Christopher Lee - Howzat!: Kerry Packers Cricket War

HOWZAT!

CHRISTOPHER LEE , former journalist and foreign correspondent, is one of Australias leading television writers. He is the originating writer of many of Australias most popular TV dramas including Police Rescue, Big Sky, The Secret Life of Us and Rush. He wrote the screenplays for the mini-series Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo for the ABC and Howzat! Kerry Packers War for the Nine Network. He has been awarded the Centenary Medal, four Australian Writers Guild Awards, the Queensland Premiers Literary Award and the Fox Fellowship for Screenwriting Excellence.

HOWZAT!

KERRY PACKERS WAR

CHRISTOPHER LEE

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

Christopher Lee 2012

First published 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Lee, Christopher

Title: Howzat! Kerry Packers war/Christopher Lee.

ISBN: 978 174223 360 4 (pbk)

ISBN: 978 174224 119 7 (epub)

ISBN: 978 174224 377 1 (mobi)

ISBN: 978 174224 609 3 (epdf)

Subjects: Packer, Kerry, 19372005.

World Series Cricket History.

Cricket Australia History 20th century.

Television broadcasting of sports.

Cricket.

Dewey Number: 796.35865

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Nada Backovic Design

Front cover images clockwise from top left: Kerry Packer, 1977 (Central Press/Getty Images); WSC Sydney, Australia v West Indies, 1979 (Patrick Eagar/Getty Images); Dennis Lillee, 1978 (Adrian Murrell/Getty Images); Stadium lights (Shutterstock).

Back cover images Photographs by The Shot Enterprises/Natasha Blankfield. Left: Lachy Hulme as Kerry Packer in the TV mini series Howzat!; Right: The cricketers celebrate in the change rooms after the Centenary Test in the TV mini series Howzat! Front row (LR) Jeff Thomson (Ryan OKane), Dennis Lillee (Matthew Le Nevez), Coach (R.J. Bright), Greg Chappell (Damon Gameau) and Doug Walters (Hamish Michael). Back row (LR) Rodney Marsh (Brendan Cowell), Max Walker (Andrew Carbone), David Hookes (Richard Davies), Tony Greig (Alexander England) and Ian Chappell (Clayton Watson).

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests

Published by arrangement with Southern Star Entertainment.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Scriptwriters deal in small moments, building them into scenes, then sequences, then parts, and finally into some kind of coherent whole, a dramatic narrative. Directors and actors take over and howzat! a screen drama. With luck audiences are intrigued or reminiscent or frightened or repulsed but, you hope, connected in some way to whats happening on screen.

Enter Howzat! Kerry Packers War. At Southern Star Entertainment, after the 2011 success of Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo, a four-hour mini-series made for the ABC which introduced the character of Kerry Packer to TV drama, it was decided itd be a good idea to do something more on this fascinating man. Research into Packers war the one he had with the cricket Establishment in the late 1970s, signing up the cream of the worlds cricketers and setting up a whole anti-Establishment cricket system showed that this guy and his cricket shenanigans were tailor-made for television. So a four-hour mini-series for the Nine Network went ahead.

But a book on Packers war was an entirely different proposition. In the first place writing a book although it mightnt look like it is a different exercise than writing a screenplay. And secondly, and most importantly, apart from enjoying watching it, I know not much about cricket at all. The game is about weird things like popping creases and blockholes, third slips and silly midons, flippers and chinamen, sweeps and hooks, the late swing and the early declaration.

But as it turns out, cricket is much more than what happens on the field. It involves all sorts of arcane rituals and Gordian thinking. With the exception of chess (which you could say is not a sport) the five-day game is arguably humankinds most complex and intricate sporting contest. Packers 1970s war revealed a game and a time in its history that was gladiatorial, wonderful, filled with characters you couldnt possibly invent, moments of comedy, farce and true drama, all on top of a few centuries of rich anecdotal legend and myth.

Given all this, it struck me that a book on Kerry Packers World Series Cricket need not be about the game itself. The elements of culture, conflict and character a screenwriters bread and butter fill the story of Kerry and his iconoclastic band of sportsmen, so I thought Id go with that.

Id like to thank a series of people who helped out as I was putting first the screenplay then this book together, these absolutely indispensible players in the drama. Firstly, John and Delvene Cornell, Ian and Barbara Chappell and Tony and Vivian Greig, who all helped out with generosity and charm. And I want to thank others who kindly shared their time and their reminiscences, notably David Hill, Bruce Francis, Allan Johnston, Bill Macartney, Trevor Kennedy, Geoff Longland and Richie Benaud. And researchers Stephen Vagg in Sydney and Hester Abrams in London.

I also want to sincerely thank that gentlemanly doyen of Australian cricket writing, Gideon Haigh and his encyclopaedic knowledge. His definitive book The Cricket War: The Inside Story of Kerry Packers World Series Cricket is by any test the go-to volume for anyone wanting more detail on this fascinating chapter in crickets history and I recommend it.

Finally, Id like to thank my friend and colleague at Southern Star, the unsinkable John Edwards. Weve been making television drama now for 26 years and were just warming up.

ABBREVIATIONS

ACB Australian Cricket Board

CPH Consolidated Press Holdings

ICC International Cricket Conference

MCG Melbourne Cricket Ground

NCC New Zealand Cricket Council

BCCP Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan

SACA South Australian Cricket Association

SCG Sydney Cricket Ground

T20 Twenty/Twenty cricket

TCCB English Test and County Cricket Board

WACA West Australian Cricket Association

WICBC West Indies Cricket Board of Control

WSC World Series Cricket

SET UP

At 2 pm on the sunny afternoon of Tuesday, 28 November 1978, thousands of people began queuing at the Sydney Cricket Ground gates to get into what would become one of the most significant cricket matches in the history of the game. Since Shakespeares time the grand English sport had been played in the daytime, gradually developing over the centuries from a kids game in English paddocks to an adult competition between locals, then villages, then shires, then as the British Empire covered the globe, internationally.