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

in the new, digital television technology. He was early into the pay-TV game in a joint venture with Optus Vision, while Rupert Murdoch would team with Telstra. In 1998, Packer would acquire 25 per cent of Murdoch’s Foxtel in the fallout from Super League.

Also in 1998, Nine embraced the worldwide web, buddying up with software giant Microsoft to establish Ninemsn and buy itself some time trying to figure out how to make money from the internet. Just like everyone, including Ninemsn, is still trying to figure it out.

Close observers of the television industry insist that Packer’s failing health and his death in December 2005 was the end of a golden era for Nine. Such a view was certainly reflected in the station’s ratings, and in the publicly embarrassing ructions among high-profile staff that regularly reached mainstream news.

To quote approximately everyone: That wouldn’t have happened if Kerry were still in the chair.

WORLD SERIES CRICKET

In the mid-1970s, Australian cricket was bowling up a high-speed catwalk of tousle-haired wild boys, oozing larrikin humour and hard-playing, hairy-chested sex appeal. The one thing they couldn’t compete with was the national average wage. These were world-class athletes, yet none could afford to do it professionally.

The dynamic between the players and the sport’s governors, the Australian Cricket Board (ACB), was well illustrated in 1974 when the players made a request for higher pay. The ACB responded with a stern reminder that it, the ACB, was bestowing upon them the honour of representing their country. If the players didn’t like it, there were hundreds in line behind them.

Meanwhile, cricket itself was in danger of losing relevance to a generation of younger television viewers. To all but the converted, it was of only small consolation that, from 1975, about 80 per cent of the evident action in a test cricket telecast—the photosynthesis of lawn—was now occurring in colour.

Emboldened by his breakthrough marketing and broadcasting of the Australian Open Golf tournament in 1975, Packer set his sights on cricket. He would re-package the game’s energy and appeal for the era of colour television, and ensure that the players earned a living more appropriate to their status as national heroes.

From the very introduction of television to Australia in 1956, televising of the game had been effectively a gentleman’s-club agreement between the ACB and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The cricket authorities used the television-rights income to feed back into the game at all its amateur levels. The ABC cultivated its cardigan-collecting cricket audience with a practical monopoly on televising the game. The ABC’s rights were non-exclusive, but every other network knew that it faced a national broadcaster that did not need to interrupt its programming with commercials.

Packer’s initial play was straightforward enough. In early 1976, he approached the cricket board with a bid for exclusive broadcast rights for the national Sheffield Shield and international Test cricket matches. At a Melbourne meeting in June, Packer offered $1.5 million over three years.

The ACB’s weak response was that, oh dear, he was too late; they’d made a verbal (if not contractual) agreement with the ABC, and in any event, exclusive rights just weren’t on.

Packer knew that the ABC offer, at $207,000 for three years, should have been obliterated. He sensed mere muleheadedness. Plenty have speculated that the ACB’s response inflamed the Packer anti-establishment gene.

Packer, famously, suggested that all in the room shared an even more deeply-rooted gene; one dating back to the most ancient profession. ACB negotiator Ray Steel remembers the line as: ‘We’re all harlots, how much do you want?’).

But Kerry Packer got no play from the game’s governors. The meeting was dismissed, Packer left wondering why the hell these men—with the full knowledge of his intentions—had made him bother to fly down to Melbourne in the first place.

Unbeknown to Packer, at around that very time, the spark for his revenge was being fanned beneath an ill-fitting surf life-saver’s cap. John Cornell was a former producer on A Current Affair. Cornell was now managing the stellar career of his comedian mate Paul Hogan, and doubling as Hoges’ dim-witted sidekick, Strop. In early 1976, Cornell was approached by friend and former Perth footballer Austin ‘Ocker’ Robertson to manage fellow Perth sportsman, cricketer Dennis Lillee.

In Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, Cornell recalled asking Lillee for a list of his earnings. For nine months of playing cricket, the moustachioed sex symbol had trousered less than $9000. He made most of his living selling cars for a Perth dealership.

Cornell was astonished. ‘I can get [$9000] for two nights’ entertainment from Hoges,’ he thought. ‘The players [are] getting ripped off.’

The figures proved that they were. Back in August 1975, witnessing escalating sponsorship from tobacco giant Amatil, Australia’s outspoken captain Ian Chappell had met with cricket authorities in Sydney and again put forward the case for a pay rise.

Gideon Haigh’s The Cricket War: The Inside Story of Kerry Packer’s World Series revealed that, up to this point, the Australia players had received $200 to play a Test match, plus $50 expenses and $35 for meals away from home. Chappell’s initiative had at least resulted in these sums being roughly doubled for the 1975–76 season.

Cornell and Hogan, under their banner JP Productions, formulated the idea of special, made-for-TV exhibition matches to generate some extra income for the players outside their Shield and Test calendar. Lillee—and in short order, the recently retired Ian Chappell—assured them the idea would be a hit with the players.

But both also insisted that the ACB should be left well out of it.

What Cornell needed was a television proprietor. As a bonus, he found one with a fresh chip on his shoulder the size of the Australian Cricket Board.

The serendipity was not lost on the Big Fella. Neither was the already brilliant Cornell-Hogan hatching beyond immediate improvement. Packer proposed that they take