Takapuna

"There were dilemmas everywhere the novice Sky team looked. What if the government changed its mind and the frequencies were never tendered? What if they were tendered but Sky lost the bid? Or won it but had nothing to broadcast? But if they signed up pay TV rights, then lost the bid, the money they had paid for content would be wasted. Would their chances of signing up rights, and winning frequencies, be enhanced if they had a demonstrable physical base? But what if they paid for a base, then did not win the frequencies or could not obtain the rights or both? However they looked at it, there was no way of escaping significant financial risk. On top of that, apart from Jarvis’s early discussions with Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine in Australia about televised horse racing, none of them knew how to go about signing international broadcasting rights for a TV company, let alone one that was not yet on air. The one outcome they did not consider was what might happen if they set up pay TV and not enough New Zealanders were willing to pay for it to make it viable. But as David Grieve observes, Heatley has an ability to look past problems. Grieve remembers that in the post-crash environment when people were being much more cautious in their spending, Heatley paid $2 million for a property at O’Neills Avenue in Takapuna. ‘He always seemed prepared to move forward, rather than move backwards.’"

"Back on the island, Heatley has brought his son Josh and some of Josh’s friends up from Auckland. They head off to play pool, though if Josh was with only his father, they would most likely first play chess. No chance for a competition slides by the pair. If they swim in the surf, they compete to see who can bodysurf furthest up the beach. They are keen on poker. In their Auckland house, at Maui and here on Moturua, chessboards are always set. Josh maintains in his head a lifetime tally of thousands of chess games with his father. The wins are, for now, slightly in his father’s favour. Cut-throat competition is the norm between Heatley and his sons. The Takapuna house where the children grew up had a tennis court adjoining the neighbour’s property. Ben, the eldest of the four children, recalls his brothers, his father and him playing tennis. ‘And, hell, those poor people next door! The moment we’re on the tennis court it’s all on, all of us yelling and all of us arguing because each of us wants to win.’ More often than not, the matches would end with two people not talking to each other. ‘But the next day, we’d put it behind us and do it over again.’ His sister is competitive too, he says, but displays it differently."