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

at least a week beyond his planned departure date, put the frivolous fortunes of a card game sharply into perspective.

7

THE TURF

According to his daughter Gretel, Kerry Packer was ‘a complete softie when it came to horses.’ Packer had an intuitive understanding of the beasts, even if ideas on equine nutrition may have been influenced by his own: when KP was at Ellerston, the finely-tuned, four-legged athletes would feast on packets of Nice biscuits.

The passion for ponies naturally included the punt. Between casino blitzes in Las Vegas and London, the turf provided Packer with instant gambling gratification to stave off his bouts of boredom.

He kept a large stable of polo ponies—and a stable of large polo ponies—but he also owned or co-owned several top-flight racehorses over the years. That’s despite what his footy mate, legendary South Sydney supremo George Piggins recalled Packer once telling him over a quiet dinner: ‘Anyone owning a football team or a racehorse is mad.’

Packer, of course, owned both (he financially backed the East Sydney rugby league club), but as Piggins explained years later, ‘Kerry was interested in sport and he put his money where his mouth was.’

One of the great racehorses of the mid-1990s was Mahogany. Packer jointly owned the thoroughbred with his great punting mate, property developer Lloyd Williams. Fathered in 1990 by a stallion named (appropriately) Last Tycoon, Mahogany racked up at least eight major victories and around $3.7 million in prize money.

Sounds like a good investment. But Packer had offered some proof of the profligacy of thoroughbred ownership in a conversation with writer Les Carlyon, who quoted Packer in The Bulletin.

‘Now you take my best year—the year when Mahogany won all those derbies and was made horse of the year and all that,’ Packer said, referring to the 1993-94 season. ‘You’d reckon if you had a horse as good as him you’d be a mile in front, wouldn’t you? Well, when I totted up the running costs on the rest of my racehorses, I was out two million bucks for the year.’

Carlyon reported that Packer, in telling the story, burst out laughing.

But it was Packer’s huge, sporadic spends from outside the rails that equally caught the attention of the turf fraternity. In the betting rings at Australia’s racecourses, where his wagers reached Vegaspheric heights during the 1980s-90s, the bookies knew him as ‘Buckets’.

As always, Packer knew what he was doing, and he was doing it to win. Since the 1970s, he’d cultivated friendships with jockeys. He got his race tips almost from the horse’s mouth. Jockey Greg ‘The G’ Hall, who often rode for Packer and Williams, told Patrick Carlyon in The Bulletin of a conversation with Packer immediately prior to Mahogany’s storming run in the 1993 Victoria Derby.

‘Hey, Greggie, do you think this horse will win or not?’ Packer had asked.

‘Yep. How much you had on it, KP?’

‘$600,000-odd.’

‘It will win by a minute.’

Packer raced off and put another million on it.

Many of his reported splurges naturally involved his own horses. But some didn’t, as Hall explained of his win six years earlier in the 1987 Sydney Cup, on a Packer/Williams chestnut named Major Drive. It was his first victory for Packer and he later found himself in Packer’s Bellevue Hill home, basking in the warmest hospitality of the Big Fella … Who, it turned out, hadn’t actually backed Major Drive, but had $6 million at 6-4 on, on the favourite Myocard, which had run second.

Packer’s spree over a frightening fortnight of Autumn Carnival in 1987 still makes bookmakers swoon. At the Golden Slipper at Rosehill, exactly two weeks before the Sydney Cup, Packer lost as much as $7 million on his horse Christmas Tree, according to Eric Connolly, veteran racing editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. The bookmakers’ holdings from that weekend were double those of the previous year.

Indeed, Packer was said to have bet more than $100 million over the 1987 Autumn Carnival, scoring some wins to offset his better-publicised losses.

In another well-publicised Packer turf splurge, during the 1991 AJC Easter Racing Carnival, ‘Buckets’ is said to have spilled $55 million to Sydney bookmaker Bruce McHugh—one of few bookies able to man-up to Packer’s punts. McHugh later revealed that Packer, in an attempt to foil the racing media that followed his every move, code-named a million-dollar bet a ‘brick’.

McHugh retired from bookmaking just two days after the 1991 carnival. He went on to become a long-serving chairman of the Sydney Turf Club. Although, it could be argued he’d already given something back to the club, particularly during that 1991 carnival.

‘Nobody anywhere in the world, before or after, has ever paid as much turnover tax,’ McHugh told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011, of his 1991 Packer play. ‘I paid the Australian Jockey Club $1 million and Treasury $1 million, for one week. And I was in bookmaking for 20 years.’

Packer made some notably enormous punts on the Melbourne Cup, in league with Melbourne mate Williams. Their $2 million on the nose of Might and Power in 1997 made the papers, and the pair picked a winner again in 1998 with Jezabeel, winning more than $5 million, according to The Bulletin.

There may well be incalculable remnants of Packer’s punting sprees sown into the turf and lining the clubrooms of Australia’s most ritzy racecourses. But one especially coveted souvenir is the trophy for the Doncaster Mile, held annually at Royal Randwick in Sydney since 1866.

It was crafted in England and presented in 1858 to the winner of the original Doncaster Cup, the oldest continuously run horse race in the world, held at the English racecourse of the same name.

Kerry Packer purchased the trophy in the late 1970s and brought it back to donate to the AJC. He requested