It will be the end of a 50-year era when James Packer sells his stake in Crown Resorts

Crown Casino in Southbank, Melbourne. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)

We are now heading into a most unusual future – for the first time in well over half-a-century, the words ‘Packer’ and ‘casino’ won’t be closely and continually linked.

There’s still a bit of regulatory and investment water to be traversed, but to me it’s now pretty clear. The die has been cast with the latest $8.5bn Blackstone takeover bid for the Crown casino group. The biggest investment group in the world will emerge with ownership and control.

At its simplest, just about everybody in and around Crown and its increasingly tortured saga of the past decade would want it to succeed – governments, regulators, the Crown board, Crown shareholders, and one holder very much in particular.

Once James Packer sells out of Crown, we are most unlikely to see him go anywhere near another casino – other than maybe Barangaroo in Sydney on the way to his penthouse and even that right now looks a long time away.

More than 50 years of ‘Packer history’ will reach its end-point.

First of course, it was Kerry and his legendary feats inside casinos – most spectacularly in Las Vegas when it really was Las Vegas, of Frank Sinatra and ‘Rat Pack’ fame, or more accurately infamy.

Crown Casino in Southbank, Melbourne. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

I think the term ‘whale’ for ‘high roller’ was invented for Kerry – his bulk, his presence, his personality and most of course, the size of his bets.

And even more, the size of his losses.

At least he was ‘lucky’ in owning one of those ‘licences to print money’, in the glory days of television when they were ‘running their printing presses’ almost 24-hours a day continuously.

And Kerry had the biggest ‘printing press’ of them all downunder, the Nine Network – capturing the eyeballs of Aussies and the advertising spends of brands, big and national and small alike, decade after decade.

In the words of the Andrew Lloyd Webber song from Evita: “the money kept rolling in from every side” – and much of it went rolling out, across the green baize.

Kerry was not much for sitting on the other side of the table, so to speak. He never really ‘got’ casinos like son James did, passionately, statistically, forensically.

Kerry did try to buy the original Sydney licence but without the sort of intensity and determination he would bring to media and World Series Cricket and he was just outplayed.

He went along, but more as a silent partner with his good friend Lloyd Williams in Melbourne; and as the 1990s unrolled and too many dollars were “rolling out” in the lavish construction, his PBL media group ending up acquiring Crown just as it finally kicked off as the 20th century drew to its close.

And, away would go son James – with accelerating momentum and a fascinating cocktail of starry-eyed optimism and very precise cold statistical calculation, especially after Kerry’s death at Christmas 2005.

Within a year James had sold the Nine Network to the money-men of Wall St. He had zero interest in the family’s – father and grandfather before him – business of TV and even less in other media like the Fairfax papers.

When Kerry was wheeling and dealing his way through the 1980s and 1990s, I projected a pretty good rule of investment: if Kerry’s selling don’t be a buyer; if he’s buying don’t be a seller.

In selling out of Nine James outdid anything his father had ever done. He sold at the very, very top of the FTA-TV market – less than a year before the first iPhone would surface, unleashing our age of the ubiquitous smartphone that would rip the eyeballs and the dollars away from the ‘nets’.

James walked away with $5bn free and clear and in cash. He had his stake – not to spend inside casinos as his father would have, but to embark on ‘Crownising the world’ just as John Elliott had set out two decades earlier to ‘Fosterise the world’.

Albeit, whereas Elliott was targeting bogans and lager louts, Packer aimed (penthouse) higher and richer.

Well, we could detail the next 15 years: the moves into Las Vegas, the partnership with Hong Kong’s Lawrence Ho into Macau, the soaring lavish ambitions which reached their pinnacle at Barangaroo.

Then the accelerating downside: China, the regulatory exposures and implosions, the broadening deepening humiliations of the past half-dozen years.

And then Covid – ending right now in a final deal that exactly defies that ‘Packer investment rule’. It’s good for both buyer and seller.

There could be another 10c or 20c to be put on the baize, especially if Blackstone’s acquisition can be ‘speedily facilitated’ through the regulatory and approval processes.

But short of some spectacular left-field shock – and heck, after the last dozen or so years, you’d be nuts to totally rule something like that out – we are at the end-point of fifty-plus years of Packer association with casinos.