Chris Rattue: Packer hits sports codes for six

As the story goes, the thunderbolts Kerry Packer was about to launch on the cricketing world were delivered on a slow news day in England in May 1977.

Rain had rubbed out a day's play for the touring Australians and famed British sportswriter Ian Wooldridge decided to follow up rumours of a rebel cricket movement by phoning Richie Benaud.

Former Australian captain Benaud, the key adviser to Packer, at first denied any knowledge but, having gained Packer's consent, spilled the beans. The World Cricket Series news was out.

The story revealed 15 of the game's top players who had signed to what became known as the cricket "circus", a short-lived venture that would change the game - for the good - forever.

Rugby and league would also end up playing with a whole new stack of chips delivered by the man who was a casino legend, as he locked horns with his Aussie rival Rupert Murdoch.

In the nearly three decades since world series cricket, it is difficult to think of anyone who has had a greater influence on the major sporting codes in this part of the world.

Kerry Packer died on Monday, on what might have been another relatively slow holiday sports news day, save for the relentless barbs between the South African and Australian cricket teams.

But in between, the media and television mogul has been a walking sports headline.

Packer, whose first sporting love was polo, will test the obituary writers. It will be a problem of luxury, however - like the most fortunate of selectors, they will have to decide what to leave out.

The yarns will invariably include his legendary three-day card gambling splurge in Las Vegas, which lost him around $35m, and the time he paid off the house mortgage for a down-on-her-luck waitress.

And then there was his late 1980s business deal, in which he sold television channels to Alan Bond for A$1 billion ($1.08 billion) then bought them back for a song.

But Packer's foray into cricket has been partly seen as an act of compassion for the game, as well as a business move by Channel Nine to secure the television broadcasting rights denied to it by the Australian Cricket Board.

Packer brought showbiz and marketing to the one-day game, which has proved to be cricket's lifeblood.

While at the time much of the establishment thought Packer was contemptible, some of this revolution was hardly head-spinning in hindsight.

For instance: it is hard to believe that cricket was once covered by television with a camera at only one end of the ground. Packer decreed that he no longer wanted to see the batsmen's bums.

From floodlighting, coloured clothing, to camera angles and players' wages, Packer turned cricket around and ended up with the one-day TV rights he so desperately wanted.

Everywhere you look, cricket runs on the Packer legacy, including in the test arena, where the Australian team's influence has consigned the boring approach to the trash bin where it belongs.

Packer's "circus" gave cricketers added bargaining power, and this theme was repeated in a bigger dose in the mid 1990s in rugby and league.

If Packer was a cricket rebel, then he was cast as the establishment man in the mid-1990s league war when Murdoch's News Corp launched a bid to take over the game.

League players were ripe for the picking. One complaint among the top Australians was the loose change they got for playing in the high-profile State of Origin series. At the heart of the matter was Packer's cosy TV deal with the Australian Rugby League, which did not attempt to maximise what the players might earn.

It was game on as the two sides went head to head for players, clubs, states and indeed countries. Murdoch's Super League snapped up the New Zealand Rugby League with the sort of haste Joe Public uses for buying an ice cream.

Books can be filled with the yarns that emerged from this fight. The Warriors' English forward Denis Betts was famously said to have held telephones to each ear, as the two sides pleaded for his services. Betts scooped up over $700,000 a year.

And among the other claims was one that the money scramble was so out of control that Super League got two Warriors forwards mixed up and gave them the wrong money.

It wasn't just league that was swept up.

In an effort to counter Murdoch, Packer deemed league to be sport with little potential beyond the backyard of New South Wales, and turned to rugby.

He backed the World Rugby Corporation, a supposedly pie-in-the-sky operation which came far closer than most could believe in setting up an international rugby troupe, including most of the top All Blacks.

Lawyer and All Black Eric Rush was roaring around New Zealand getting signatures and promises for the WRC.

Former All Black captain Jock Hobbs led the NZRU fightback. The mass of All Blacks who did sign for the WRC did so only after a visit to the house of a leading Packer employee, the first proof to them that Packer was on board.

As journalist and former Wallaby Peter FitzSimons wrote in his brilliant 1996 book The Rugby War, the Packer name was pivotal to forcing the rugby establishment to adopt professionalism. "It was marvellous, incidentally, what just the mention of the Packer name could do at all levels of the saga," FitzSimons wrote.

As FitzSimons wrote it, Packer's company paid out $4 million for the option to buy a majority share in WRC.

The Springboks proved the major stumbling block for Packer, and the establishment prevailed. Murdoch forked out US$555 million in the initial 10-year deal in the Southern Hemisphere which ended shamateurism and brought rugby into the real world.

So what of Packer's effect on these sports?

The lingering question during the Super League fiasco was this: if Packer had all that money to fling about when Murdoch rode into town, why hadn't some of it been made available before. Disgruntled and under-valued players might have stayed loyal to the ARL, thus avoiding the ugly and costly war which alienated many fans who were disgusted by the way a sport they loved was tossed about in the money dealings.

And neither of the Packer schemes, in rugby or cricket, lasted remotely as long as the influence they wielded.

In league, the Packer/ARL TV arrangement prepared dangerously fertile ground for a damaging battle that alienated the audience. Much of the character of the game seemed to disappear in those cynical times of lies and money grubbing.

There were genuine signs of a revival this year, led by the innovative underdogs Wests Tigers. And time heals the wounds, although the subtle after-effects may linger longer than anyone cares to admit.

League would have been far better served by a more orderly march forward.

International league, which was already ailing, certainly took a further major blow because the Super League battle left the impression that players were representing corporations, rather than countries.

The villain in rugby was the international board and its ridiculous clinging to amateur ways. Packer didn't back the WRC boots-and-all to the point of splitting the game. It was only a matter of time anyway before the snobbish IRB walls were torn down.

Rugby got what it deserved and probably needed with the WRC's mysterious attempted takeover, which forced in open professionalism but with a haste that has not always treated the game well.

In cricket, his explosive influence has held and expanded the audience by livening up the action, removing over-cautious ways on and off the field.

Kerry Packer was a gambler with such immense wealth that he could play and enjoy life in the carefree style of an olden days tycoon. His most favourable sporting epitaph, by far, is that he was able to inspire a new world of cricket with this devilment and swagger.