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 it farther than Australians playing each other. ‘Let’s get the world’s best cricketers to play Australia’s best.”

  A world series for cricket.

  With Lillee and Chappell doing the recruiting, Richie Benaud doing the schmoozing, and the base rate for players set at a staggering $25,000 per year for a three-year contract, the maverick series had signed up 35 of the world’s best players in complete secrecy before news of it finally escaped in May, 1977.

  Cue the sound of smashing brandy snifters. And the pffft! of a fuck-you Fanta.

  For many people, Australians included, their first real consciousness of Kerry Packer came via his appearance on The Frost Programme in the UK on 2 June 1977. Interviewer David Frost—who already knew Packer well—had pitted the cricket-promoting pariah against Sunday Times cricket writer Robin Marlar.

  It was the Aussie upstart versus the establishment toff. Packer, far from being coarse and bullying, was ice-cool and confident with his quips, while Marlar escalated to a spit-soaked fundamentalist. The interview ended with the audience cheering for cricket’s ‘super-test’ to go ahead.

  Naturally, many Brits saw it differently. ‘The circus may last a season or two—there are good reasons for thinking that it will be no longer than that—and it may do much harm to the game,’ sniffed Britain’s The Spectator on 10 June 1977.

  Packer’s poke at a world series would have to go all the way to England’s High Court. In September 1977, the attempt by the International Cricket Conference (aka ‘the establishment’) to ban Packer-aligned players from the game was defeated. The ICC’s tilt at Kerry Packer reportedly ended up costing $320,000.

  If anyone had thought rounding up (eventually) 51 of the world’s top cricketers would be Packer’s biggest challenge, there were still greater obstacles ahead.

  Packer’s ‘circus’ was frozen out from those cricket grounds administered by the Australian cricket authorities. It was forced to look at other sporting venues like Melbourne’s VFL Park where, compared with the manicured nuances of a cricket pitch, the surface was an Amazonian jungle.

  Expert horticulturalists were engaged to cultivate cricket pitches off-site in huge concrete trays, to be trucked into place. Even then, the final few metres of their journey would require steel plates to protect the surrounding grass from the weight of the vehicles.

  It was during an evening inspection of VFL Park, where footballers were training on the floodlit field, that Packer and Cornell hit on the idea of night cricket. Putting this into practice, however, would necessitate the design and construction of lighting towers for the other venues, including the Sydney Showground. Night cricket even meant changing the colour of the ball.

  With every brainstorm, cricket traditionalists bristled.

  It’s a matter of history that in its first season, World Series Cricket looked like it would crater. Packer had revealed during the High Court case that he had committed to investing $12 million into the game. Yet everyone could see, live on Packer TV, that the first matches were struggling to pull in a few thousand spectators each.

  The face of cricket was changing. The television coverage was in a different league, with cameras at both ends of the pitch, and eight cameras in total to relay unprecedented detail. So, too, the field microphones that were buried near the stumps, protected from the damp earth by being stuffed inside condoms.

  At the second Supertest, played at the Sydney Showground, David Hookes’s jaw was shattered by a ball from the West Indian bowler. Seeing the severity of the injury, Packer personally bundled Hookes into his Jaguar sedan and raced him the kilometre or so to St Vincent’s Hospital.

  Strangely, Hookes’ misfortune sent a powerful message to cricket fans: WSC wasn’t playing pretendies. Another consequence was that batsman’s helmets would soon become commonplace in cricket.

  In those countries where cricket is played, the argy-bargy continued over whether Packer signatories should be allowed on their national teams. The West Indies lifted its ban, then Pakistan, but England and Australia remained firmly opposed. The Australian WSC side was still forbidden from being called ‘Australia’.

  The turning point for WSC occurred at VFL Park in Melbourne in late January 1978, as the first season drew to a close. Its first night game, a limited (40-over) match between the Australians and the World side in December, had still only drawn a modest crowd of about 6500. But the concept of city commuters meeting their families after work to watch an evening of cricket became etched in the public’s minds.

  When the night game returned to VFL Park in January, almost four times as many spectators turned up. Similar turnouts over the following two nights’ play confirmed that World Series Cricket had indeed, to quote Cricketer magazine editor Eric Beecher, ‘turned on the lights’.

  There was no stopping WSC after that, especially with its weapon for the 1978–79 season: a television jingle turned sporting national anthem, C’mon Aussie c’mon. Its authors: Allan Johnston and the late Alan Morris, of Sydney agency Mojo.

  As World Series Cricket grew in spectacle, urgency and colour (with the ‘pyjama’ uniforms introduced in January 1979), its crowd figures rocketed. The Supertest final of the 1978–79 season, played under the Packer-prompted (and controversially, State-funded) lighting towers of the Sydney Cricket Ground, drew 40,000 spectators over three days.

  The ‘official’ Australia-versus-England Test was hosted at the very same venue just one week later. It attracted a crowd of just 22,000, over four days. Packer’s gut-punch to the ACB had truly hit home.

  And WSC wasn’t just great sport—it was spectacularly good television business. According to Nine’s annual report for 1978-79:

  ‘Cricket added one point each hour of broadcast towards Nine’s Australian content quota whilst drawing between half and three quarters of the available audience. Tests and One-Day Internationals have won their slots 99 per cent of the time. A mini-series that received similar ratings would cost around 80 times as much to produce and even a cheap “soap” costs some 16 times as much.’

