The Billionaire and the Bankrupt: Part 3
The Odd Couple
Ken Fletcher and Chuck Feeney, though good mates, were such totally different characters that it was sometimes amusing to watch.
To save money, so he could give more to help humanity, Chuck always flew Economy Class. This annoyed Fletch who – as a five-time Wimbledon champion – was accustomed to being upgraded to First Class … not downgraded.
As Fletch said to Chuck one night at dinner: “Chuck, I’m the one who always wanted to become a rich eccentric … you’ve stolen my role!”
“If I was Chuck,” Ken told friends, “I would have my own bloody big Boeing parked out at Eagle Farm Aerodrome all the time! … The trouble is, none of the billionaire qualities have rubbed off on him!
“Of all the billionaires in the world, I’ve drawn a dud!”
Chuck certainly didn’t live like a billionaire. He wore a cheap watch made in his own watch factory. He owned only one suit. His wife Helga washed and ironed his shirts, trousers and cardigans, and, I presume, darned his socks.
His attitude was “if I save $5, that can save somebody’s sight”.
Now that they were coming to Brisbane all the time, Chuck and Helga wanted to buy a specific apartment on the top floor of the Dockside Hotel near Ken in Kangaroo Point. But foreigners weren’t allowed to buy second-hand apartments in Australia.
So Chuck did a deal with me where I bought it and he rented it from me. From then on he always introduced me as his landlord.
But there are downsides to renting to a multi-billionaire.
First Chuck needed a separate phone line installed for overseas calls: “Management switchboards charge too much.”
Then Chuck needed a separate new lock on the door: “Hotel keys are too easily obtained.”
But the most surprising incident was when the rent arrived in my bank account … in Austrian shillings!
I now particularly looked forward to the first dinner after Chuck’s arrival so I could hand him the huge overseas telephone bill he had run up in my apartment.
As he did with all restaurant bills, Chuck sat at dinner in the Lyrebird Restaurant at QPAC going through the 15-foot-long continuous-form computer printout of the bill checking every call.
While Chuck did this, Ken exclaimed to the table: “Look at Chuck! Here we’ve got a multi-billionaire checking up on a two-bob phone call!”
Chuck looked up grinning and said: “A billion isn’t what it used to be Ken.”
Ken would have picked up the Feeneys at the airport after first filling their fridge with fresh milk and bread.
Chuck complained every time that Ken had bought white bread, telling him it was bad for you. But Ken didn’t think like that and so never changed the order.
At dinner, Chuck generously kept inviting Ken’s friends to holiday for free at his luxury resort in Bali.
But Ken would tell him privately that not everyone could afford the air fare.
Fletch told me: “Chuck doesn’t understand how ordinary people live! I have to tell him, ‘Chuck, so-and-so and so-and-so haven’t got the air fare! If you want them to holiday for free at your five-star resort you’ve got to give them a return air ticket as well!”’
Fletch also kept the many odd-bods away from Chuck when dodgy businessmen – known locally as “solid Gold Coasters” – cottoned on to the billionaire wearing the $4 watch.
Years later, when a book was being written about Chuck, Ken suggested the title: The Man with the Two-Bob Watch.
Chuck replied “No Ken, it should be: The Older I Get the Greater I Was.”
After a few years, Fletch told me that Chuck’s three main interests were retailing, universities, and philanthropy: “So he wants to build something for a University in Brisbane.”
Ken didn’t know who to contact, so I rang Brian Wilson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland, and told him a rich Irish-American philanthropist was in town and wanted to meet him.
Unlike everyone else in Brisbane, Wilson (born in Belfast in Northern Island and educated at Queen’s University, Belfast), knew exactly who Chuck Feeney was, and knew that he had bought 7 acres of land and put up a high rise building for Limerick University in the Republic of Ireland.
Ken and Chuck lunched with Wilson, but nothing came of Chuck’s first attempt to give away some of the $550 million he eventually gave to medicine and science in Australia: most of it in Brisbane.
