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

could not dominate. But in his early learning, further hindered by his medical isolation and subsequent relocation to Canberra, Packer himself seemed to have accepted his father’s assessment of him as a ‘boofhead’.

He bounced back physically, as he explained in his 1977 interview with journalist Terry Lane.

‘I was academically stupid and my way of surviving through school was sport. I used to play everything. I was never a great natural talent, but I worked hard at all the sports that I played and I became reasonably competent at all of them.’

At Geelong Grammar he acquitted himself more than adequately in a variety of sports and continued to spend enough time on the golf course that, in his early thirties, he played off a handicap of five.

In 1974, however, when at age 36 he inherited the multiheaded media business from his father, exercise and physical fitness began to take a back seat to the instant gratification of burgers, cream buns and lung-burners.

There were stories of Packer looking for instant fixes to his bad habits, investigating miracle diets and stop-smoking methods, including hypnosis. Around a decade and a half would pass before Australia’s richest man began to comprehend that he could not simply pay someone to do what he would have to do for himself.

Packer’s first major, publicised health scare in adulthood occurred in 1983, when he collapsed at The Australian golf course. It has been variously reported as an angina attack and a full-blown heart attack. He was taken to St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, in Sydney’s inner-east, run by the Sisters of Charity.

For the Sisters, surgeons and staff, it would be the beginning of a long, often loud, challenging and wonderful relationship, the benefits of which would extend well beyond the parties directly involved.

In May 1986, Packer was again on the golf course, this time at Gleneagles in Scotland, when he collapsed and was rushed to hospital in London. There, he underwent operations for the removal of a cancerous kidney and diseased gall bladder. The urging of his doctors, plus the financial freedom provided by Alan Bond less than 12 months later, prompted a Packer-sized embrace of polo.

For the next three years he trained quite hard, lost weight and made some more, fairly credible attempts to give up smoking.

Then, in October 1990, while playing for his Ellerston White team in the semi-finals of the Australian Open Polo Championship at Sydney’s Warwick Farm racecourse, Packer suffered a massive heart attack that left him clinically dead for around seven minutes.

It’s part of Packer legend that what was needed to save his life was a defibrillator; that only around 40 of NSW’s 800-plus ambulances were equipped with one; and that one such ambulance, one of only 12 on duty for the entire Sydney metro area that day, happened to be driving past Warwick Farm during those critical few minutes.

Astonishingly, within three days of being dead, Packer was popping back into his Park Street office to keep an eye on the shop. The following weekend, he was back watching the polo. A week after that, Packer underwent bypass surgery, under Dr Victor Chang at St Vincent’s.

KP was 53 years old—the same age his mother had been when she died of heart failure in New York, where she had flown for heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic. Kerry’s grandfather, RC Packer, had been just one year older when he died in 1934, also of heart failure. Kerry’s father, Sir Frank, had made it to 67 before heart failure and pneumonia claimed him.

KP had no obvious reason to be confident of a long life.

In September 1995, Packer suffered another suspected heart attack, collapsing at the Hakoah Club in Sydney. In July 1998, with his private McDonnell-Douglas DC-8 (a converted passenger jet) fitted out with medical equipment and staff, he flew to New York for another bout of bypass surgery.

It came in the middle of an Australian Broadcasting Authority enquiry into cross-media ownership. Arriving at the Cornell Medical Centre in New York, Packer checked in as ‘James Fairfax, no fixed abode’. James Fairfax was the former chairman of the rival Fairfax publishing group.

The following year, Packer was in Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital having more surgery to clear his arteries. By now, despite other angioplasty surgeries to clear his kidney arteries, his remaining kidney was beginning to fail. His helicopter pilot and friend Nick Ross acknowledged, ‘[Packer] has had a rough bloody track medically all his life. Hasn’t had a great deal of quality living in the last seven years. I wanted to help him, so I did.’

Ross’ help was to donate one of his kidneys to his boss, a gesture that naturally touched Packer profoundly. The transplant was life-saving, but required ongoing therapy with anti-rejection drugs and steroids. One of the side-effects—were it miraculously not already present—was severe diabetes, which ignites another downward spiral.

Diabetes introduces a hardening of the arteries and associated heart problems. In 2002, some measure of how far medical technology had advanced lay in Packer’s being implanted with a defibrillator. A dozen years earlier, Packer’s whacker had arrived in a NSW Ambulance; this one was about the size of a matchbox. The unit had to be replaced after about 18 months, obviously in another surgical procedure.

In his last few years, Packer was often accompanied by a medical team equipped for any emergency. While he had shown a lifelong stoicism where medical matters were concerned, eventually the drugs, the hospitalisations, the gradual removal of the freedoms that made his life worth living, would culminate in a very logical decision to let the whole business wind down.

FANTA AND FINGER BUNS

Australians were always oddly fascinated by Kerry Packer’s predilection for junk food. Here was Australia’s wealthiest man, able to indulge a diet worthy of a James Bond villain, choosing instead to gorge on working-class grub.

For Packer, just possibly,