Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl

Author:Michael Stahl [Stahl, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2015-02-16T22:00:00+00:00

7

THE TURF

According to his daughter Gretel, Kerry Packer was ‘a complete softie when it came to horses.’ Packer had an intuitive understanding of the beasts, even if ideas on equine nutrition may have been influenced by his own: when KP was at Ellerston, the finely-tuned, four-legged athletes would feast on packets of Nice biscuits.

The passion for ponies naturally included the punt. Between casino blitzes in Las Vegas and London, the turf provided Packer with instant gambling gratification to stave off his bouts of boredom.

He kept a large stable of polo ponies—and a stable of large polo ponies—but he also owned or co-owned several top-flight racehorses over the years. That’s despite what his footy mate, legendary South Sydney supremo George Piggins recalled Packer once telling him over a quiet dinner: ‘Anyone owning a football team or a racehorse is mad.’

Packer, of course, owned both (he financially backed the East Sydney rugby league club), but as Piggins explained years later, ‘Kerry was interested in sport and he put his money where his mouth was.’

One of the great racehorses of the mid-1990s was Mahogany. Packer jointly owned the thoroughbred with his great punting mate, property developer Lloyd Williams. Fathered in 1990 by a stallion named (appropriately) Last Tycoon, Mahogany racked up at least eight major victories and around $3.7 million in prize money.

Sounds like a good investment. But Packer had offered some proof of the profligacy of thoroughbred ownership in a conversation with writer Les Carlyon, who quoted Packer in The Bulletin.

‘Now you take my best year—the year when Mahogany won all those derbies and was made horse of the year and all that,’ Packer said, referring to the 1993-94 season. ‘You’d reckon if you had a horse as good as him you’d be a mile in front, wouldn’t you? Well, when I totted up the running costs on the rest of my racehorses, I was out two million bucks for the year.’

Carlyon reported that Packer, in telling the story, burst out laughing.

But it was Packer’s huge, sporadic spends from outside the rails that equally caught the attention of the turf fraternity. In the betting rings at Australia’s racecourses, where his wagers reached Vegaspheric heights during the 1980s-90s, the bookies knew him as ‘Buckets’.

As always, Packer knew what he was doing, and he was doing it to win. Since the 1970s, he’d cultivated friendships with jockeys. He got his race tips almost from the horse’s mouth. Jockey Greg ‘The G’ Hall, who often rode for Packer and Williams, told Patrick Carlyon in The Bulletin of a conversation with Packer immediately prior to Mahogany’s storming run in the 1993 Victoria Derby.

‘Hey, Greggie, do you think this horse will win or not?’ Packer had asked.

‘Yep. How much you had on it, KP?’

‘$600,000-odd.’

‘It will win by a minute.’

Packer raced off and put another million on it.

Many of his reported splurges naturally involved his own horses. But some didn’t, as Hall explained of his win six years earlier in the 1987 Sydney Cup, on a Packer/Williams chestnut named Major Drive.

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