The cheeky wizard
What you saw was what you got with our Peter Pan who now will never grow up, writes PATRICK CARLYON
WHERE were you when you heard? The early morning news on Saturday seemed shockingly personal, as if the death of a young family member was being announced to the world.
The radio was talking about Shane Warne in the past tense. It didn’t make sense.
Warne was gone, in a wrong ’un of fate no one had thought to pick, and a reality which jarred with the unquestioned assumption that Warne is, sorry, was always going to be around.
Recent weeks offered few clues for understanding.
We had received the latest titbits of Warne’s being, as we had since he turned up in international cricket, in a splash of gold chains and bogan curls 30 years ago. Warne was going to get fit – he called it Operation Shred. His new documentary, Shane, was screening. Perhaps in jest, he had offered to fill the vacancy as coach the England cricket team
Warne had said plenty about Justin Langer’s exit as Australia’s cricket coach. He had paid tribute to Rod Marsh, another archetypal Aussie bloke, whose death at 74 was very sad but fell within the natural order of things.
Warne was as visible as ever, a news machine, a magnet for attention good and bad. On Friday, Warne wished everyone a “good night” on Twitter, then apparently went to bed and didn’t get up.
The (Spin) King was dead. In his home town, the jolt of his death matched the disbelief felt for Princess Di in 1997. His life, like hers, seems unfinished, a life we all shared for its amplified highs and lows.
Most of us barracked for Warnie, even if we didn’t subscribe to all his tastes. We wanted him to mature and excel, to nail the pleasing aspects of adult life which had sometimes eluded him.
Now, however, our Peter Pan could never grow up.
Warne seemed younger than 52. In middle age, as in youth, he buzzed like a mischievous kid who explored his surrounds and brightened them.
Most people wanted to like
Warne, even when he had failed their better judgment. He appealed to the sports star trapped in every overweight Australian man. He got more second chances than almost anyone, perhaps because he never pretended to be something he was not.
Mums wanted to rescue him, maybe with a passing clip over the ear. Blokes wanted to be him, or at least emulate this or that facet – if not the package – of his wondrous life.
Warne didn’t try to conform. Like many successful people, he treated the accepted norms as optional, in what was both a strength and weakness. He got kicked out of the AIS cricket academy, where he ate pizza and drank beer, not long after he had been booted from the St Kilda football list for being too fat and slow.
If Warne was the budding business mogul whose interests took him to India, Morocco and Las
Vegas, he was also the kid who never left Black Rock.
He battled his weight and dyed his hair and plugged hair replacement therapies. He liked pies and tinned spaghetti.
Warne long ago redefined celebrity. Once a larrikin and loudmouth, he didn’t bother with varnish.
He transcended high-profile norms by being both a wizard and an oaf. An enigma in extremes, his onfield patience conflicted with his offfield impetuosity.
He became a specimen to be studied – how could such success reside with such self-destructiveness? His private life was public property, his unabashed pursuits a currency of water=cooler conversation.
If today’s internet existed in the 1990s, Warne would have broken it. He was the biggest sporting rock-star Australia has produced. A friend to Elton John and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, he was once engaged to Liz Hurley. One of his last Twitter posts showed Warne pictured with
Michael Gudinski and Ed Sheeran.
Yet there were few pretensions. Warne, the everyday hero, was kind to everyday fans on the street, which helps explain the placing of a beer can, cigarettes and meat pie at a makeshift shrine outside the MCG yesterday.
The little stories matter: just before he died, Warne touched entertainment reporter Peter Ford by reaching out to express his condolences for the death of Ford’s dog.
In his self-professed role of doting Dad, Warne seemed much like everyone else. “You know, they can say whatever they want about Shane Warne, but he was one of the best
fathers that you will ever meet,” former teammate Brett Lee said.
In death, Warne’s personal missteps almost instantly dim; the indiscreet texts, the brushes with diuretics and a bookie called John, the party girls and the odd nurse.
He spruiked Melbourne as if he were its biggest cheerleader. He shared innovative ideas about the future of cricket. His commentary was marked for his insight; he led you to the psychological coalface where batsman and bowler rumbled.
As someone wrote almost three decades ago, if not for cricket, Warne “was just another bloke with an earring”.
Warne was the best captain Australia never had. A thinker not a bruiser, he forced “wouldbe Bradmans to slink from the crease, then scurry to the ophthalmologist”.
We all have a favourite Warne cricket memory, to be replayed in the backyard, where the clothesline, say, is reimagined as the Great Southern Stand (which has already been given a Warne rename).
No cricketer has ever been more imitated than Warne. No Australian player, bar Bradman, has so inspired average people to dream.
To say Warne was an ordinary bloke with extraordinary talents diminishes his iron will. Warne didn’t get lucky; in cricket (and in life afterwards), he never stopped striving.
On-field, he shone brightest at the end of a dusty day, after bowling dozens of overs, when the zinc cream had smudged and he still ached to rip the ball at right angles. The last ball bowled didn’t matter; Warne was already thinking about the next.
He embraced the weight of the team’s expectations as the wannabe hero who could shift the momentum of a fiveday game in a couple of minutes.
Warne’s adage – add two wickets and 20 runs to see how the contest was placed – was a product of his irrepressibility. He was down from time to time, but he was never beaten. To meet him was to affirm what you thought you already knew. He exuded boyish honesty, almost naivete, as if magically untouched by the accumulated embarrassments of his adult life.
Warne boasted that natural way that eludes most politicians. He asked about you, not from obligation, but because he wanted to know. He wanted to like you. He wanted you to like him.
This extended encounter was 10 years ago, but it could have been last week.
His hair was splashed blond, as if to say “look at me’’. But that’s not what you most noticed. In conversation, Warne was far brighter than his parodied stylings.
Warne was busy-busy, he explained, as he cupped a sneaky ciggie. He presented as part-schoolboy behind the shelter shed, part-celebrity export about to embark on the latest business venture. He was both the imp he once was taken to be and the Inc. he hoped to be.
Warne was about to fly overseas for 10 weeks, for work and pleasure. When he wasn’t being a suburban dad, he was building the empire.
He didn’t like the intense scrutiny, he said, but he accepted it. “I don’t think it’s anyone’s business, but the more you fight it, and the more you resent it, the worse it can be,’’ he said.
“I think you just say, ‘You know what? It’s part of life’.’’
Warne had made some unwise choices in life, but he had also learned to listen to those who did not. He had sat at the knee of billionaires and absorbed their wisdom.
If he talked about crying himself to sleep with a hotel minibar, as happened in the 2005 Ashes series, it seems he also never doubted that he would spring back.
Warne had evolved since his Test playing days. Up close, he seemed earnest.
He batted off questions about his public private life. He strived to be a public figure who would be taken seriously.
``My image at the moment is probably as good as it’s ever been,’’ Warne said at the time. “Touch wood, everything is going really well.’’