Kerry Packer was a tough frontline corporate trench fighter who, like Ernest Hemmingway, would have preferred to write his own obituary. A pity neither had the chance. Meeting him twice during World Cup ’92 explained much of his aggressiveness and down to earth assertive frankness. He could be rude and crude; maybe deliberately, to test your ability to take the pressure. As the first meeting was less than a minute (and involved some four-letter words), you didn’t think he would remember the second time around. ‘‘Nice to see a short, bald, skinny Kiwi can stand up to a few (backhanded) compliments’’ were words passed on during the second meeting in Sydney. There is, though, a certain irony in Australian Cricket linking Sir Donald Bradman and Packer as the nation’s most famous citizens of the last century. Both smart operators, each barely had time for the other. Yet the modern game could not have done without either. One a tough administrator, tight-fisted with Australian Cricket Board funds. The other a much younger, hard-nosed businessman, eager to push cricket as a product and take it to the people. Packer saw his bid for TV rights as a business deal; it was where the game needed fresh ideas and marketing ploys. Thirty years ago, Packer had a modern vision for the game designed to turn it into trendy entertainment. It was an image that the conservative-minded elite establishment could neither understand nor perceive and appreciate. To Bradman and the ACB, it was all too brash and commercial. They feared losing control of the game and the purse strings. This was where Bradman’s business sense lost its edge and the plot. His view was that it was an amateur game and run accordingly. It was where Packer, repeatedly thwarted by the ACB to secure the TV rights to show Test and the burgeoning shorter version on his Channel 9, took up the challenge. It wasn’t a case of joining the establishment but creating a new one and thumbing his corporate nose at the fusty-minded men running the show. If this may seem like the BCCI, then understand Packer’s frustration at the ACB’s (Bradman’s) obfuscation. If the outcome of the 1977 Packer World Series Cricket court case in London is examined purely on legal and ethical grounds as it unfolded, and not in hindsight, it could be seen how the establishment cronyism of Australia, England and the ICC was reminded of their role as guardians of the sport. To them it was all about egoism and elitism. Well, that is how some of us saw it at the time. Don’t forget that 1977 was still the time when the Marylebone Cricket Club switched hats to become the ICC; they had the same president and secretariat and South Asian nations as well as the West Indies partly fell into line. Dissenting voices came from Abdul Hafeez Kardar, the former Indian all-rounder and Pakistan’s first captain. Tired of the game being run as the old boys club from Lord’s, he had wanted a change in constitution and a move of headquarters to the subcontinent. This was about the time Packer’s challenge to the stuffy pink gin brigade at Lord’s jolted them out of their comfort zone. Cricket may be seen by some as a quintessential English game exported to the former colonies but those playing it in far corners of the old empire had to be allowed to administer it without central influence (by hierarchy control at Lord’s). If players were legally contracted who were the then TCCB/ICC to demand a retraction and ban players? In 1975, the ACB coffers were overflowing, they had banked a massive A$78,000 from the 1975 England tour and even bigger takings from the 1975/76 Windies tour of Oz. From this players earned something that amounted to between A$180 to $240 a week. Barely enough, in some cases, to cover expenses. By the end of 1975 the Australian players’ Test income, or lack of it, created dissension; not all had other jobs that paid them while playing home or on tour. With the Chappell brothers losing faith in the ACB (Bradman) way of running things, they took the Packer deal along with others. Bradman may have lost the battle with Packer over WSC, but he gained a small reward in another way. In 1996, Packer paid him a personal visit to persuade The Don to appear on his Channel 9 programme. Bradman could have anything he wanted for the one-off programme. The deal was A$1.2 million for the Bradman Museum in Bowral. Both men have gone. Both great in their own way; yet it is Packer’s professional legacy that many remember for the way it revolutionised the game’s administration.
