Kerry Packer Colourful media tycoon who transformed cricket

The Australian billionaire outraged the sport's staid ruling bodies when he launched his splinter World Series Cricket competition in the 1970s.

His innovations such as one-day games, floodlighting and players wearing coloured "pyjamas"were shunned by the cricketing hierarchy. More than 25 years later, all have become standard features of the modern game.

Packer began his cricket revolution after the Australian Cricket Board rejected his attempts to secure exclusive broadcasting rights to Australian cricket.

He launched World Series Cricket (WSC) in December 1977 after signing up some top international Test players, including then England captain Tony Greig, for a game featuring an Australian XI against a rest-of-the-world side.

This was followed by one-day internationals, which began to attract crowds. After two seasons, a deal was struck with the Australian Cricket Board.

Mr Packer's Nine Network won broadcasting rights to Australian cricket, regular oneday internationals were introduced and players' pay rates soared.

The launch of WSC split English cricket, setting player against player in a confrontation between the old guard and the new pretender.

Greig became Packer's recruiting officer for a World XI, signing up the likes of Dennis Amiss, West Indians Viv Richards and Clive Lloyd and the Pakistanis Imran Khan and Asif Iqbal.

In the winter of 1978-79 there was a showdown between the pro and anti-Packer camps at the Cricketers'Association AGM at Edgbaston in Birmingham.

Greig and Amiss clashed with traditionalists Geoff Boycott and Bob Willis, vehement supporters of the established game. Ian Botham and Mike Brearley were among the rump of England players who also resisted Packer's overtures and his money.

But the changes the traditionalists fought against were gradually accepted as the cricketing world realised that they were revitalising the game.

Ehsan Mani, president of the International Cricket Council, said Packer had an undeniably enduring influence on the sport. "He took the game by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into the modern era and although, at the time, many people had reservations, the current healthy state of our sport shows howwise he was."

Packer ran a media and gambling empire, Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd (PBL). He amassed his billions from his family company, Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd, which he inherited from his father. He handed the day-to-day running of the giant company to his son James several years ago. The Packer media empire included Australia's most popular television network and a stable of profitable magazines.

But while his business empire made his name in Australia, it was his love of sports and gambling that earned him worldwide fame. He haunted baccarat tables at casinos from London to Las Vegas and his love of gambling inspired him to buy Melbourne's Crown Casino complex, Australia's largest. Reports of huge losses in the tens of millions surfaced from time to time but Mr Packer either refused to comment on them or brushed them off.

The son of newspaper and magazine mogul Sir Frank Packer, Kerry began his career in the industry at 19, working in the printing room of his father's Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney. He was trained in all aspects of his father's business except as a reporter. He had shown little academic ability at school, later attributed to the condition dyslexia, and was not considered journalistic material.

He was not first in line to take over the running of his father's empire, but his older brother Clyde fell out with his father in 1972 and remained largely estranged from the remaining Packer family until his death in 2001.

Kerry Packerwas announced as chairman of Australian Consolidated Press, now the magazine publishing subsidiary of PBL, in 1974, a few days after his father's funeral.

He inherited two television stations, five radio stations, nine provincial newspapers and the biggest magazine publishing company in the country. The Daily Telegraph had been sold two years earlier to rival Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

By the late 1980s, Packer had acquired another magazine business, bought and sold the nation's largest engineering company and expanded programming at Nine. He also bought property and, in the late 1980s, became one of Australia's largest landowners and cattle barons. His Australian properties were said to cover an area bigger than Belgium.

The powerful businessman was courted by prime ministers and was credited with using his media empire to make or break governments. He was not a one-party supporter - according to former Labour prime minister Bob Hawke, he "preferred winners to losers".

In 1987, Packer made the deal of a lifetime when he sold his two television stations to up-and-coming entrepreneur Alan Bond for one billion Australian dollars - Packer's own financial advisers believed the stations were worth 400 million dollars. He bought the TV stations back three years later for just 200 million dollars.

A giant of a man who was said to live on hamburgers and milkshakes, Packer was nonetheless a keen sports fan and in the 1980s began devoting his time and money to the sport of polo.

The family statement announcing his death did not detail the cause, but he had long been plagued by ill health. In 2000, he received a new kidney donated by his longtime friend and helicopter pilot Nick Ross. The operation left him without either of his own kidneys - the first was removed in the 1980s after doctors found it to be cancerous.

In 1990, he had a heart attack while playing polo and his heart stopped for about seven minutes before he was revived by paramedics using a defibrillator.

Days later, he donated three million dollars to equip all ambulances in New South Wales state with defibrillators. Machines bought with the donations were irreverently branded "PackerWhackers".

He had heart bypass surgery later in 1990, but had a second heart attack in 1995.

According to journalist Paul Barry, author of the unofficial biography The Rise And Rise Of Kerry Packer, the billionaire's power "was frightening to some, but to others he seemed to be a champion of Australian values and the common man".

Mr Packer is survived by his wife of 42 years, Roslyn, and a son and a daughter, James and Gretel.

Kerry Packer; born 1937, died December 27, 2005.