Ken complained after the lunch: “Wilson didn’t bring any interesting schemes with him!” Fletch seemed to think the two Irishmen were poles apart because of the Protestant-Catholic divide in Ireland. But Chuck told me years later: “My mind wasn’t free at that time.”
In fact, Chuck wasn’t having any success at all trying to give away hundreds of millions in Brisbane.
Some even assumed he and Fletch were conmen.
Part of the problem was that Chuck had always actively avoided publicity and had given his money away anonymously: with the recipient legally bound not to reveal the donor.
Also, Chuck had a strict rule that he never had his photo taken because, with five children, he was worried about kidnappers. But he never mentioned this reason in public.
Instead, he would say: “Someone once described me as a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Wayne, so I don’t want to disappoint them.”
And he certainly didn’t look rich.
Chuck always dressed in a cardigan and black Mephisto sneakers (he highly recommended them), carrying his papers in a couple of white plastic shopping bags instead of a briefcase.
Years later, a Wormald security guard told ABC Radio he’d seen this mystery man Chuck Feeney in Brisbane.
“I see this old bloke shuffling through Brisbane stores in tennis shoes and wearing a cheap watch. I hear he gets thrown out of his stores all the time!”
Under Ken’s urging, Chuck decided his 121-acre $13 million block on South Stradbroke Island would not suit a tourist resort … and should become a National Park.
So Chuck offered to swap it for a piece of government land in Brisbane big enough to build a Tennis Sports Club on, now that Milton Stadium — which had produced Fletch, and Laver, and Emerson, and Anderson — had been allowed to fall down.
Chuck had already built 17 such Clubs in the US and he showed government officials the architect’s plans for them.
The state pointed him to a piece of land at Sunnybank that was no longer needed for a school.
I went with Chuck and Ken to look at it and Chuck declared “it’s perfect!”
But instead of taking Chuck’s more than generous offer, the government accepted a $3 million cash tender from some Taiwanese businessmen. However, the Taiwanese soon pulled out of the deal and the Queensland government refunded their $300,000 deposit.
When the state told Chuck that he was now the winning tenderer, Chuck refused to proceed.
“Chuck does have a stubborn streak,” Ken explained.
“It really irritates me,” Chuck told me. “These two bandidos come along, make an offer to the Queensland government – backed by nothing – and the bandidos are allowed to walk away, deposit in hand!
“I thought people in Australia knew how you do business. After that I decided not to do any more business here.”
This was a bitter disappointment for his “man in Australia”.
Ken had scouted out possible deals all over Queensland: a development in the township of 1770, an isolated undiscovered gem on the Queensland coast; a high-rise apartment block on the Brisbane River at Kangaroo Point; a whole city block near the foreshore in Cairns for a 1,000-room Hotel similar to Chuck’s successful Hotel in Guam.
He took Chuck to see them all.
Ken Fletcher told me: “Chuck says he’s looking for things clean and green but I told him, ‘These projects are all above board … and you can paint them any colour you like’.”
Once again, this odd couple did not speak the same language.
Instead of investing in any of Ken’s projects, Chuck set his jaw and stubbornly went ahead and built on the South Stradbroke Island land which Ken had once described as “a mosquito-infested scrub”.
Under the management Chuck appointed, the cost of the eco-resort project ended up running way, way over budget from an original estimate of $30 million to $185 million on completion at the end of 1998.
Meanwhile Chuck Feeney was concentrating on his global philanthropy … giving away his billions to projects he believed in.
One project was connecting up scientific and medical research in Vietnam, San Francisco and Australia.
The eco-resort management decided it needed a mainland passenger terminal on the waterfront on the hugely expensive Gold Coast. Then it couldn’t do without a fleet of ferries to move supplies, rubbish, builders, three shifts a day of staff, and tourists.
The 20-minute journey became 35 because of the very low speed limits passing expensive waterfront homes.
Electric carts were needed to service the “Eco” cabins dotted through the bush, and managers purchased 1000 bicycles for guests.
Because it was on an island, the eco-resort needed to provide its own electricity supply. Then its own water. Then its own fire station.
