“I used to fight with Rebecca all the time. “I know she was fighting it pretty tough but it’s obviously an enormous shock. I’ve been in regular contact with her up until before grand final week so this has come as a shock to me. “I spoke with Rebecca about two weeks ago and she said she thought she was getting better, it was a slog. “For a couple of months it’s been very bad with the breast cancer, it came and it came really hard,” he said on SEN Breakfast.
The sports broadcaster Francis Leach also paid tribute. “Great sports columnist, devoted mother, wife and friend,” the former Wallaby said. The Fairfax journalist Kate McClymont said Wilson was “a passionate and gutsy reporter who loved sport” and fellow sports writer Peter FitzSimons said he was shocked to hear of her passing. “She was a pioneer in many respects for women in the game, women in sports and women in sports journalism,” he said. The NRL chief executive, Todd Greenberg, said she was a fearless journalist. “Her private fight against the cancer that took her life is testament to that spirit.” “She was courageous, she was bold, she was determined and she never gave up,” he said. News Corp Australia’s executive chairman, Michael Miller, said Wilson was one of Australia’s most respected sports journalists – “expert, passionate and utterly fearless”.
“We have really broken through here,” she said. She always championed the role of women in sport and last year she was proud to appear on an all-female sport panel on Sky News’ Sports Night alongside athletes turned commentators Melinda Gainsford-Taylor and Liz Ellis. While her mainstay was journalism, she did leave News to work in various corporate and media roles for the Sydney Olympics, the Rugby World Cup and Super League. She was a reporter or commentator on both the Olympic and Commonwealth games and early in her career was a sports reporter at Channel Ten in Brisbane. Wilson made a name for herself as a forthright television commentator on the ABC’s The Fat with Tony Squires in the early 2000s. “While there are bad eggs in both, nothing in either comes close to the atrocities that are almost routinely committed in league.” “Dare I say it but incidents like this do not happen in rugby union or AFL. “So that’s when the league steps in,” she said. Wilson, a much-loved member of the News Corp family, continued to work right up until last month when she called for the league player Andrew Fifita to be sacked for visiting a killer in jail and said rugby league had more disgraced players than AFL or rugby union. “She proved that women had an equally important role in sports journalism as her male counterparts. She brushed aside evil trolls, bullies and organised crime figures to prosecute her craft.
“We are so proud that she was so fearless in her chosen role as a sports journalist. The majority of her friends, colleagues and indeed members of her family were unaware of the extent of her illness. “Rebecca kept knowledge of her illness a closely guarded secret. “Courage has always been a significant part of her DNA, no less in her desperate battle against her insidious disease.
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