Hinch’s own colleagues wanted him dumped over Hookes revelation
Derryn Hinch revealed a secret about a cricketing great to the public that saw his own colleagues calling for him to be dumped and some still refuse to speak to him.
Entertainment
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DERRYN Hinch has revealed his radio colleagues campaigned to have him sacked for revealing the truth about Australian cricketing great David Hookes’s personal life following his tragic death.
Hookes, a swashbuckling batsman turned charismatic radio sports broadcaster, died after hitting his head during a brawl outside the Beaconsfield Hotel in St Kilda in 2004.
Hinch outraged many of his on-air colleagues by reporting that Hookes had separated from his wife, Robyn, and was accompanied by his girlfriend, Christine Padfield on the night of his death.
“In my opening editorial that day, paying tribute to David Hookes, I said I think six or seven words, just saying, ‘there is another woman grieving out there’, that was all I said,” Hinch said.
“Clark Forbes was the program manager at the time and he was in Adelaide at a wake and one of his staff held the phone to the radio so he could hear what I was saying and he called me on the red phone during the commercial break and he just unloaded on me with f-words and c-words and hung up.
“Many of them, I think Ross Stevenson, never did speak to me because of this.
“They all told Graham Mott, the boss (General Manager), that he should sack me.
“And Mott said, ‘what would I tell the media? That I sacked him for telling the truth?’.”
Hinch stands by his decision to reveal Hookes’s personal situation.
“The Hookesy one, I actually went back over it, I gave a laudatory (editorial) about him and how tragic it was but six or seven words, that is all I said, ‘there is another woman grieving out here’.”
He said he had no idea how sensitive the issue was for his colleagues.
“I did not know, it was kept hidden by 3AW, that he and his wife had been separated for a long time, that he had been seeing another woman for a long time and they were looking at buying a house together,” he said.
“I did not know anything about this and I found out later on that his girlfriend and his separated wife were in different rooms at the hospital at that tragic time and being kept apart by AW executives.”
Hinch also caused outrage by claiming TV legend Graham Kennedy had AIDS when he died in 2005.
He was forced to apologise over his claims.
“The Graham Kennedy story, his former partner Rob Astbury who was a 3AW and Ch 9 sports reporter, he had written a book about this in which he made allegations against Kennedy and also stories had appeared in the Australian newspaper, I think it was, about Kennedy having Kaposi’s sarcoma, which are those tell tale black face spots from it.
“I was going to interview Rob Astbury that afternoon (on 3AW in 2005) and at the last minute he pulled out.
“His close friends Nolene Brown and her husband, they went ape over what I’d said.
“I did not say he died of AIDS, because he died of pneumonia apparently, but I said it appeared that he had AIDS.
“I was forced to apologise for it.
“The Kennedy story was a tough one. At the time I figured it was right, but the last minute when Astbury pulled out it was not a good look.”
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