Link: http://sport.independent.co.uk/cricket/article335900.ece

The recent death of Kerry Packer created some interesting obituaries. Packer was a one-of-a-kind business figure. He was the son of Frank Packer, an aggressive, take-no-prisoners Australian newspaper and magazine owner. Kerry, being the second son, was not even expected to take over the businesses, but his elder brother Clyde Packer fell out with their father and ultimately moved to live in the US. This left Kerry Packer to take over the business once Frank Packer retired.
And history will show that Kerry Packer, despite a rather robust business approach and an occasional public charm deficit, did very well in business. Many of his deals were exceptionally shrewd, none more so than the deal he did to sell his Channel 9 empire to fellow Australian tycoon Alan Bond. Less than 5 years later he was able to buy back the whole business for less than a quarter of what he sold it for when Bond, whose grasp of PR was not matched by his ability to finance and run a business empire, was forced into an asset fire-sale to stave off bankruptcy.
However, in the UK, Kerry Packer's name was often used in vain in the 1970's, because of World Series Cricket.
The backdrop to World Series Cricket was the fact that at the time, leading cricket players were little more than indentured servants in most of their home countries. They played in the Summer for regional or county sides that paid them little more than the salary of a middle-ranking white-collar manager. In return, they were tied to long contracts that could be terminated at any time. Some of the top players could supplement their earnings by commercial endorsements for cricket equipment such as bats, pads, caps and clothing. However, the sums earned were still relatively paltry.
In England, the the poor salaries paid to county cricketers were partially offset by what was known as a "Benefit Season". Each year, one long-serving player for a county would be permitted to organize fund-raising events throughout the season, the profits of which would be given to him at the end of the year. For a player approaching the end of his career, the benefit season became one of the main ways in which he could move on to the next phase in his life with at least some money in the bank. However, there was always an undercurrent of charity associated with the practice. Lost in the enthusiasm for Fred's benefit season was the answer to the question "why are we having to do this for Fred? Why isn't he paid properly?"
A few top cricketers who were playing for their country could look forward to year-round employment, since their country would usually be touring overseas in their Winter. For the rest of the players in a country, Winter was a time when you either took another job, went overseas to play or coach, or collected unemployment benefit. I was amazed to watch an interview in the early 1970's with Alan Knott, who at the time was regarded by many people as the best wicketkeeper in the world. In the interview, Knott explained that if England were not touring, he would sign on for unemployment in the winter in the UK. He had no other work and no other source of income.
All of this treatment of the players was sympomatic of a more fundamental fact that the sport was poorly managed worldwide. Television broadcast rights, which are one of the main revenue streams for most professional sports, were, at the time, captive to monopoly host broadcasters and were sold for next to no money. As a result, there was relatively little money coming into the game. The players were getting a low percentage of that money, but the overall revenues across the world were shockingly low for a sport whose regular viewer numbers could reach the tens of millions in the UK for the Ashes series between England and Australia.
The early 70's also saw the appearance of a new breed of cricketer in Australia and England. The new cricketers were impatient at what they saw as the amateurish way that the game was run, and they hung out with other professional athletes enough to know just how badly most cricketers were paid by comparison with other professional sports.
This was also a time when many talented cricketers in South Africa were denied an opportunity to perform on a world stage (with the resulting increase in their incomes) because of the ban on South Africa imposed after 1969 due to apartheid. Because of the international ban, a number of emerging South African-born players utilized nationality and eligibility loopholes to play overseas and become eligible to play for other countries. One of the leading "expatriate" South Africans was Tony Greig. Although born and brought up in South Africa, his part-English ancestry allowed him to claim eligibility to play for England. He subsequently became the England captain, but his working relationship with many of the leading figures in English cricket was poor. Greig regarded many of them as amateurish has-beens, and probably did not do a very good job of hiding his contempt.
The situation in England was parallelled in Australia, where a new breed of cricketer (led by the Chappell brothers, and including the fearsome fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson) had emerged in the early 70's. These players were a new breed - they were buccaneering, hard-living types with no patience for what they saw as stuffy ceremony and antiquated management approaches.
Enter, stage left, Kerry Packer. Packer saw an opportunity to re-cast the game of cricket. His vision for cricket was an exciting sport, based on one-day matches (not the 3 and 5-day games that still dominated the sport), and utilizing modern television production techniques including instant replay, and more camera angles.
