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Grant Cohn is used to being the story.
The 49ers reporter, who writes for Sports Illustrated and has a YouTube channel with over 220,000 subscribers, has had his fair share of run-ins with San Francisco players over the years.
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In 2022, Cohn claimed then 49ers defensive tackle Javon Kinlaw confronted him at OTAs (organised team activities) and knocked off his hat.
Kinlaw later appeared on Cohn’s YouTube channel in an exclusive interview, where he told him to “stop f**king playing with me”. That video has 167,000 views.
Later that year Arik Armstead, who had previously clashed with Cohn on Twitter, refused to answer one of his questions. Again, Cohn took his YouTube subscribers inside the drama of it all.
Most recently, 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk called out Cohn on social media in 2024 for standing too close to players while they were changing in the locker room.
So, what did Cohn do? He released a reaction video.
All of this is to say Cohn, whose father was a longtime sports columnist, has been in and around the game for a while — and he knows how to play it.
So, when Cohn landed in Australia last Friday he arrived a plan.
“I thought the novelty was Australia and that I was going to be reporting back to America this is what Australia is like,” Cohn told foxsports.com.au.
“But what I realised was that I’m the novelty.”
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In case you somehow missed it, Cohn has become somewhat of a celebrity overnight in Australia.
Just how viral has he gone? Well, the moment it hit him was when he looked at his DMs and was being flooded with requests from all the Australian radio and TV stations.
Cohn appeared on 9News Melbourne earlier in the week, where he said it was like he was “reporting from the moon”, such was the level of fascination in every word he has spoken and every tweet he has sent.
He has tried meat pies and Vegemite. He has filmed magpies. He even, by chance, got a last-minute ticket to attend an AFL game — and that is where the interest in Cohn really took off.
He didn’t have any clue what was going on, and yet Cohn did what he usually would during an NFL game. He live tweeted his reaction to Geelong’s win over Carlton.
“I thought it’d be funny just to do that for a sport I don’t understand,” he said.
So, Cohn whipped out his phone and fired away tweets.
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Grant Cohn at an AFL game.Source: FOX SPORTS
On how Bailey Smith “simply has to play better”. How Patrick Dangerfield had become his “favourite player”.
Then came Sydney’s shock victory over Brisbane. Tom Papley became a quick favourite of his. Lachie Neale, or ‘Lashay Neale’ as Cohn pronounced it, was put under the spotlight.
Later, it was Marcus Bontempelli’s turn. Cohn called him the “Justin Herbert of AFL players”, Herbert being the Los Angeles Chargers quarterback who has for so long been put up on a pedestal in NFL discourse despite not having any playoff wins to his name.
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“You want to be in the same breath as Tom Papley and Patrick Dangerfield and Bailey Smith? Do something when it counts,” Cohn said of Bontempelli, or ‘The Bont’ as he calls the Bulldogs star midfielder.
“It was funny how I started taking little jabs at the Bont and people were like, ‘You can’t say that in this country!’. It’s like, ‘Hey, wait a second man’, people tear down Stephen Curry in America. It’s just kind of part of the whole entertainment of it,” Cohn later added.
Papley told Cohn in a video message on AFL.com.au’s ‘The Round Ahead’ that his criticism of Bontempelli was “a little bit off”.
Cohn’s response to that?
“I think he’s actually right. I think Western needs to put a better team around him and if they don’t made Bont needs to request a trade,” he said.
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Either way, the Swans star is clearly a fan — he has since followed Cohn on X, also known as Twitter.
“I’m so excited,” Cohn said.
“I’m around these guys all the time. It’s like, ‘Here’s Brock Purdy, oh it’s Christian McCaffrey — cool’. I’m like, ‘Tom Papley followed me’. I’m starstruck.”
A message from Tom Papley.Source: FOX SPORTS
Papley is just one of 10,000 Australians who Cohn reckons have followed him in the past week, with the San Francisco local planning to continue his live tweeting and reaction videos throughout the AFL finals.
