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When Sara Leonardi met cricketer Glenn McGrath at a party in Cape Town in 2009, she had no idea the tall, affable Australian was one of the greatest fast bowlers the game has ever produced. In fact, the Italian American interior designer barely knew what cricket was.
"I remember asking him, 'What do you do?'," she recalls. "And he's like, 'I play cricket.' And I was like, 'No, I mean how do you pay your mortgage?' And he said, 'No, I play cricket'.
"I didn't know anything about cricket, let alone Glenn."
Sara had been living in Cape Town, South Africa, for the previous three years. Glenn, who was nearly 12 years her senior, was there to play cricket. The pair "just hit it off", Glenn recalls.
"I just enjoyed being with her. She's fun, she's exciting. She's got all these ideas and never wants to sit still."
Within a year of their chance meeting, Sara up-ended her life and moved to Australia to be with Glenn. But she was walking into a potentially daunting situation.
"She was thrown in the deep end," Glenn recalls. "For her to come out here and come into a family where they lost their mother previously, there was a foundation because of Jane and her experience, took a lot of courage and character."
"I came without a backup plan," Sara says. "But Glenn and I knew what we had. And that's all that mattered."
There are intriguing parallels to the story of how Glenn McGrath came to be with his first wife, Jane. Glenn and Jane met by chance in a Hong Kong bar in 1995. He was playing in a local tournament; she was a British flight attendant on a stopover.
Jane, like Sara, had no interest in cricket and no idea who Glenn was, later recalling how baffled she was when someone said he was as famous as Robert De Niro.
And, similarly, she up-ended her life, moving to the other side of the world to be with a man she had only known for a short time.
Jane and Glenn McGrath went on to become one of Australia's most popular and high-profile couples.
The way they dealt with her decade-long battle with breast cancer won them enormous respect and affection, and when Jane finally succumbed to the disease in 2008, there was a sense of collective mourning.
The sight of Glenn and their two young children, James and Holly, releasing doves at Jane's funeral touched hearts across the country.
Just over six months after she died, Jane's memory became further entrenched in the national consciousness when the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) hosted the inaugural Jane McGrath Day, turning the stands into a sea of pink on the third day of the Test.
That in turn raised the profile of the McGrath Foundation, which Jane had started with Glenn and her best friend Tracy Bevan to provide free breast care nurses to cancer patients around Australia.
It was into this environment that Sara Leonardi flew in late 2009.
"When I met Glenn, he very quickly told me that he was a widower and that he had two kids," Sara says. "When you make the decision to be with someone, you take the whole package. I had no illusions that things were going to be peachy peachy, but I knew that Glenn and I loved each other and we were going to make it work."
Taking on a man and two kids
When Jane died, starting a new relationship was the furthest thing from Glenn's mind.
His focus was on helping James and Holly, who were just eight and six, deal with the loss of their mother. When Sara appeared on the scene, that remained his priority.
"I think Dad sort of sat down to talk to both myself and Holly about who Sara was, how they met and all that sort of stuff and that she was coming to visit," recalls James, who is now 22 and doing an electrical apprenticeship in Sydney.
"Glenn knows how to speak to James and Holly; he always knew how to," Sara says. "So when I came here, the kids weren't like, 'Oh my God, who's this?' And also, Glenn wasn't the type of man that would have brought any woman home unless he knew that it was going to be 100 per cent.
"The kids were beautiful when I came," Sara continues. "In the back of my mind, I might have thought a million things, but when I first met James and Holly — like I literally got out of the car from the airport — the kids hugged me. So it was nice."
Initially, Sara moved into an apartment near the Cronulla family home, to ease the children into the idea of her being around and to allow herself to adjust to her new situation. But before long she moved in with Glenn and the children and took on the role of stepmother in earnest.
"I can't even imagine what it would be like to come into a relationship knowing that you're taking on not just the man but also two kids as well," says Holly, who is now 20 and studying biomedicine in Melbourne.
"From the first day I met her, she was always so kind and caring," Holly continues. "She kind of knew what we needed at the time. You can tell that she's Italian, like she runs a tight ship and that was good. We needed that."
"What I know Sara brought to the family was fun," says Jane's best friend, Tracy Bevan. "Because it hadn't been much fun in the McGrath family for a long time."
"Sometimes people will come to me and they'll be like, 'Oh, how are Glenn's kids?' And I'll say, 'Our kids are great'. Because from day one I took them on as mine," Sara explains. "I had a very simple philosophy. I always thought if I passed away, how I how would I want somebody to take care of my kids?"
