darrell Eastlake has passed away, aged 75.
Within hours of the news breaking about his death, a whole generation of sports fans started impersonating Eastlakes booming commentary, most notably from State of Origin and weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games.
Eastlake was once banned from calling weightlifting because he was too loud — “NO! NO! NO! WOBBLE! WOBBLE! WOBBLE! YES! YES! YES!” — before Nine built him a sound-proof booth.
Perhaps his greatest line didnt even belong to him. It was comedian Billy Birminghams parody on the 12th Man albums when Eastlake was calling Origin alongside the late supercoach, Jack Gibson, that stands out as much as any of his calls.
“Pearce off, Jack,” Eastlake says. “Gibbs, on.”
In other words, Wayne Pearce is leaving the field. Ron Gibbs is coming on.
“What did you say to me, f— knuckle?”
“Pearce off, Jack,” Eastlake says. “Gibbs, on.”
Whack!
“Oh, Big Jack has just hit me and I've gone crashing to the deck!”
Larger than life: Eastlake was unmistakable on the mike and never faked his enthusiasm.
Photo: Fairfax Media
A few years ago, I spoke to Eastlake about Birminghams iconic line. The late Richie Benaud never really liked the 12th Man impressions of him. Too crude. But Big Daz loved them.
“How good was that?!” Eastlake laughed. “HOW GOOD WAS THAT?! Ohhhhh! Ho! Ho! Ho! How good was IT?”
Thats how Eastlake called his sport: with extravagant volume and enthusiasm, although he never faked it.
“He didnt have to,” Sutcliffe said. “He loved his sport. He didnt know it as well as others. He didnt know statistics. He said others were there to do that. He just enjoyed his sport and you could tell it in the way he called it. And he became larger than life, which wasnt hard for him to do because he was already 6ft 3in tall!”
Eastlake became an Origin institution in the 1980s, his voice as synonymous with the call then as Ray Warrens is now. This was the era of Queenslander Wally Lewis, and Big Daz loved nothing more than calling his name, especially at Lang Park.
Fan favourite: Eastlake in 2001, doing a live cross from Newcastle for the Today Show.
Photo: Anita Jones
Its part of Nine folklore how head of sport David Hill would stand behind Eastlake in the commentary box on those nights and start whacking Eastlake with a rolled up newspaper if his call wasnt loud enough.
Eastlake would call those Origins alongside Ian “The Bear” Maurice. In later years, it was “Rabs” Warren, who had been out of the game and on hard times when Eastlake nudged the powerbrokers at Nine to bring him in from the cold in the early 1990s. Warren has now called more Origins and grand finals than anyone.
“That was the thing with Darrell,” Sutcliffe said. “He never begrudged anyones success. He knew this guy [Warren] was good and he wasnt threatened by him.”
Warren is still calling rugby league but many of those Wide World of Sports icons have either retired or passed away. Eastlakes death comes a week after Nine lost the broadcast rights to cricket, 40 years after Kerry Packer established World Series Cricket.
What lingers are the one-liners, the impersonations, the funny anecdotes.
“I had never been thrown out of a pub until I met Darrell,” Sutcliffe laughed. “He once mooned an entire restaurant in Wollongong after the Australian Surf Lifesaving Championships one year. It was very funny.”
And, no doubt, huuuuuuge!
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Chief Sports Writer, The Sydney Morning Herald
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