Kerry Packer carks it

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
not to mention gamblers - this is the first story I heard about him
(as told by the Beeb - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/cricket/1967964.stm)

But it is as a personality - a very rich one - that Packer will be remembered.

Uncomfortable with the attention a stranger was receiving from a waitress at a casino, Packer turned to the gentleman and asked why his presence was causing such a stir.

"I'm worth US$100 million," bragged the oilman.

" Really. $100 million?" said Packer, pretending to be impressed.

"Yes I am sir," grinned the oilman.

"I'll toss you for it," Packer replied.

The oilman walked away.
 

geto.blast

snap on rims
man aussies are tough :

"His most brutal moment probably came in 1962, when he was sent by his father, with a few mates, to rough up the owner of a Sydney publishing house who was refusing to sell. He was busy trashing the office when Rupert Murdoch, also with a few mates, turned up to fight him."

"Life was one big gamble, and a massive heart attack in 1990 had convinced him that “fucking nothing” lay on the other side."

http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5354247
 
Freud, Biography and Kerry Packer

Today a tribute to Kerry Packer was held in the Sydney Opera House some 50 days after his passing. Freud said only one thing about biography in his 28 volumes of writings and it was that it is impossible to really know a man. WIN TV presented the good side last night(16/2/06-8:30 pm)...others at this site present another side. Here is a piece I wrote today. :cool:
______________________________________________
In life most of us try to connect the big picture and what happens there with our life, our little picture. The juxtaposition is one of the key ways we all have of integrating our lives into some kind of meaningful whole. Here is one more effort written some 50 days after the passing of a legend, one, Kerry Packer, age 68.


PERHAPS, KERRY, PERHAPS

Kerry Packer lived through the first 68 years of the Baha’i teaching Plan(1937-2005). His independent business life began in 1974, the year I worked at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education as a senior tutor in human relations, the first human relations program at a CAE in Australia. I had been in Australia just over two years at that time. In 1974 Packer inherited 100 million dollars when his father Frank Packer died. Kerry Packer may be best known in Australia for founding World Series Cricket in 1977. That was the same year my son, my only child, was born and, although I don’t remember much about the cricket for I was always stuck on baseball, a simpler game I have always thought. I do remember my son’s birth. One of Kerry Packer’s first and unflattering appearances in the media was in 1962. That was the year my own pioneering life began in Canada as part of the Baha’i community.

I must say I knew little of the man when he died because most of my life I have taken little interest in corporate finance, ownership of the media and celebrity in general, especially who was rich and by how much. Packer’s personal interests in gambling, in sport, in business and finance and, of course, his own family, held little to no interest to me. When I saw the profile of Kerry Packer on WIN TV this evening, though, I found most of the information about his life interesting and revealing.

At age 8 he had a severe bout of poliomyelitis. I, too, suffered when young from some pathoanatomical knee problem whose name I can not now recall. Packer’s life began eight months after the start of the first Baha’i teaching Plan which began in April 1937. For me, it is the curious juxtaposition between Packer’s life, my life and the life of the Australian Baha’i community that has led to this prose-poem. –Ron Price with thanks to WIN TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. 16 February 2006, “The Big Fella: The Extraordinary Life of Kerry Packer.”

You certainly seemed to be
a man of energy, very human,
very kind, honest, calling a
spade a spade, as they say.

I’m not sure how much a doco
of 60 minutes tells the story
of a man’s life. I guess it makes
a start, gives a few angles,
creates an impression of sorts.

A gift for ordinary conversation,
meeting-the-man, not the retiring
quiet sort of chap if you know what
I mean, made connections easily,
could easily be one of the boys.

Kerry, you had no belief in a life
to come but, perhaps, your stone
cold body was a sign that all your
life could not be gone and only one
place seemed likely: that Country,
the Undiscovered One, that Shelley
called It and where you now may be.

Perhaps you will now have
a new language with a 1000
conjugations for the word love,
where laughter will be spelled
in capitals and sadness will grow
obsolete. I trust food and affection
will be yours for that wink of yours
and, perhaps, light will say all that
needs to be said. Perhaps, Kerry,
perhaps!

Ron Price
February 17th 2006.
 
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