Melai played fifty games with Geelong reserves in the Victorian Football League during the early 1960s,[5] and was part of Geelong's 1963 reserves premiership team, but he did not play a senior game for the club.
It was a historic transfer, as he was the first player to make the switch from the VFL to the VFA without a clearance after the VFA had terminated its transfer agreement with the VFL in April that year – a consequence of the bitter deterioration in relations between the two competitions following North Melbourne's relocation to Coburg.
[7] Melai became the mainstay ruckman of the Dandenong team over the next decade, a successful time which saw Melai win premierships in 1967 – notably knocking umpire David Jackson unconscious in an accidental collision during the controversial Grand Final[8] – and 1971, and he played off in a further three Grand Finals in 1969, 1972 and 1975.
[9] After retiring from playing with the club, he stayed on with Dandenong as a runner, and was suspended for six weeks after the 1976 Grand Final for using abusive language during the brawls for which that game became infamous.
In the early 1990s, he served as a runner and team manager for the St Kilda Football Club.