Kerry loved horses and shared that bond with his daughter, Helen. Helen was disabled and Kerry would take her in her wheelchair to see their horses race. Helen died two years ago, which was a deep grief for Kerry and his wife Marilyn (Mary) and Helen's brother, Andrew.
Although I knew Kerry through his horse interests, he was more widely known as a business leader.
He had a vision to build a global company when he created Fernz (later Nufarm), which he helped grow from a small local fertiliser firm to a listed company with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.
Business colleagues and friends, including his business partner Doug Rathbone and friend Graeme Harford, paid tribute at his funeral to Kerry as a visionary.
But you don't build an international company without being a bit ruthless. Someone drily mentioned that Kerry's leadership style was to run as a "committee of one". He admitted as much himself.
After he was named New Zealand Herald Business Leader of the Year in 1998, he told the Herald's Mark Reynolds: "In the final analysis, when everything is falling down around your company and you are staring at the fires of hell, it becomes a question of whether your staff are going to charge through this fire after you, or whether you will just sit there and warm your hands with them while you talk about it."
This did not always make Kerry friends. His stint as chairman of Fletcher Challenge in the late 1990s was not mentioned at his funeral.
Kerry was engaged in breaking up Fletchers, at that time a dynastic company, the epitome of the old boys network. Yet it was Kerry who ended up getting burnt when he was investigated for insider trading, though in some ways he was more outsider than insider. He bought $635,000 of company stock just before it revealed the break-up and a big profit. Lawyer and Act MP Stephen Franks and the late Business Roundtable head Roger Kerr brought a private prosecution against Kerry, but this was settled out of court.
I always found Kerry a strange choice of target for anti-corruption campaigners; Kerry did not seem to be engaged in feathering his own nest and there were far more conspicuous self-interest corporate gluttons of which to make an example.
I talked to Stephen Franks for this column and he said it was never a vendetta against Kerry, who he never met, but grew out of his view the insider trading law was flawed.
I imagine this episode was a source of private rage and shame for Kerry -- who always seemed to me a man of great integrity -- but he never spoke about it. Afterwards he kept a low profile and never communicated by email for the rest of his life; everything was done in hard copy.
I can't help wondering how much of a price Kerry paid for being an outsider in our small business hamlet. If he had been better at playing the one-upmanship games of the establishment he might have been farewelled with great pomp as Sir Kerry Hoggard. He certainly contributed as much to creating wealth as some of the other business figures who have received knighthoods.
But Kerry played his own game, and that has other rewards.
I didn't take notes at the funeral; it just didn't seem respectful. But afterwards I wrote down part of Kerry's son Andrew's eulogy: his "lessons from Kerry". Give it away. Don't sweat the small stuff -- or the big stuff. Always remember who is the most important person. (His wife). Don't forget to have a bit of a funny. But the lesson that was most precious to me: Run your own race.
This is simple advice, but it is always at the precise moment that it is most desperately important that you must remember this, that you are wont to forget it. In these days where empathy is so highly praised it is easy to get swept away, agreeing with your critics, rather than holding your position.
But as Teddy Roosevelt said: "It's not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better." The one who counts is the man in the arena, daring greatly. That man was Kerry.
