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

He had played pro-ams before—one, in Ohio in 1978, partnered with Jack Nicklaus, former president Gerald Ford and comedian Bob Hope—and the Pebble Beach event at least once before, in 1979, again with Nicklaus. For 1992 he would partner fellow Australian Greg Norman, at the time usually ranked among the top three in the world. The two had known each other from a meeting eight years earlier at The Australian golf club in Sydney.

Packer hadn’t been spending much time on golf, and he took the 1992 challenge seriously. In Sydney he had Ron Luxton, the long-serving pro at The Australian, help him tune up his swing. Then he flew in Mitchell Spearman, golf instructor from the hugely exclusive Lake Nona Country Club in Orlando, Florida. Spearman spent two weeks in Sydney giving private lessons.

Norman and Packer strode to victory by six shots, shooting a 42 under par. Packer, with his handicap, contributed 38 of their under-par shots. Their 246 remains the second-lowest winning score in Pebble Beach Pro-Am history.

But more than Packer’s playing, it was something that happened just prior to the game that had truly impressed Greg Norman. In the days after Packer’s death in 2005, Norman told the story to veteran Sydney Morning Herald golf writer, Peter Stone.

‘We walked onto the first tee to hit off and they had Kerry’s handicap down as 21. “Kerry, is that your handicap?” “No, it’s 18,” he replied. That’s the character of the man. Most amateurs would have said “I’ll take the 21,” saying, “Shit, OK, great, I’ll take the extra shots.” But Kerry, with his high morals and high ethics, said no and we won by six shots.

‘To see Kerry as happy as he was at the end of the day, that’s what life is about. Achieving that. Money doesn’t buy that stuff.’

After the match, the US-based Golf World asked Packer how it felt to win the event, compared with closing a big business deal. ‘This costs more,’ Packer quipped.

Greg Norman would soon become more entwined in Packer’s golfing life, as all—or certainly most—of Packer’s sporting dreams culminated in the haven he created for himself and his family at Ellerston.

Arguably the jewel of Ellerston is the golf course that Packer commissioned from Greg Norman, as he and then business partner Bob Harrison moved increasingly into golf course design. It hosted its first game in 2001.

Norman explained in The Bulletin’s tribute issue to Packer that the catalyst had been a strange theory put forward by the proprietor. ‘Kerry always had a belief that any golf course in the world could be played using a putter. It might take several hundred shots to get around, but he believed there was no course that could defy his putter theory. So he wanted one that could.’

Co-designer Harrison, who left Greg Norman Golf Course Design in 2009, explained the process to Planet Golf USA: ‘The first task was to work out where to put the golf course on a 75,000 acre property. The manager … wasn’t a golfer and thought that the best place for the course was probably on top of the extremely steep ridges. But there was a beautiful, fast-flowing stream in the valley below, where I thought the course should go—and much of it did—even though it meant moving the polo ponies to new pastures and building a number of extensive bridges to link the paddocks beside the creek.’

Harrison had also said that the course, which might see half a dozen rounds played on it each week, was designed for experienced players. ‘It was done specifically for the Packer family and they can hit the ball,’ he said.

The Great White Shark himself said: ‘At Ellerston we were able to create a course that a golfer of my calibre would love to play every day for the rest of his life.’

Greg Norman, who became a close friend of Packer’s, would have bittersweet memories of Ellerston, and the world-class golf course that they’d built together over many determined discussions.

‘My greatest regret,’ Norman told The Bulletin after his friend’s death, ‘is that we didn’t do it 20 years earlier, as I never got to play a round with him. When I played, he’d come around in the cart.’

9

PACKER’S TOYS

It was the late 1970s. The jungle drums of Sydney’s petrol-head scene rumbled with sightings of a mythical wild cat. It was low, loud, with the power of two Formula 1 cars and a muscled-up body that bulged rudely over tyres as fat as a tractor’s. One report, claiming to know the whereabouts of its lair, said the beast spat fire at anyone who went near it.

For all that, the beast was only as mysterious and fearsome as its rumoured owner: Packer.

The man behind the world’s most expensive, powerful, unreliable and inflammable Jaguar XJ-S was Kevin Bartlett. A multiple Australian motor racing champion and engineer, Bartlett was a versatile and aggressive charger in single-seat formula machines and touring cars, both here and abroad.

According to a story related in Christopher Lee’s Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, Packer may have succumbed to the XJS’s Rubenesque charms while in London during the September, 1977 High Court case against his World Series Cricket. Packer and his controversial WSC signatory, Tony Greig visited a Jaguar showroom to look at the car.

Packer asked the salesman about the colour availability. On being told there were five hues from which to choose, Packer ordered one of each, and distributed four of them among his favoured executives.

Jaguar had launched the XJ-S in 1975, as the replacement for its fabled E-Type. Jaguar’s V12 engine produced a reasonable 220 kilowatts (295 horsepower), but the XJ-S’s size, weight and thirst relegated it to the role of a posh boulevardier aimed at the American market.

Packer suggested that Bartlett might do something to make his XJ-S go faster. Bartlett, who raced hairy-chested, 375kW (500 horsepower) Formula 5000s around the world, reasoned that if this was worth doing, it