Since he owned the Channel 9 network in Australia, Packer had a ready-made TV platform. He started out by playing the game the way it was currently played, by bidding for the rights to show Australia's international cricket matches. When his bid was summarily rejected in favour of a much lower bid by the incumbent Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Packer concluded (probably correctly) that he was not being taken seriously. At that point, it was "game on".
Packer proceeded to act dramatically by doing something that at the time seemed impossibly audacious. He simply set up his own cricket series. He won over a significant number of the world's leading cricket players very quickly by offering them something that most of them were not getting at the time; guaranteed contracts for proper salaries.
In England, Tony Greig was instrumental in persuading a number of England's best players to join the series. The South African players were also able to take part, since the international ban did not apply as far as Kerry Packer was concerned. He simply wanted high-quality cricket teams, and the more top players the better. The format was Australia vs. The Rest Of the World.
Predictably, the reaction of the international cricket authorities was to circle the wagons. In the UK, the TCCB announced that it would ban WSC players from playing for England for 3 years after the series ended, and even announced that it would ban World Series Cricket players from county cricket, which would have forced many players to permanently live and play overseas. This proposed county cricket ban was swiftly dropped after it was ruled in court to be an illegal restraint of trade. However, there was a lot of bitterness in the UK about WSC, and since the series took place on the other side of the world, and was not televised in the UK, people in England had little knowledge of what was actually happening. As far as many cricket fans were concerned, the players had "sold out" to the God of Commerce, and they could go hang. Many of the English WSC players did not help their image, particularly in the UK, by being defensive and unwilling to discuss their motivations. In part this was because they had been sworn to secrecy when WSC was being set up; the fans and cricket authorities felt blindsided and deceived. Only Tony Greig was prepared to be up-front about his views and motivations once World Series Cricket became a public reality, and his divorce from English cricket was cemented by his unrepentant attitude as much as his time in WSC. After the series ended he settled in Australia and remains employed to this day as a commentator by the Channel 9 network.
The bitterness over World Series Cricket continued for some time. Graham Gooch, one of the English cricketers who joined WSC, would abruptly terminate interviews for several years if asked any questions about WSC and his subsequent ban from playing for England. Other players were similarly defensive and uncommunicative.
Packer ultimately recruited over 50 players from the leading cricket countries to play in the series. Despite the bans on international play enacted by the ICC countries, many players still joined because they were being offered the chance to be paid properly and respected as athletes and performers, instead of being treated as little more than indentured servants.
When the World Series Cricket series got under way in 1977 (complete with a corny theme song for the Australian team, multi-coloured uniforms, and cricket played, in some matches, under floodlights), initial reactions from traditional cricket fans were ones of horror and ridicule. Just about every feature sacred to the game seemed to have been sacrificed for commercial and television expediency. The start of the series was not helped by the fact that most of the cricket stadiums in Australia were closed to WSC, so the series was forced to use a large number of non-cricket arenas, including Australian Rules football grounds, where a temporary mat took the place of the typical impeccably maintainted crease. However, the players, who, despite cynical predictions that they were merely non-trying mercenaries, played hard and played to win. In part this was because Packer himself took a keen interest in how his money was being spent; as John Snow, one of the English cricketers, recalls, "KP turned up when we first landed on Australian soil. He said to us: 'You're getting paid well for this and I expect you to take it seriously. If you want to bugger about you can get back on the plane'". The competitive nature of the players soon resulted in exciting matches, and many of the innovations from World Series Cricket were rapidly adopted by other domestic cricket competitions and by television broadcasters.
World Series Cricket came to an end in 1979 as part of a compromise that saw Packer obtain a significant level of control and influence over the direction and revenues of Australian cricket. The compromise was probably fuelled in part by the poor performance of the Australian "official" test side during the 1977-79 period. Having lost the nucleus of their side to WSC (including the Chappell brothers, Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson) Australia were forced to assemble a patchwork team including captain Bobby Simpson, who had not played at international level in 8 years, and they were losing test matches regularly to other countries.
Wolrd Series Cricket changed the game significantly. One big change was that international cricket match fees leaped upwards; players started to be paid properly for representing their country. Packer's lead in aggressive TV coverage was followed in the UK by Sky's purchase of international cricket broadcast rights, which brought more money into the sport at all levels and allowed for more professional coaching and management.
Ultimately WSC was a wake-up call for a sport that was in danger of simply fading away. For that, Kerry Packer, despite not having the purest of motives, deserves credit.