The naysayers thought she wouldn’t cut it, but few AFL players have stood on a football field in circumstances more terrifying than Rebecca Maddern.
Staying cool under fire could be said to be a hallmark of the first woman to host Channel Nine’s The Footy Show, who kicked it out of the park to create a six-year ratings record with her debut on April 7.
This, after all, is the woman who once sat in the lounge room of a murder suspect and asked him the hard question: did you kill your wife?
That man was Joe Korp and just as Rebecca was grilling him in an exclusive interview, his missing wife would be found barely alive in the boot of her car at the Shrine of Remembrance. Maria Korp died six months later, having never regained consciousness.
Two years earlier – at just 24 – Rebecca earned one of journalism’s highest accolades for her unwavering reportage as the flames closed in on Omeo oval during the devastating alpine bushfires of 2003.
“It was Australia Day. We woke fairly early and right from the start there was this strange feeling in the air and then about 10.30am the sky went completely black,” Rebecca recalls of the events that led to her winning a prestigious Quill award for news reporting.
The fires had by this stage been burning for weeks in inaccessible country and other reporters had already moved on, leaving Rebecca and her cameraman, who were directed to evacuate to the oval, along with the few remaining residents.
“We had one fire tanker in the middle of the ground and the change rooms for shelter. I remember having a conversation with the chief firefighter. I asked if the water in his tanker was going to be enough to save us if it came to it and he said: ‘It should be’. I remember thinking ‘should’ is not really the word I want to hear at the moment.”
The fire was closing in and the crews were preparing for the flames to come right through the oval and explode the cars evacuees had driven there.
“We filmed some interviews and I did a piece to camera just before we had to get inside. It was terrifying. Then, just at the very, very last minute the wind changed and we were spared.”
Rebecca had been a television reporter for just four months. “I am happy to say, now, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t really know what was required in such a big moment.”
There are some situations where you just have to rely on instinct and training, and that’s just how Rebecca approached her first night in the hot seat on The Footy Show alongside co-host James Brayshaw and the sometimes irascible and unpredictable Sam Newman.
A firestorm of criticism erupted when 38-year-old Rebecca was announced as the replacement for The Footy Show’s previous host Garry Lyon, who went on indefinite leave and is being treated for depression following revelations of his relationship with the former wife of regular panellist Billy Brownless. But Rebecca was unfazed.
“Because I have been on TV for 13½ years I have pretty much heard it all before,” she says with a tweak of her classic Carla Zampatti blouse.
“But I do find it fascinating that a lot of the critique is like, ‘She doesn’t know enough about football’. I have stood in front of Parliament House in Canberra, on the steps of State Parliament at election time and no one ever worried if I knew about politics. I have never been questioned on my knowledge of anything else in my journalism career. People are very protective of their football. I suppose that is where that comes from, I am not quite sure.
“I just go back to what I know, and what I know is television, what I know is journalism and what I know is presenting. When you break it down, that is what The Footy Show is about. One of the things I bring to the show that differentiates me from others is not that I am a woman, but that I am a journalist. My skill is asking questions and I think that will hold me in great stead.”
After finishing high school at Geelong College, Rebecca first enrolled in arts at the University of Melbourne before transferring to media studies at RMIT, drawn to the idea of a career behind the camera.
“I thought it would be great to be a film producer, having no real idea what a film producer did, but I liked the idea you could be a little bit creative and there was also a business side.
“I hadn’t any friends or family in the media industry so I didn’t really have an idea how it worked. It was actually through a friend of a friend that I got a job in radio at Triple M. That was my foot in the door. They always talk about the foot in the door, but it’s true, you actually need to get that little toe in there and off you go.”
Although Sam Newman pretended not to know Rebecca on her first night on The Footy Show, she had in fact worked with both him and Eddie McGuire in her first job. “I actually started as a sports reporter and they would talk down the line to me to get my sports updates,” Rebecca reveals. “They were both very encouraging to me.”
