AFL Legend Mike Brady's Miraculous Recovery: Singing 'Up There Cazaly' Against All Odds

For decades, one performance has been a constant at the AFL grand final: Mike Brady's iconic rendition of 'Up There Cazaly'. But this year's show was almost derailed by a horrific accident.

In January, the 78-year-old musician suffered a terrible fall while out walking near his Great Ocean Road home. The incident left him with a fractured leg, ankle, and foot in 12 places.

"I fell and landed on my ample backside," he said, laughing. But the injury was no laughing matter. Brady described the horror of having to twist his ankle back into place before dragging himself to a nearby fire station, "leaving a trail of blood and mud".

With his doctor advising him not to push himself and predicting he might not walk again soon, his grand final call-up nine months later seemed highly unlikely. Yet, when the AFL asked if he could still perform, he vowed to be there, even if it meant crawling on stage.

"I said, 'Try and stop me,'" he said. "Because I love it. It's a part of me."

The road to recovery was long and arduous. Brady admitted that even he doubted he would make it during parts of the nine-month journey. "I wasn't doing well," he said. "I was waking up and felt like the place was closing in on me." He spent five months in hospital, relying on a wheelchair and later crutches to get around.

But on September 26, Brady defied expectations, ditching his walking stick to walk out on stage. The 100,000-strong crowd gave him the strength not just to walk, he said, but to fly.

"At the beginning of the song, I'm singing it kind of normally, but then I thought, 'I've got this, I'm going to be able to sing it!'" "I sang harder than I've ever sung before. One hundred thousand people reacted, and the roar — I've never heard anything like it. It was fantastic. I felt absolutely vindicated for pushing myself so hard."

Brady, an English immigrant who moved to Melbourne at 11, never expected to have such a storied career. He was asked to create a tune to market the Victorian Football League, despite having never attended a full AFL game.

"What an honour," he said. Recalling the day he first performed 'Up There Cazaly' at the 1979 VFL grand final, introduced by his friend John Farnham, Brady said it was the first time he felt truly at home in Australia.

"I really felt like I belonged in Australia," he said. "I'd never felt that before. But hearing men and women in the crowd shouting, 'Good on ya, Mike', I really felt the warmth."

Even 48 years later, the feeling remains every time the words "up there cazaly" leave his mouth. "I often say the smile on my face when I sing it is actually me chuckling at the irony," he said.

Brady hopes to perform for at least two more years, taking it to the song's 50-year anniversary and his own 80th birthday. "I just hope the crowd is as kind to me as they have been for all those 48 years," he said.