Opinion: Craig Heatley - one of the most important people in NZ sport during past 30 years

Craig Heatley has been an influential man in New Zealand sport. Photo / File

He probably doesn't realise it, or think much about it, but Craig Heatley has been one of the most important people in New Zealand sport during the past three decades.

The multi-millionaire Rich Lister is often mentioned in the business pages but his dealings in rugby during the mid 1990s changed the way we watch the sport, and bedded in the professional game in this country.

The story of what he did back then is outlined in the new biography No Limits by Joanne Black.

Just before the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in Johannesburg (when rugby was still nominally an amateur game), News Corp, the multinational media organisation controlled by Rupert Murdoch, paid a staggering US$555 million ($816m) for the right to broadcast all international and representative rugby in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa for 10 years. It was the beginning of SANZAR.

But at the time News Corp owned no TV network in New Zealand so had to off load its investment here to either TVNZ, TV3 or Sky.

Already immensely wealthy through his Rainbow Corporation of the 1980s, Heatley was the driving force and major funder of the then fledgling Sky TV. But by 1995, five years after first going on air, the pay TV company still wasn't profitable.

Heatley recognised that live sport, and especially rugby, would be the key to Sky TV's survival and future success as a business.

It was Heatley who went to London and negotiated with Sam Chisholm, the New Zealander then Murdoch's right hand man. They agreed that Sky pay News Corp $20m for exclusive live coverage of all rugby in New Zealand for the next 10 years, $5 million of which was to be paid in the first three years of the deal.

But New Zealand rugby fans would now have to pay to watch rugby on TV, a prospect that horrified both rugby supporters - and the politicians they voted for.

So under implied pressure from then Prime Minister Jim Bolger, Heatley and Sky on-sold delayed coverage for the next three years to TVNZ for $5m - recouping the investment straight away!

The upshot was, that from 1996, there was more rugby on TV - both pay and free to air - than there'd ever been before, the game became professional and rugby was never the same again.

Heatley's deal in 1995 saved Sky TV from oblivion, but it also laid the foundation for rugby as we know it today.

These days well removed from Sky and rugby, Heatley can claim to be the most influential New Zealander in golf. A strong single figure handicap player himself, he was invited to join the game's most exclusive club, Augusta National, in 2003.

His legendary networking and negotiating skills were quickly recognised there too, and he now chairs the club's media committee. That means he's on the "sell" side of the TV deals, decrees who gets the much sought after media accreditations for the Masters each April and chairs press conferences with some of the most famous golfers in the world, most notably Tiger Woods in 2010 after the sex scandal.

Craig Heatley's contributions to sport are seldom mentioned in his business dealings. They should be. He's been a key player.