Action Man

Whether he’s chasing a story in a danger zone or a new fitness PB, Sunday Night reporter Denham Hitchcock is a real-life Clark Kent

- Daniel Williams

IF DENHAM HITCHCOCK’S assignment du jour were to compile a report on his own life, how would he start it? Perhaps it would be in the surf at Sydney’s Dee Why in the summer of 2016, when he glanced to his right across the break and noticed a woman on her board. “She was paddling around in a Brazilian bikini, which is eye-catching,” recalls Hithcock. “She was surfing with another guy, and I was just hoping he wasn’t her boyfriend.”

Except, it’s not Hitchcock’s style just to sit there hoping. That kind of passiveness . . . well, it doesn’t get you anywhere, does it? “So I waited for him to catch a wave, then I paddled over and said hello.”

The beauty turned out to be Mari Borges, a (single) Brazilian expat and hostel manager. She and Hitchcock hit it off, bonding over a shared love of fresh air, exercise and salt water. “We’ve been inseparable,” says Hitchcock, who was 40 at the time. They’re getting married next February.

It would be a decent opener, and it would speak to Hitchcock’s don’t-die wondering approach. But it’s a mite too soft and sentimental for a journalist of his ilk. This isn’t a bloke who shadows the dressmaker before a royal wedding. This is Sunday Night’s toughest operator, who’s in his element reporting from a Middle East battlefield or buttonholing a slippery murder suspect.

So though it’s painful, Hitchcock would more likely hark back to something that happened a long time ago – when he was 14, in fact, and enjoying a summer scorcher on the Hawkesbury River with his dad, Kevin. Young Denham, home from boarding school for Christmas, had tied a rope to a branch and the pair were swinging out over the water and dropping in.