IS NOTHING sacred? That was the question that the world asked when Kerry Packer made his masterpiece of World Series Cricket, and the answer came echoing back: not as much as you thought. And certainly far less than you thought in sport.

Before Packer, sport in general and cricket in particular were bowed under the weight of the pseudo-sacred. Packer changed all that. When he met bullshit — no matter how pseudo-sacred its presentation — he saw not the silver salver and holy cloth but the excrement that lay beneath.

Packer had a way of thinking simple and it terrified the life out of people. The doorway to the acquisition of cricket for his Channel Nine organisation in Australia was closed against him. So did he spend years looking for the key? No: he broke the bloody door down.

Rough and ready language seems suitable for Packer’s obsequies, but it was not the roughness of Packer that mattered. It was the readiness. Always ready for a fight, always ready to go bulldozer-like through a sea of bullshit to get to what mattered. And if others’ things got damaged or broken, too bloody bad.

Before Packer, sport had thought itself a thing apart, sacred, special, utterly separate from normal life. The usual rules did not apply; sport operated under a dispensation. This thinking enabled all kinds of nonsense to flourish.

Packer, an entrepreneurial philosopher, took Ockham’s razor to sport and came down with the bones of the matter: sport is a public entertainment, and its greatest asset is performers. The performers are not trying to prove a moral point, or to demonstrate their honour, or to express their loyalty. They are trying to (a) win things and (b) make a living.

They also know that a sporting career is brief and, when it ends, the opportunity for money-making has gone. What, then, for the future of athlete and family? So Packer said: all right, great cricketers, would you like to have lots and lots more money?

And when the cricketers said: “Yes please,” the world was staggered and amazed. You can’t do that! Cricket is sacred! So the matter went to court, and the court saw not a dispute about honour and morality and sacred matters, but a row about money and restrictive practices. Sport, the court said, was just like anything else. Sport is only now getting over the shock.

Thanks to Packer, a great swath of abuses and hypocrisies was swept away. Sport in general, cricket in particular, was overdue for reformation. Packer was cricket’s Luther. Athletes, especially cricketers, had been held in check by the notion that “no player is bigger than the game”, the war cry of the blazers. Packer, a blazer-free zone, told the world that the players are the game.

So the players have it much better these days. Money pours into sport because, as Packer proved, sport is something we want and will pay for. And as sport seeks to find its optimum position as regards product and market, so it is worth considering the additional matters that were not, after all, swept away by the reformation. Did we thrill to the Ashes summer because it was great entertainment and great value for money? Up to a point, Lord Packer. Did England’s victory in the rugby World Cup come down to entertainment and the dollar-value of Jonny Wilkinson’s feet? Will we follow the football World Cup of the coming summer purely because it is entertaining?

Not entirely, no. Sport is entertaining and athletes are entertainers. But if that were all it was, then we might as well watch professional wrestling. We are drawn to sport because there is also something beyond commerce, beyond entertainment, beyond Packerism — and which is also beyond bullshit.

Sport has meaning. And if we don’t usually analyse that meaning closely, we understand that sport has a resonance that no blockbuster movie or stadium-filling concert can rival. Steve Redgrave’s fifth gold medal, David Beckham’s penalty against Argentina, Kelly Holmes’s disbelieving triumph — these things are more than mere entertainment.

They touch something deep in us and though we recognise the right of athletes to get paid fortunes for their triumphs, the fact remains that for the athletes as well as for the spectators, sport has a meaning that mere dollars cannot reach.

Packer got rid of the bullshit. Packer showed us that sport is a part of the commercial machine. But now we are aware that the truth unveiled by Packer is not the whole truth. As we watch sport through the gears and the cogs of commercialism, we can perceive, perhaps more clearly than ever before, the ghost in the machine.