  Outside of Packer’s orbit, it seemed, cricket was heading into a flat spin. Australia’s Test performances were suffering for the absence of the top-line players and crowd attendances at Tests were plummeting. With them went the ACB’s revenues, even in the face of increasing sponsorship from tobacco giant, Amatil.

  In the end, in May 1979—just two years after the cricket world first heard of Packer, the pariah—the warring sides agreed to a truce. What emerged in time for the 1979–80 cricket season was a sort of hybrid of the two factions, bringing together the players, marketing ploys, one-day and night-time matches and a vastly upgraded standard of television broadcasting of the game.

  On Packer’s Nine network, naturally. Live and exclusive.

  KP TO A TEE

  Before World Series Cricket came smashing through our television screens, Kerry Packer could have been just another Australian media mogul. He was by no means the top Aussie media tycoon on people’s minds at that time.

  Rupert Murdoch was making headlines in the US through the mid-1970s, snapping up the New York Post newspaper and the magazine group publisher of The Village Voice. In January 1977, Murdoch was cartooned on the cover of TIME, a kangaroo King Kong flogging papers from New York’s skyscrapers.

  Murdoch’s scale of operation would continue to outstrip Packer’s, but their paths would be quite similar. And the rival scions who had, between them, negotiated the $15 million sale of the Telegraph in the back seat of a car in 1972, were destined to butt heads almost a quarter of a century later—on a sporting field.

  Packer’s offloading of the Telegraph titles was a case of Kerry fixing his eye on the ball. He had never cared for newspapers; he read them with difficulty, if at all. In television, Packer could play to his strengths.

  Imagine making a career out of sitting in front of the telly, eating burgers, swigging one’s preferred beverage and watching sport—cricket, golf, footy, whatever. For Packer, television and sport wasn’t just a career, but a calling.

  In following it, he would make millions. And along the way, make Nine a weekend institution for sports fans, revolutionise an entire game and change live sports broadcasting forever.

  The tee shot occurred in 1975. In his own right, Packer was a more than capable golfer. At the Royal Sydney Golf Club, his name is listed as the winner of the 1965 Herbert Marks Trophy, and of the 1970 Royal Sydney Cup. At the time of the latter event, he played off a handicap of five. But he fell out with the Royal Sydney, in snooty Rose Bay, and took up at The Australian Golf Club, in slightly less salubrious Kensington, beneath the flight path of Sydney Airport.

  The Australian Open is said to be the second oldest golf championship in the world (after The Open Championship in Scotland). It was first played in 1904, predating the US Masters at Augusta by 30 years. The Australian Open changed venues each year to take in courses around the nation, but in 1975 it was to be played where it had all begun 71 years earlier, at The Australian in Sydney.

  Despite the jet-set image and the draw of golf’s ‘Big Three’—Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer—the Australian Open was in the rough. In 1975, it was in desperate need of a title sponsor. Packer pitched in $1 million in prize money, under the banner of The Bulletin, and proposed that the then-Australian Golf Union, owner of the event, grant him television rights for three years.

  But KP was already looking farther down the fairway. Jack Nicklaus had once referred to the Australian Open as the world’s fifth major, putting it in lofty company with the venerable British and the three big US tournaments. Packer believed that a permanent home, as the US Masters enjoyed with Augusta, would cement the Open’s prestige.

  The AGU had been founded in 1898 in Melbourne. It reeked of southern-city Establishment, and bristled at Packer’s Sydney-centric vision of the Open. But Packer tipped what was estimated as a further $2 million in the direction of Nicklaus, by then a budding course designer, to transform The Australian into a world-class course.

  Packer streamlined the way in which players were paid, proposing a one-size-fits all payment (reportedly $6000 a head), plus air fares, accommodation and Packer-sized hospitality. Several were billeted at Cairnton, Packer’s Bellevue Hill estate.

  KP may have had good reason to keep a close eye on the invoices. He’d already figured on losing money on the Open. But in the end, he and the Nine team would learn lessons in live broadcasting that later proved priceless.

  A network of buried cables, established during the wholesale redesign of the golf course, allowed for far more cameras than had been seen before; advertising and sponsorship opportunities expanded accordingly. With colour, drama and unprecedented detail, the telecast rated well. Nicklaus’ victory (on the course he had designed) generated plenty of international publicity.

  Indeed, Nicklaus would win three of the four Australian Opens played under Packer’s patronage (Australia’s David Graham foiled a hat-trick in 1977), after the original three-year deal was extended into 1978. For the duration, the AGU had shifted its headquarters to Sydney.

  All of that would change quickly after the 1978 tournament, when the AGU insisted on a return to a Melbourne course for 1979. Packer, contemplating the scale of his investment in The Australian, was understandably miffed.

  Packer had to walk away from the Australian Open, but he did not abandon The Australian Golf Club. Veteran golf writer Peter Stone, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, estimated that, over the years, Packer personally contributed some $18 million to the ongoing benefit of the course.

  Later it was reported that Kerry had also approached the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia with an offer of $1 million, to secure five years’ television and marketing rights for the Australian Open tennis. The LTAA eventually turned it down, but it was a line call.

  Many years after his WSC success, Packer would face one more major sporting stoush; a bodyline bowl at him, using the same world-series concept he had pioneered for cricket.

 

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