Coincidentally Eddie and Sam also represent competing sides of Rebecca’s football heritage. While she is Geelong’s No.1 female ticket holder, she might easily have been a Magpie, had her mother Wendy not married Rex Gorell – today chairman of one of Victoria’s largest car dealerships groups.
“My dad [Graeme] and my brothers [Paul and Anthony] are actually Collingwood supporters,” says Rebecca. “But I have lived with my stepdad since I was three or four years old and he was involved in the Geelong Football Club. It was actually his influence that got me interested, although my mum’s grandfather, my great-grandfather [Harry “Nipper” Marsham] also played for Geelong [he was captain in 1917]. It was sometimes hard for my mum who has a bit of a soft spot for Collingwood.”
“I don’t have a soft spot for Collingwood.”
As a teenager Rebecca was frequently at Kardinia Park, either playing netball or attending Cats home games with her girlfriends.
“I was really fortunate to see some of the finest players we will ever see. At the time I thought it was normal to see Gary Ablett [snr] take the most amazing marks of the century right in front of me.”
Between her brothers and three step-brothers, Paul, Brett and Jason, Rebecca learned pretty early how to mix it with the big boys.
“Having brothers who were quite a bit older was pretty significant, because you grow up quicker being the youngest child. It was like, ‘Put Becky on the motorbike, put Becky on the swings, put Becky in the go-kart’. I grew up a bit of a tomboy.”
She was also devoted to horses and competed at Royal Melbourne and Adelaide shows. When she was about 11 she was trampled by a spooked horse as she tried to lead him into the stable one windy night. Her hip was dislocated when the horse ran over the top of her, narrowly missing her head.
“I can remember I was in extreme pain and felt every single bump of the driveway and all the way to Geelong Hospital.”
She endured six weeks flat on her back in traction with weights on the bottom of her leg. “It was bed pans and bed washes all that time and then I was on crutches for six weeks after that. But, yes, I rode again. You have to get back on the horse.”
After the family moved from the farm at Ceres when she was 15 or 16, she stopped showing and, eventually, riding.
“I think if you compete at a certain level in something it is not really appealing to just have a hack in the paddock and go for a ride on weekends. I haven’t been on a horse for 15 years probably.”
These days her down time is most often spent at the Great Ocean Road property she bought with her cameraman husband Trent Miller, not long after their marriage in 2014. She was previously married to Geelong real estate agent James Wilson.
“My husband is a big surfer so I will go down and just sit on the beach and watch the waves, although he thinks I am watching him,” she laughs.
“I love that time. It is the only time I ever feel I switch off. When I am in inner-city Melbourne I don’t think I can. I don’t live for the weekends so I can do something crazy, I live for my weekends or my down time to just be.”
It was at the beach that Rebecca pondered the job opportunity of a lifetime after a Good Friday meeting at Channel Nine, which included Footy Show co-host James Brayshaw. People who saw her that weekend at the Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach had no inkling of the churn beneath the calm exterior.
“I talked about it with my husband for probably 48 hours straight. Because he’s in television and his father was in television and he actually had a TV upbringing, he is my number-one sounding board,” Rebecca says.
“I wanted to keep it as in-house as possible. I don’t like talking about things before they happen and I don’t like playing hypotheticals. I just like to look at the facts and, pretty much by Sunday, I knew this was what I wanted to do.”
Her parting with Channel Seven after 14 years – the last two as Melbourne correspondent on Sunrise – was not expected, although her contract was nearing expiry.
It was a play out of left field by Nine executives after their approaches to get Eddie McGuire failed because of his Fox Footy obligations.
“I wasn’t looking for a new job. I had a great job at Sunrise and it wasn’t that I was bored by any stretch of the imagination. I think in life, challenges come up and when they do you just have to grab them, otherwise you may regret it later.”
While she will fondly recall her former job with its mix of presenting and reporting, the one thing she absolutely will not miss is the Sunrise alarm. “I think I am pretty tough, but 3.30am is incredibly taxing on your body.”
It’s a reminder that you have to get up pretty early to beat Bec Maddern. She’s definitely in for the long game.
- The Footy Show airs on Channel 9 on Thursdays at 8.30pm.
