Kicking goals for the girls: the Footy Show’s Rebecca Maddern
The AFL Footy Show is two hours of very blokey live TV, co-hosted by the controversial Sam Newman. Why, asks Beverley Hadgraft, did Rebecca Maddern leave a prestigious TV gig to sit beside him?
IT WAS A curious moment when Rebecca Maddern was announced as the rst female host of the Nine Network’s AFL Footy Show. Detractors wailed they’d lose their last bastion of political incorrectness. Feminists wondered why one of our most talented journalists would take such a job and social media went into the kind of meltdown usually reserved for Australia’s annual changeover of Prime Minister.
Rebecca herself, however, elding calls from friends, family and fellow TV stars, had no doubts about taking the role. Her only worry was entering the studio her rst night. “No one had walked down those steps in high heels before,” she says. “I told [fellow host] James Brayshaw, ‘Stay close because if I fall over you’re catching me, buddy.’”
She looked remarkably con dent from her rst appearance, but that’s hardly surprising. She’s not a panicker, she says, and there’s plenty of evidence in her journalistic career, dealing with anything from being trapped by bushfire to quizzing suspected “body in the boot” murderer Joe Korp.
On top of this, Rebecca knows her footy. She’s been going to watch her beloved Geelong Cats since she was eight and yes, she did have two older brothers, Paul and Anthony, but they and her dad, Graeme, were and are Collingwood supporters.
Her stepdad, Rex Gorell, was on the Cats’ board, but Rebecca went with her girlfriends after netball and, 30 years on, still goes with those same girlfriends. “We’ll probably still be going in our 80s,” she says, laughing, “sitting there with our rugs over our knees.”
The Cats’ Grand Final wins were only narrowly pipped to “best moment of my life” status by her marriage to cameraman husband Trent Miller.
Anyway, she is enjoying displaying her footy knowledge – and it seems that’s contagious. Probably Rebecca’s favourite reaction to her appointment came from two female supporters who approached her after a Geelong-West Coast game. “They said, ‘Rebecca, we want to thank you so much for being part of the Footy Show. We’re the ones who’ve taken our kids to footy since they were six. We know about football and now feel more con dent to talk about it in front of family and friends.’ That was a special moment,” she says.
There are many who might say that, ironically, the Footy Show is one of the reasons women don’t feel con dent talking about AFL. A testosteronefuelled domain led by TV’s most controversial and, some would say, misogynistic character, Sam Newman, it hasn’t exactly been female-friendly.
“It’s been an awful vehicle for sexism and racism. It’s been a show that’s excluded women,” says one of its most outspoken critics, News Corp sports reporter, Jessica Halloran. “It goes against everything the AFL is trying to become, this inclusive, diverse code.”
The most commented on AFL Grand Final story last year, Jessica says, was an open letter from a mother about another host, Billy Brownless, who had referred to her as a stripper. “The Footy Show condones and breeds this toxic behaviour,” the mother complained.
Sam Newman, meanwhile, is a “sexist dinosaur”, as he does anything from bringing on nurses in G-strings to mocking footy journalist Caroline Wilson by dressing up a mannequin with her head on it.
“For Rebecca to take that role was a real positive and a history-making moment,” says Jessica. “The gags still happen, but her being there is a changing attitude. From the first show, she had that great comeback for Sam about him being the same age as her greatgrandfather. She’s witty and smart. She’s a lesson to TV bosses not to be afraid to put female talent into sporting TV roles.”
Rebecca has proved a ratings’ hit with 181 viewers, with numbers up 20 per cent since her arrival to the show – an achievement not lost on her TV bosses.
So what did Sam Newman think about Rebecca’s appointment?
“He was very encouraging and excited about having a female on the show,” she says, firmly. “You might not expect that, but he understands TV and knows you need to evolve. He also added that it wasn’t that we needed a female. We needed a co-host and he told me, ‘You were the best man for the job’.”
Yet there will be a time when Sam steps out of line. What will she do? “It’s hard to say,” she says. “It’s hypothetical. I will go with my gut. If I think it’s wrong, I’ll challenge him.”
In any case, she isn’t there to keep Sam in line. Her role, she says, is to be the journalist. “It doesn’t matter if you’re asking about politics or football, the art of crafting a good question to get a great answer is the same.”
The offer to host the Footy Show came out of the blue. It wasn’t a role Rebecca had even considered. “Five years ago, it would’ve been a huge step,” she says. Today, with Samantha Lane on the Seven Network’s AFL coverage, Leila Gurruwiwi on The Marngrook Footy Show, Chelsea
Roffey becoming the first female goal umpire in a Grand Final and the first women’s AFL league starting next year, “the stars were aligned”.
