Shane.

 

Indulge me a second. This one hurts.

Maybe it’s the tragedy that’s already surrounding us in Eastern Europe.

Maybe it’s the sight of floodwaters in place of where my high school used to be in Northern NSW.

Maybe it’s the second person of significance in my life to have died in Thailand.

Maybe it’s the second cricketer who I’ve never met but felt deeply affected by their death.

Maybe it’s just all of this. Wrapped into one.

Nothing sobers you up faster than bad news. There’s an ironic dichotomy of when news filtered through that Shane Keith Warne had died at around 1.00am on Saturday morning on Australia’s east coast.

Most of us were ‘on the lash’. Earlier in the evening most of us had raised a glass to the death of Rodney Marsh…nothing prepared us for what came next.

 

“And he’s done him.” – Manchester, 1993

 

Put simply, he is the best to have played the game of cricket.

And there will never be anyone better than him because we’ll never see anyone like him ever again.

There are those who have more wickets, more runs, more matches and captained their country in Test cricket. Statistics don’t lie because statistics are measurable and objective.

But you can’t measure impact.

You can’t measure the ability to change a game.

You can’t measure how watchable someone was, or how captivated you felt as they did their thing.

And you can’t measure legacy.

There’s an interesting psychology into how a hero develops in a child’s eyes.

You could study pages of journals of what defines a hero, and there’s probably very few characteristics that align with Shane Warne – cricketer or person.

Deep down, heroes are quite often the ones you want to emulate. They make you proud, because they make you want to make other people feel proud of you.

Some heroes are personal. But in the cases of sporting athletes, indirectly, they have a relationship with many more people than just yourself. The reason so many are then affected by the tragedy of their death, is that in this instance, everyone had a relationship with Shane Warne.

There have been athletes who have come and gone and been so representative of their peoples, their cultures, and their countries, that they transcend just their skill set.

Like Maradona to Argentina. Like Kobe Bryant to Los Angeles. So loved was he, universally, that Shane Warne was just so ‘Australia’.

 

“A great moment in his career.” – Melbourne, 1994

 

So many of us Gen-Y types who grew up loving cricket will almost certainly admit to that one Christmas where ‘The Shane Warne Ball’ was unwrapped from beneath the Christmas tree.

The yellow ball with the red dots and an instruction manual of where to place your fingers and grip to emulate the various balls Warne had perfected on the international scene.

This is how to hold the leg-break. The slider. The zooter. The flipper. The wrong ‘un. The top-spinner.

We all tried to do what he did. And none of us were able to. None of us will ever be able to.

I so badly wanted to be him that, aged six, I demanded my parents legally change my name and ordered people around me to start calling me Shane. Probably fortunately, it didn’t catch on.

Possibly more than any other player of that generation – the likes of Ponting, Gilchrist and McGrath – he was the safety net of heroism, team success and just straight-up individual brilliance.

Would we all have loved cricket if it were not for Shane Warne?

Of course, there were layers. There was the pride. How he’d always lift and we’d always beat England, and win World Cups and mesmerise us with the mystery and magic that was leg-spin bowling.

And then there was the larrikinism. So progressive are we nowadays, it might be more termed ‘arrogance’. There was the sledging, the pre-series predictions, the Rockstar lifestyle, the on-field showmanship and the cheekiness behind all of it.

Mostly, it was all just representative of why we love cricket: it was fun.

 

“This game is coming alive.” – Birmingham, 1999

 

“Warnie’s on!”

It was a connection of the triangle between myself, my father Bob and our love of cricket, which he had been fostered in me at an early age, largely because of what Warne brought to our cricket experience.

Those two words were either bellowed out if one of us wasn’t in the lounge room watching the cricket, which drew a response of Usain Bolt-like speeds to return to the couch.

If we were both in the room, it drew the response of sitting up either straighter or leaning forward on the couch, intent on not missing the show.

Watching him was just theatre.

In his documentary, released a mere few weeks ago, he would admit that his art could be defined as such.

It wasn’t so much the skill execution; he would intimidate.

He’d move a fielder one metre, bowl the ball for no consequence, and then move the fielder back to their original place before the very next delivery. It would be for no reason at all other than to fascinate the umpire, the batter, his own teammates, the attending crowd, and TV audience that there was some sort of scheme in development.

