By James Wigney
Copyright news
In fact, after having the initial damage in the AFL Legends Game done with a knee from former West Coast Eagle Andrew Embley and then exacerbated by hits from hulking ex-Gold Coast ruckman turned podcaster Dan Gorringe and hardman Mitch Robinson, who once played for his beloved Blues, Hughes is determined to come back leaner and meaner than ever.
“I think maybe I’ll have a year of trying to get really f***ing fit,” says Hughes, on the road to recovery in his Melbourne home.
“I might get on the steroids or something – but I’d love to run out there next year like Dan Gorringe, but obviously shorter and older.
“I think it’s an incentive for me to get fit once my wounds are healed, basically. I might play – I might get stopped – but I might play.”
Although Hughes has made light of the incident on radio, TV and social media in recent weeks – and was back on stage doing stand-up for another charity gig just days later – there’s no doubt that he was in a world of pain on the night, especially given his slight physique thanks to a stint on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here earlier this year and his crazy-brave decision to play on. The second hit from Gorringe, who has more than 20cm and 20kg on the vegan comedian, was “like I got hit by a truck”.
“I was lying on the ground, now knowing that my ribs were just swimming around and stabbing into my lungs, and I had to get up. And I really didn’t want to get up – I wanted to die right there. I thought I was going to die, actually.
“But then I thought, ‘I’ve got a 50m penalty, I have a shot at goal, what if I miss?’ So that’s my overarching thought – not death, just missing the goal and being eternally ashamed.”
Victorian Hughes, 54, says he bears no ill will to the All Stars players or their coach Shane Crawford – who had jokingly suggested Hughes be targeted in a video before the match – but says a “line in the sand” was crossed in what’s supposed to be a lighthearted match to raise funds for prostate cancer research.
“I don’t reckon they will allow the oldest person on the field – and also the person who’s not a professional sports person to be f–king targeted again like that,” he says. “Shane Crawford has rung me a few times. I think he’s worried about getting sued to be honest. I’ve got no hard feelings. For me, I love content and I’m alive. If I had died, then questions would have been asked.”
The Legends game was not the only time of late that Hughes has been the oldest person on the call sheet. In the reboot of the comedy quiz show Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, Hughes’ Generation X team has replaced the Baby Boomers as the senior citizens in a line up that now includes Generation Y (captained by stand-up comedian and radio host Tommy Little) and Generation Z (with rising comedy star Anisa Nanduala in charge).
“Gen X is now getting old,” he says, resignedly. “I still feel like I’m a 21-year-old, smoking bongs and on the dole. It’s weird that we’re now the older generation … we should be proud that we’re still f–king upright.
“I should be proud I’m still bloody being asked to do the bloody game even though it nearly killed me. I am aware of being older but I still feel the same. I’m like Mick Jagger – but he’s a lot more popular and he sells more tickets, and he’s probably thinner than me. No, he probably isn’t thinner than me, at the moment, to be honest. Maybe I am Keith Richards.”
Hughes says that the older he gets, the happier he is to be the butt of jokes, which is just as well given the merciless ribbing – often returned with interest – he gets from his younger TBYG colleagues and host Anne Edmonds, who takes over from Shaun Micallef.
In recent years, and especially since losing his breakfast radio gig with Sydney’s 2DayFM last year, he’s learned to lighten up and has “really leaned into not giving a flying f— about anything”. After decades of what he describes as “battling my own ego” and worrying obsessively about what people thought of him and his place in the Australian entertainment landscape, the father of three teenagers is no longer worried “about all that bullshit”.
And where he used to get riled up by internet feuds and would fight or block the trolls, now he just ‘likes’ their comments to confuse them.
“I’m happy for whatever situation I am in life to be able to laugh at it,” he says. “And as I’ve been saying recently, I will never retire from comedy. I’ll be literally on my death bed and the life support system would be there and I’ll say ‘unplug it – I want to plug my phone in and I’ve got a f—king video I want to put on Instagram – it’s something funny about your last four breaths’. I will be trying to do jokes right till the end whenever that is. Hopefully a long way away but who knows.”
While he’s gratified to see his children – and younger audiences – discovering shows like Kath and Kim thanks to streaming services, Hughes says he’s wary of the newer generation of what he describes as “f–king internet stars who get on stage and have got no f–king idea how to make a crowd laugh”.
“Sometimes my children are laughing at some bullshit on the internet like some half-baked, quarter-baked, poorly thought out comedy, with inverted commas around it, and I am like, “What the f—? That’s not funny.” And they’re like, ‘You wouldn’t understand’. And I say ‘I understand shit jokes – and they’re shit’.
“But I’m having more and more kids turn up to my shows with their parents, like 14-year-old boys find me funny so, that’s cool. And my son says that his mates do think I’m funny, which has taking him f—king a long time to admit.”
Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation, Tuesday, 7.30pm, Channel 10. Read the full interview with Dave Hughes in Stellar on Friday, inside today’s papers.
For more from Stellar, click here.
Originally published as ‘Really f***ing fit’: Dave Hughes pledges to return to footy despite horror injuries in AFL Legends match