Not that we should be surprised. Around 41 per cent of AFL supporters are women and, according to the AFL’s annual report, the number of female participants in 2015 soared to 318,880 – that’s 22 per cent of all participants and up 46 per cent on the previous year.
In addition, with newsreaders regularly staying glued to their seats for 30 years, Rebecca had to face the fact a prime presenting position might never come up at Seven. “I was 38 and knew I could still be waiting at 50,” she says. “There wasn’t really a choice at the end of the day.”
Rebecca grew up in Highton, a suburb of Geelong, with her brothers and three older stepbrothers, Paul, Brett and Jason – moving easily between her two homes, just 15 minutes apart, after her mum, Wendy, remarried.
She probably was a tomboy, she agrees; her brothers happily doubling her on their motorbikes or teaching her to swim. “They threw me in the pool and yelled, ‘Go, Bec. Get to the edge!’”
Yet because they were all so much older, she was more like an only child in many ways. She went to an all-girls school and mostly hung out with her girlfriends, particularly those who, like her, were pony-mad.
Rebecca got on her first pony aged four and after that spent every moment preparing for showing competitions all over Australia. In retrospect, she says, looking after horses set her up for life – the hard work, the never making excuses because things are uncomfortable and the understanding of the need for patience, dedication and respect.
Those traits may explain why various mentors have been keen to help her along the way. Radio news director Nikole Gunn was the first to take the young promotions part-timer under her wing, giving her private tutorials, then launching her straight into the breakfast news reading spot when the two of them moved to Nova.
A year later, out of the blue, Rebecca got a call from Rob Olney, then News Director at the Seven Network. “I hadn’t had any television experience, so he was either very smart or very silly,” she says.
When she literally got her on-air baptism by fire in the 2003 Victorian Alpine region bushfires, she made him look very smart.
Hearing Rebecca talk about that assignment, it’s obvious why hosting the Footy Show holds no fears for her.
“I’d been reporting from Omeo for a few days, then woke up on Australia Day and had a very funny feeling.
I rang work and said, ‘It’s 10am, the sky is completely black and it’s very still. I don’t think that’s normal.’”
The whole town was ringed by fire. Rebecca and the rest of the population took shelter at the footy oval and were spared after a wind change, but the loss of livestock and homes was devastating.
For the first time her smile disappears and she tears up. “I grew up on a farm,” she says. “I was very sensitive to livestock owners who had lost their animals. I am very aware of what the land means to people.”
She won a prestigious Quill Award for that report and her face was on television constantly in 2005, as she captured a raft of exclusives on the story of Joe Korp, whose mistress attempted to murder his wife, Maria, including going to his house to ask him outright, “Did you kill your wife?”
That was another scary moment. “I kept thinking, ‘Is he going to close the door and kill us?’” she recalls. As she drove away, she got the call to tell her that Maria had just been found.
In between all this, Rebecca found the time to get married – twice. She says she was too young when she met her first husband, James Wilson, whose family owns a Geelong real estate business.
She met her second husband, Trent, when in Albuquerque on a story. He was working in the Los Angeles bureau at the time, but returned to Australia soon after meeting Rebecca. They’d been dating for two months when he was lured back over the Atlantic for a job filming the US TV series Mythbusters and for the next year Rebecca used all her leave flying over to watch him film things being blown up!
They got engaged three years ago on the beach in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. “He’d organised a private table. We had a candlelit dinner for two – it was high tide and the Mexican waiters were concerned we’d be washed away – and then he organised a waiter to bring the ring down, pushed into a little eggcup of sand.
“He proposed and, of course, I started crying and said yes.”
A year later, in 2014, they married in a “fun, casual, beautiful” ceremony at her mum’s Melbourne apartment, each reading out a series of funny, heartfelt statements about each other.
“I said I was in awe of his love of the ocean, which is very special to him as he loves surfing,” she recalls. “I can’t remember what he said about me, but he doesn’t save those nice things. He’s always telling me that he’s proud of me and I’m gorgeous, and good at my job. He’s a real sweetheart.”
Their honeymoon was a working bee at the holiday place they had bought on the Great Ocean Road and where they still escape to whenever possible – Trent to surf and Rebecca to run or walk on the beach.
She is close to her family – doesn’t even distinguish between who’s a step family member and who’s not, they all get on so well – and her next ambition is to start a family of her own. “I’m 38 so I’d better get to it!” she says.
Talking of families, how does her mum feel watching her only daughter enter the blokey bastion of the Footy Show?
Rebecca laughs again. “She’s just glad she doesn’t have to get up at 5.30 to watch me on Sunrise any more.”
Perhaps too, Wendy knows her daughter is also kicking another goal for the girls. As Jessica Halloran says, “There should be more women holding meaningful roles in footy. We make up nearly half of supporters, so why not?”
“I kept thinking,
‘Is he going to close the door and kill us?’”