For the catalogue of Warne highlights, three stand out: the 1999 World Cup semi-final, his entire 2005 Ashes series and his Day 5 performance at Adelaide in 2006.

They were moments where at the time of their happening, you felt all the emotions and energy of when your team succeeds.

In some cases, 20 years later, YouTube provides an endless supply of highlights to re-watch and to re-feel all the feelings of euphoria you felt back then.

My own YouTube algorithm has understood me very well following the hours I’ve spent on the website, from around 2.00am on Saturday morning, when I first typed in “shane warne highlights”.

 

“Bowled him! How about that!” – Birmingham, 2005

 

I’ve never been particularly massive on the phrase: ‘Never ever meet your heroes’, largely because it identifies that it’s the hero, and not yourself, that lets down the experience.

It’s as if we hold the hero up to the impossible standard that they have been so excellent in all of their endeavours, that their chance and fleeting interaction with you also needs to meet some level of expectancy. And that anything below being treated like the royal-est royal whoever did live would be a let-down.

Most often, we get so tongue-tied or nervous that it dents the interaction.

In Warne’s case, I never met him. Not that I ever sought him out, but there was a sense of trepidation that anything that I did say to him would be meaningless because there’s so many other things that I could’ve said in that one moment.

A few weeks ago, I was unbelievably fortunate to sit down with Ricky Ponting for a six-minute chat to talk about his MCG experience.

As he spoke, I did lose myself momentarily in the trance of ‘Punter’, my own childhood and the fact that his poster was on my wall until the age of 14 and that it embodied everything I wanted to be as a cricketer and a leader of men.

Then the chat was over and I was left with a lot of things unsaid that selfishly I just wish I’d said. Just so Rick had known. Like: “thank you”.

What do you say to someone who gave you so much of what you loved?

In Warne’s case, I agree with The Grade Cricketer’s Sam Perry who spoke on this subject in very raw terms on a special podcast recorded on Saturday evening: Warnie also needed the love thrown back his way.

Sure, that search for affection adjoined the ridiculous, the callous, the absurd and the general head-in-hands reaction.

But it was part of the man and part of his realism. As ‘Pez’ said, he needed the love, and we were both encouraged and happy to give it.

 

“What a cricketer. What a match-winner. What a ball.” – Adelaide, 2006

 

Over the last 48 hours, we have well and truly moved into tribute phase.

We like to think that, individually, Shane Warne meant the most to us, largely because he was so generous and giving of himself as a cricketer and a person, that we all feel we have a slice of the pie of Warne to take away with us.

Indeed, my relationship to Warnie felt personal because he was my first-ever memory of cricket.

But ultimately, there are friends who are in true guttural mourning of their mate who won’t be around to share that next laugh, and a family that is still mulling over the question of ‘why’. Why their son, why their brother and why their father.

That’s where my head and heart is at.

This tribute is in response to Shane Warne the cricketer – it is the start and end-point as I did not know him personally – and the idol that he once was, although it’s a status that probably never truly left me.

As has been passed around – he was most definitely flawed.

But the flaws probably endeared us even more.

The worldly, mixed with the outer-worldly.

And fuck he was good at cricket.

 

“And they can’t catch him!” – Melbourne, 2006

 

All in all, many other people and friends have probably summed the affect Shane Keith Warne’s death has had on them in much more succinct terms than I.

On the Australian side, friend Dan Toomey posted of Warne: “Thank you. You changed my life.”

On the English side. Yes, the English side, one friend, Charlie Thomson told me: “He was cricket.”

Another Pom and friend, Tom Meredith called Warne: “My sporting hero.”

But back in Oz, Ian Higgins of the Grade Cricketer summed it up perfectly: “I just hope he knew how much he meant to us.”

I don’t really know why this has affected me. ‘Celebrities’ and ‘heroes’ and death might not register on the emotional scale and nearly every other time – with the exception of Robin Williams – for me, it has not.

But…

Maybe it’s that with Shane Warne dying, the private lie that you might be still in connection with your childhood has died alongside with it.

Maybe it’s a level of guilt that you were waiting for the most mature time to thank your ‘hero’ for everything that they gave to you, but time ran out.

Maybe it’s just that it couldn’t have been him. Not now. Not at this time.

Maybe it’s just all of this. Wrapped into one.

And maybe, it’s just another reminder to tell your friends you love them.

Rest well, Warnie.