Plan to oust Rod Butterss from St Kilda presidency was hatched at fancy dress party
Radio star Steve Bedwell’s dramatic grab for the top job at St Kilda threw the club into turmoil. But here’s how it all came undone in just one week.
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Former Triple M host and comedian Steve Bedwell has told how his bold plans to overthrow the St Kilda Football Club president, Rod Butterss, were hatched at a fancy dress party.
A passionate Saints fan, Bedwell was the high-profile, if unexpected, choice to spearhead a move to unseat Butterss in June 2007 and his power play created a media frenzy.
His foray into the politics and boardroom manoeuvring of footy came after a fancy dress party.
“Coming from Sydney, for the first 12 months I tried to ignore football then I realised it truly is the greatest game in the world,” Bedwell told the Herald Sun Sacked: Showbiz podcast.
“I became quite involved with the St Kilda Football club through Eric Bana and I would host functions and do things.
“Then I was approached by a high profile businessman’s son at a fancy dress party, it was Sean Taylor’s 40th or something.
“He said ‘we should mix this up, we will go to the next general meeting and have a look’.”
Mix it up meant announcing Bedwell, who had hosted Melbourne’s top rating FM breakfast show, Timbo and Bedders, as the face of a planned six-man ticket to push for the removal of Butterss and the entire board.
“I put out the press release not wanting to be president, I didn’t want to be president, I just wanted to be a spearhead of a new era,” Bedwell said.
“Man, I copped it from pillar to post, from everybody; ‘what would I know?’, ‘who am I?’, blah, blah, blah.”
Always quick with a quip, Bedwell soon labelled Butterss “Harvey Norman.”
“I had a meeting with Rod Butterss about what was going to go on, and we had the meeting down at a cafe on Bay Street that was meant to be secret, but I alerted the media that we would be there which probably, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have done.
“And that is where I gave him the name, because he had his own problems at (that) moment, he had substance abuse issues and all sorts of things going on while he was the president of a football club, and that is when I called him ‘Harvey Norman.’
“He is Harvey Norman because he has had no interest for three years.”
Despite his best intentions for the club, Bedwell’s attempt to save the Saints quickly ended.
“That blew up and then deflated and I backed away very quickly, but Kevin Bartlett was very hard on me, like really hard on me and probably rightfully so,” he said.
“I probably was not equipped to do the job, I just got excited at a party one night and got a bit manic and everything started happening, and so it was.”
By September that year the team that had backed Bedwell had regrouped and refined its campaign with Butterss ultimately stepping down as president and being replaced by Greg Westaway.
“Being on the board of a football club is no longer just making decisions, it is making big financial contributions and that is (what) we were looking for with the Westaways and in the end the dad (Greg) got the presidency,” Bedwell said.
“It was an interesting time.”
Still a dedicated follower of the club, he revealed some of his ideas offered during that heady time were not warmly received.
“There was a thing called the Foundation Membership, it cost $9000 a year,” he said.
“One of the benefits was you could go down in the rooms before and after the games and I thought to myself, ‘why would I want to do that? I don’t deserve to be there. I am not playing, I am not about to play and the game is over, they (the team) don’t need hangers on, they need to be among themselves and together.’
“Anyway I put that forward and that just got the arse.
“I (also) had the fanciful thing that we could pay back all the players who weren’t paid in the ‘80s when they took no money.”
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