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

that it be used as the trophy for the Frank Packer Plate, which commenced in 1980. Since 2009, however, with the Packer family’s permission, the trophy—estimated to be worth $250,000—has been presented to the winner of the Doncaster Mile.

In 2012, the winner was a horse named More Joyous. In celebrating the victory, her high-profile owner grabbed the precious trophy and thrust it into the air—causing the lid and base to separate and come crashing to the ground. Packer would have been laughing in his grave, as the winning owner was his old mate, Sydney advertising and media man John Singleton.

‘I went to pick it up thinking, 17th-century real silver, it’s going to weigh a tonne. But I think it’s Alfoil,’ Singo joked. ‘I think I’ve uncovered an insurance fraud here … Ros Packer has got the real one at home. I’m not saying Ros has perpetrated the crime, but one of the maids.’

8

SPORTING AMBITION

From a sickly childhood (contracting polio at age seven), and struggling with dyslexia, Kerry Packer focused more on sport than his schooling and grew up to be a competent sort of sportsman. At Geelong Grammar, he was school heavyweight boxing champion, played cricket in the first XI, rugby in the first XV and was also headlong into golf, tennis and swimming.

This era of intensive school sport would equip him with not only a passion for sport, but with a rich, deep seam of sporting ability that could be mined even decades later, when he was far from physically fit.

Packer quit drinking alcohol at just 18, after being involved in a multiple-fatality road accident, but he was evidently unable to maintain similar abstinence (or even moderation) in his smoking or diet.

At age 40, Packer’s bold World Series Cricket initiative suddenly put him in the centre of a global sports spotlight. He stepped up admirably, taking on a challenge in London in August 1977, at the height of his stand-off against the International Cricket Conference, to play in an England versus Australia media game.

‘I think you qualify’ (as Australian media), Ian Chappell had wryly observed.

During the game, Packer batted a couple of singles and then stepped in as wicket-keeper. There, he had the not inconsiderable satisfaction of catching out Peter Lush of the Test and County Cricket Board.

‘He had a bit of ability,’ recalls Greg Chappell. His brother Ian would also sing the praises of the WSC boss. ‘He loved talking about cricket and talking about sport. That was why it was a pleasure to work for him, because you knew he wasn’t just a television magnate churning out product.’

During the High Court case against the ICC a month later, Packer admitted: ‘Contrary to public opinion, I have always liked cricket. I have always been a little resentful of the fact that I was never coached properly.’

Years later, television host Ray Martin would tell of a charity match between Channels Nine and Seven. Packer, batting with Nine’s music director Geoff Harvey, proceeded to knock nearly a century in fours and sixes, while refusing to run for singles.

Some of those cricketing skills would have been kept in tune by the infamous baseball-pitching machine that Packer had had installed in Bellevue Hill. It was reportedly a weekly event for Packers pere et fils, along with various invited cricket stars, to face the machine’s deliveries at a V-max of around 190 kilometres per hour.

Kerry had refused to let James’ cricket coach Barry Knight turn down the speed, saying ‘What are you trying to do, turn him into a wuss? Come on, turn it up a bit!’ West Indies captain Clive Lloyd refused to take on the machine which, after all, could hurl a ball 30 kilometres per hour faster than any human ever has. Packer, naturally, manned up—and was at least once laid out flat by the missile-launching machine.

The body may not have always been up to it, but the spirit burned undiminished. Christopher Forsyth’s The Great Cricket Hijack, quotes Packer as saying ‘I would have given my eye teeth to be a champion.’

Former Australian Rugby League chairman Ken Arthurson had a privileged and very personal insight during the 1993 announcement of Nine’s acquisition of the League’s broadcast rights. The two men were standing in the centre of the playing field at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

‘He turned to me with a sort of faraway look in his eyes,’ Arthurson told The Bulletin. ‘Ya know, I’d give just about anything to have played a grand final here … Or a cricket Test.’ He meant it, too. You could just tell he meant it.’

By that stage, in 1995, Packer had endured 10 years of peaks and troughs in his physical condition. In 1986, he had collapsed on a Scottish golf course and was rushed to London, where he had his gall bladder and a cancerous kidney removed. Either one of these operations, you’d hope, would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The London doctors told Packer he had better find something sporting to do, or he was a dead man walking.

Packer had a broad catalogue of sporting interests to investigate.

At various times, he’d fancied himself as a big-game hunter. Tony Greig told one story of Packer enticing him to the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Other Packer pals also told of raucous roo and pig-shooting trips in the Northern Territory and Kimberley.

He was certainly fond of, and very knowledgeable about firearms. He was said to keep a fair collection of guns at home in Bellevue Hill, and presumably wasn’t short of weapons on the rural property at Ellerston, 350km north of Sydney.

When it came to horses, though, Packer’s own daughter Gretel described him as a ‘complete softie’. He’d enjoyed an affinity with the animals since his childhood, and maintained a close relationship through his thoroughbred partnerships with property developer and fellow big punter, Lloyd Williams. Gretel told the Australian Women’s Weekly after her father’s passing, ‘Dad loved his horses and they