Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

Australian Open tennis. The LTAA eventually turned it down, but it was a line call.

Many years after his WSC success, Packer would face one more major sporting stoush; a bodyline bowl at him, using the same world-series concept he had pioneered for cricket.

His rival was his media mogul ‘frenemy’, Rupert Murdoch.

The scuffle began in 1986, when the newly-empowered Australian Rugby League decided to begin paring down the gaggle of teams from the game’s traditional heartland, Sydney. By 1994, the culling or merging of smaller Sydney clubs had opened the way for rugby league to expand its national footprint, starting with the 1995 season.

Packer owned the broadcast rights for rugby league, having inked a seven-year, $80 million deal in 1993. Significantly, the deal included both free-to-air and pay television, though the latter service was not yet available in Australia.

The power of pay TV certainly wasn’t unknown to either tycoon. Murdoch’s UK BSkyB satellite company—steered by Packer’s former Nine lieutenant, Sam Chisholm—had built its financial turnaround largely on the back of English football. In Australia, Murdoch’s Foxtel brand was gearing up for launch in 1995. Packer had a stake in the inevitable pay TV technology via Optus Vision.

Packer-powered football was already working magic on the game’s popularity. Kerry insisted that the rugby league games be broadcast live. He knew what the fans wanted.

But not everyone was happy. Rumblings had begun in 1994 in Queensland about the teams’ share of the $10 million-a-year television bounty. The Murdoch camp swung behind the Queensland Broncos, proposing a plan all too familiar to Packer: a ‘super league’ of players, in a made-for-cable championship.

Packer sought to stamp it out, warning club bosses that he would take legal action. A month later, though, a signing spree by Murdoch’s men had bagged a handful of top coaches and about 30 players’ signatures for the maverick series.

Murdoch could play as hard as Packer ever had. Wendell Sailor, then a star Broncos player, wrote in his autobiography Crossing The Line: ‘We’d already been quietly warned that if we backed out of our Super League deals, News Ltd would sue us for everything we had and we would never play rugby league anywhere in the world ever again. The UK Rugby League had also signed up for Super League, so if we pissed these guys off, there was nowhere else to go.’

Sailor went on to add that his Super League contract, worth more than twice what he’d previously been paid, suddenly looked pale after a private meeting with James Packer and ARL coach (and KP confidante), Bob Fulton. The pockets of Nine and Optus Vision, sponsor of the 1996 premiership, were deep. ‘They were offering me a three-year contract, each year in the neighbourhood of half a million dollars,’ Sailor wrote.

The battle hit the Federal Court in September 1995. After months of legal head-butting, it appeared that Packer had won the day: Super League would be banned until 2000, when Nine’s contract was up. But an appeal lodged in May 1996 overturned it all. Suddenly, Murdoch’s men were lacing up their studs for a 1997 Super League season.

Thus, 1997 was at best a Murdoch victory over Packer, at worst a tense and temporary co-habitation. At the conclusion of that sole season of Super League, the warring tribes gathered in Sydney Football Stadium—in the shadow of ‘Packer’s candles’—and voted to run the ball forward under a new partnership, the National Rugby League.

Many saw this compromise as a rare capitulation on Packer’s part. If so, it was the kind he didn’t mind, because the negotiation included Murdoch handing him 25 per cent of Foxtel, the pay-TV provider, and 50 per cent of the Fox Sports group of channels.

Nobody has doubted that it was a victory for the game.

3

BUSH YARNS

The storyline sounds simple enough: high-pressure city businessman has a health scare in his mid-40s, decides on a tree-change, buys a remote little rural bolt-hole. For irrepressible business people of Kerry Packer’s ilk, however, it’s always just a short hop from here to creating the nation’s second-largest pastoral empire, running 350,000 head of cattle on 19 stations covering 5.8 million hectares.

Sir Frank Packer had bought the first piece of land at Ellerston in 1972, doing so jointly with wool-broker, James McLeod. The two men had shared ownership of two adjoining properties since 1956.

Ellerston was bought to expand their wool and cattle interests, but both men had been keen polo players. In 1938, they were among the five co-founders of the Town and Country Polo Club. Sir Frank had also served on the committee of the NSW Polo Association.

While Sir Frank was alive, the original 40,500 hectares was gradually pared off to just 9,000 hectares. But in the 10 years following his death in 1974, Kerry built it up again, acquiring neighbouring properties to reach a total of more than 27,000 hectares. Ellerston was a working station running up to 11,000 Hereford cattle and 6,500 Merino wethers.

Gretel Packer reflected that her father’s sense of home at Ellerston ran deep. ‘Dad really loved Ellerston,’ she told The Australian Women’s Weekly in February 2006. ‘In the early days, it was primarily a cattle and sheep property. When he was younger, Dad would go up there and be like a lot of men in their 30s and 40s, filled with energy and enthusiasm to go riding and shooting.’

It was Bondy’s billion that set off Packer’s spending spree at Ellerston. The property was developed into effectively a small kingdom, with several small homesteads in addition to the main, 13-bedroom house, along with a pub, restaurant, a general store, a cinema, a swimming pool, several man-made lakes and a school for employees’ children.

Around 100 people live and work there, the majority of them looking after the various sporting and agricultural activities that comprised Packer’s playground. Ellerston’s polo facilities are said to be second to none in Australia.

Garry Linnell, former editor of The Bulletin, enjoyed the full Ellerston entertainment experience