"I see Sara as my parent just as much as my dad is and as my mum was, you know," Holly says. "There's not really any difference in my mind."
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Stalked by paparazzi
In the early days of their relationship, Glenn and Sara deliberately kept a low profile, unsure how the public would respond to Glenn having a new partner so soon after Jane's death. But in early 2010, sitting at a café in Double Bay after Sara had been to a hairdresser, they were snapped by a passing photographer.
"It was on the front page of the newspaper and I was like, thank God I got my hair done," Sara jokes.
"We found out the guy sold it for $95,000," Glenn says ruefully. "If I knew that I'd have taken the photo myself."
Once the relationship became public knowledge, there was a media frenzy.
"We had six to seven cars following us everywhere we went," Glenn recalls. "Poor old Sara was taking James to play cricket, she didn't even know where she was going and there's cars and motorbikes following. It was just ridiculous."
Any concerns about the public response were soon allayed. Media coverage was overwhelmingly positive and the public mood reflected that, with people seemingly happy to see Glenn happy after everything he'd been through. Sara, for her part, took the attention in her stride.
"Your husband is in the public eye so you are going to be of public interest," she says. "My grounding thing was don't worry about anyone's opinion except the people that matter."
'Who's going to date you if I'm gone?'
Glenn was nearing 40 when he met Sara and he'd had a vasectomy after Holly was born, so having another child was not something he was planning on. But after he and Sara had been together a few years his thinking changed.
"Glenn and I looked at each other and we thought, we had a beautiful family so why not add to it?" Sara explains.
"We also said, 'If it doesn't work, it doesn't work'. You know, no-one gives you a 100 per cent guarantee. And I married a man who had a vasectomy."
Glenn's vasectomy couldn't be reversed so they underwent IVF and Sara fell pregnant. But right from the start, it was a difficult pregnancy.
"I used to walk around Cronulla and see all these gorgeous girls with their baby bumps walking in their activewear. I was sick from the moment they implanted the embryo. I think I threw up morning, day and night the whole time."
As the pregnancy went on, Sara become increasingly unwell. She developed pre-eclampsia and about eight weeks before the due date things took a dramatic turn for the worse. When she went to hospital with a piercing earache her doctor realised that her condition had deteriorated considerably.
"She could hardly breathe," Glenn recalls. "Her lungs were filling with fluid and the doctor came to us and he said, 'We need to deliver your baby now because your wife will not be alive in six hours'. And I thought, 'Shit, you know, here we go again'."
Despite her rapidly worsening condition, Sara mustered a bit of gallows humour. "I said to him, 'If I'm gone, you're absolutely undateable. Like, who's going to date you if I'm gone?'."
Sara had an emergency caesarean and Madison was born eight weeks early, weighing just 1.8kg but otherwise healthy.
Sara stayed in hospital for 15 days and Madison for 41. Despite her rocky start, Madison hit all her milestones and is now a six-year-old ball of energy, doted on by her parents and siblings.
"I didn't think that we could kind of get closer as a family," Holly says."But she's managed to help us do that."
Keeping Jane's memory alive
Something else that unites the family is the foundation that bears their name.
Glenn devotes a great deal of his time to it, attending fundraising events and functions throughout the year. He charges nothing for his time and receives no salary.
James and Holly have also attended McGrath Foundation events over the years but as they get older, they are showing increasing interest in the running of the charity. This year for the first time they both attended the annual general meeting.
The foundation also provides a powerful connection with their late mother.
"I don't remember much about my mum; I was pretty young," Holly says. "I really do see the foundation as a way of keeping my mum's memory and her legacy alive."
Sara is no less passionate about the work of the McGrath Foundation. A less-secure person might be intimidated by the legacy of Jane McGrath, given what she came to mean to so many Australians, but she has embraced it and has always encouraged James and Holly to become more involved.
"Sara's 100 per cent behind the McGrath Foundation," Glenn says. "We live the foundation every day. She can't get away from it and she's embraced it as she has our children."
"Did I understand Jane's legacy?" Sara says. "Certainly not from afar, but after being here and seeing the impact that she'd had on people with sharing her story, I understand why Australia had so much respect and love for her.
"Nobody lived it like Jane and Glenn did. It's their life. It's the legacy of Jane, it will be the legacy of Glenn and it will be the legacy of James, of Holly and of Madison as well. So it is a privilege to be involved with the foundation.
Australian Story returns with Glenn McGrath's story Bowled Over, 8:00pm (AEDT), on ABCTV, iview and Youtube.
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