He will miss Saturday’s semi-final because he is flying home, but outside of that he has committed to wake up and watch it, regardless of the time difference.
“I’ve got like 10,000 new followers from Australia. I’ve gotta give them want they want,” Cohn said.
“I thought Americans would see it and be like, ‘Oh, this is kind of weird, I don’t even know what this sport is’, but it was all these Australians being like, ‘Oh s***, he likes our sport’.”
So, beyond his love for Papley and complicated relationship with ‘The Bont’, what did Cohn actually make of his first live AFL game?
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Well, as an NFL fan he didn’t have much interest in both rugby league and union.
“It’s cool but there’s no forward pass’ and that gets me,” he said.
But AFL, on the other hand?
“I’m like, ‘Oh, there is a forward pass in this game, you can punch it. You can kick it’ and these guys are really skilled,” Cohn said.
“They’ll juke a guy, they’ll have someone chasing them and they’ll just pull up from 40 yards out and fake it with the right, go back to the left and it’s like, ‘Damn, where did you learn to do that?’.
“I couldn’t imagine picking that sport up at 15 and being good at it. You probably have to grow up with it.”
Cohn said his time in Australia has been “one of the best experiences” in his life and that he is already thinking about his next trip to Australia, where those golf clubs he packed may come in handy.
Instead, he has been spending most of his free time in the recent days doing interviews like this one.
So, before the AFL and all the fanfare, what was Cohn’s first impression of Australia?
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“How relentlessly friendly (everyone is),” Cohn said.
“Not that they’re so nice. But when you’re in California, people don’t want to talk to strangers.
“So you get an Uber and you don’t talk to the driver and the driver doesn’t talk to you. Everyone leaves each other alone. In Australia, no one leaves me alone. I’m in an Uber and they’re like, ‘So where are you from? What are you up to?’.
“It just feels like people are more on the same playing field here. In California, everyone wants to pretend they’re rich and famous and they can’t talk to people. But in Australia it seems like everyone talks to everyone. I like it a lot.
“It seems like people also have a great sense of humour here. People don’t take themselves too seriously. That’s what I’m like. In America, people take themselves very seriously, so I have a good time trolling them, but here it seems like everyone’s in on the joke.
“That’s not a concept in America. You’re just a jerk in America.”
As for the animals, Australia hasn’t exactly lived up to its “super exotic” reputation in Cohn’s time here exploring the Melbourne CBD. The “most crazy wildlife” he has seen is magpies.
“I don’t even know what those are,” he said.
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Cohn has, however, been taken aback by the variety of cuisine Australia has to offer. Sure, he’s tried all the classics including Vegemite and a chicken parma.
But Cohn has also visited Melbourne’s Little Italy along Lygon Street and Chinatown.
“It really is a world-class international hub,” he said.
As for anything that has surprised Cohn in a bad way, well he has quickly learned what zebra crossings are.
“It’s like when you walk into the sidewalk and someone almost kills you,” he said.
“You walk back out and you’re like, ‘Go ahead’ and they’re like, ‘Thanks’.”
Forget driving on the wrong side of the road too. Cohn is also getting used to the fact Australians also stick to the left while walking.
“The one that kills me is everyone’s driving on the left side of the road. That’s weird enough, but people walk on the left side of the sidewalk, which I don’t do,” he said.
“And I usually look at my phone when I’m walking, so I’m constantly bumping into people and pissing people off. So, my bad.”
Despite all that, this adopted Australian could definitely see himself living down under. Well, not really because that would involve also getting his family on board.
But in a hypothetical world where it was just up to him, he could absolutely see himself making the move.
And is there something he thinks Americans could learn from the way we do things in Australia?
Well, for all the criticism that Cohn cops back home for his outspoken personality, his answer to that question was as real as they come.
“No one in America trusts each other because there’s so many shootings and there’s all these awful things that happen,” he said.
“So I feel like out here people there’s more of a trust inherent in society and it’s refreshing. It’s what I think it was like in America when my parents were kids.”