Someone even decided it would be wise — in the heat of Queensland — to build two glass squash courts! Fletch was aghast when he saw them.
Management also insisted that, to attract athletes and families, a large Gold Coast Sports Centre was required on the mainland.
Of course, Chuck could afford all of this – and it was, when finished, an outstanding resort which won multiple awards – but it could never pay for itself: which haunted Chuck who had never had a business failure before.
Alas, only he knew what good he could have done around the world with all that wasted money.
When I tried to console him one day on the island by saying how exquisite it all was, Chuck replied: “Yes, it’s the most beautiful resort in the world that loses two million bucks a month!”
I asked Ken why Chuck hadn’t taken his advice not to build on that land and Fletch came up with one of his better sideways glints: “Hughie, a billionaire needs something to worry about.”
As a young man at Sorbonne University in France, Chuck Feeney would roll the clay tennis courts to earn money. He didn’t play tennis anymore but he liked to watch us play … and would fox the ball every time it went over the fence.
One day at Dockside in Brisbane a ball landed among some thick Monstera deliciosa and hibiscus and Chuck couldn’t find it no matter how meticulously he searched.
Ken became more and more aggravated the longer this search went on.
All his life, Fletch had been given tennis balls for nothing, and had ball boys to fetch them for him.
So he kept ordering Chuck to give up.
But that wasn’t in Chuck’s nature, so he ignored Ken’s calls.
“You’re a bloody multi-billionaire,” Ken eventually reminded him through the wire, “and you’re digging around in the scrub looking for one lousy tennis ball! You could buy the company that makes them!”
Next thing … Chuck came out smiling with the ball held high above his head in his left hand.
The Billionaire had a doggedness about him which he didn’t mind the former Bankrupt pointing out.
In 1993 – the year Chuck left Brisbane on a mission to (successfully) bring peace to Ireland – a curious thing happened on that same tennis court.
Chuck suggested Ken, Farid Khan and I have a game of doubles because he had an important visitor from overseas who would make the extra player.
When we arrived, that extra player turned out to be – of all the people, on all the tennis courts, in all the world – the American shiny suit who had sacked Ken in London the year before.
As Chuck watched courtside, he told the American to partner Ken: which I found bizarre.
I teamed up with Farid who had been a champion sportsman.
As usual, Ken was dead keen to win but, at 4-5, the American executive double-faulted four times in a row to lose the set and Fletch swung around and said: “That’s a hopeless effort! I should sack you!”
Days later, Chuck did indeed sack this American businessman.
Conor O’Clery described in his biography what had happened: “Chuck – who measured things in human terms – arrived in London with a list of names of the people who had left the organisation since he had stepped aside. He then asked the American to stand down and Chuck again returned to the helm.”
Fletch told me Chuck had also been annoyed by how much money – which could be better spent helping people – had been “wasted” on extras, like sending flowers.
Six years after Ken Fletcher died, Chuck and Helga flew to Australia in 2012 for his inauguration into the Tennis Australia Hall of Fame during the Australian Open on Rod Laver Arena.
That year, on his last visit to Brisbane, Chuck accepted an invitation from the Lord Mayor (elected by the entire city of Brisbane) — Graham Quirk — to plant a tree in memory of “his dear friend” in the seven-acre riverside park the Brisbane City Council named KEN FLETCHER PARK.
Chuck’s tree now grows adjacent to the bust of Ken outside Pat Rafter Arena at the new Queensland Tennis Centre.
[Part 1: What Bound Them Together; Part 2: Helping One Another]
That's a good point that I'd never thought of Peter. I know when I worked for Reuters, the British newsagency, we flew economy --- but out American opposition AP got to fly first class if the trip was more than 8 hours!
Interesting to read that Chuck always flew economy and Ken liked to fly business class. I can understand though as a sportsman who has to perform at the highest level on arrival, Ken would have been in better shape physically after a long haul flight than if he was restricted to sitting in economy 'cattle class' seating on planes.