Warne was a force of nature and an everyman – we won’t see his like again

If you ever walked behind Shane Warne through a crowded public place, you might get an idea of what it was like. Everyone looked. Some deferred by looking away again. Others grappled with their phones to take a quick shot. Many had something to say, and whether it was positive or negative it was equally free from constraint, as if his uniquely direct relationship with the public, his generosity with his time and his person developed over 30 years, meant that he wasn’t his, he was theirs.

Since his sudden death on March 4, Warne has taken his last journey in the public eye. It began in a Thai resort and will end with a family funeral followed by a state memorial service at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where a grandstand is being named in his honour. As in life, the cricketer will be shared between his friends and his Friends.

Whatever anyone could say to, or about, Shane Warne had already been said during his life. This has not stopped a grieving world from bowling up more words since his passing.

The ritual of mourning started in the online world, which Warne had inhabited as a native-born ever since he discovered he could bypass an untrustworthy mainstream media and cultivate his fans one-on-one.

His last two tweets were valedictory, for the late cricketer Rodney Marsh and the music entrepreneur Michael Gudinski, who had died a year ago. From Friday night his own 3.7 million Twitter followers inundated his feed with their sadness and shock. An Indian follower messaged: “Hey Shane, please reply. This can’t be true. Please Warnie you can’t go like this”.

Neither the internet and social media existed when Warne bamboozled Mike Gatting with his wondrous first ball in Ashes cricket in 1993. His timing was always uncanny, and it was as if the free flow of the digital world arrived to service and expand his fame. In life, Warne asked his followers what pizza he should order or what movie he should watch. He sought their opinions on matters fictional and real. He had a high-low span of human connection: he found camaraderie with the famous, who could empathise with him over what Sir Donald Bradman called “the curse of publicity”; yet at the same time he paid attention to the unheralded, using his rare gift for sprinkling the magic dust of his fame to leave behind a story, to make ordinary people feel good.

Shane Warne accepts applause from England fans during his final Test in 2007.Credit:Getty

In the days since his death, his millions reciprocated. At the front edge were famous friends like Mick Jagger, Ed Sheeran, Chris Martin, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe, all of whom communicated their sympathies. The Australian cricket team played through their grief in Rawalpindi, their visibly affected captain Patrick Cummins speaking of how many in the current team held Warne as their all-time favourite player and felt that the game had never been the same since his retirement in 2007. Former captains Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke could not speak of Warne without tears. Teammates, rivals and friends from around the world expressed their sorrow, while flowers and mementos piled up around Warne’s statue outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a tiny representation of the shocked millions.

The observation that on the same day as Warne’s passing, hundreds of innocent people died in Ukraine might have been factual but, like any brutal fact of human life, was momentarily marginal. Is one life worth more than another, and should a sportsperson be elevated in this way?

Mourning rituals are about sharing, and more could be shared about Shane Warne than about any Australian. For better and worse, one of his great gifts was to leave millions feeling that they truly knew him, and their loss was as of a friend.

Inevitably, the more official the statement, the more distant the speaker, the more hyperbolic. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, said Warne “was loved by all”. In the face of mortality, who would not want something like that said about them?

Friends: British singer Ed Sheeran and Shane Warne.

Conversely, the blanketing grief imposed its protocols. In India, cricket great Sunil Gavaskar remarked that Warne’s cricket record on the subcontinent had been inferior to other spin bowlers. The pile-on was savage and immediate for Gavaskar, who had past form in speaking too bluntly, too soon. He promptly apologised.

Walking behind Warne through a cricket crowd, you saw how others projected their appetites onto him. He would be asked to stop to drink alcohol with strangers – they felt they knew him, though, as he told Leigh Sales in what the journalist called her “dream interview” three years ago, they did not. He was not the big drinker of his public persona, yet he did not want people to speak poorly of him, so he often obliged. With good grace, he earned a reputation for his generosity to fans: signing autographs, posing for selfies, small acts that ordinary people would remember and speak about, and have spoken about this week.

At the same time, he was only human. The most insightful tributes and commentary have come from his senior teammates who knew him best. Warne had a particularly strong respect for his elders, such as Allan Border, Mark Taylor, Ian Botham, Ian and Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee, the late Terry Jenner and Rodney Marsh. The elders would offer a dose of circumspection.

Border referred to Warne’s need for reassurance from those elders. Taylor wrote, in reference to criticism of Warne’s television commentary, that he might have benefited from having people like Ian Chappell and Border around him to pull him into line.

Allan Border, David Boon and Warne at a reunion in Sydney in 2003. Warne had a strong respect for his cricketing elders.Credit:Getty

“But you don’t always have to agree with someone to be good friends with them,” Taylor wrote. “My worry today is people are so quick to judge. That if you’re not for me, you’re against me. If we had lived our lives that way we would not have been mates.”

Kerry O’Keeffe, the former leg-spinner who grew close with Warne as a Fox Cricket commentator, spoke movingly of Warne’s restless search for “peace” and said he did not know if his friend had ever really found it. Warne never forgave his former captain Steve Waugh for dropping him from the Australian team in 1999. Waugh made a gracious and heartfelt statement after Warne’s death about the many happy memories they had shared.

“Don’t worry about the public persona,” Border said, “that’s just Warnie doing his thing.”

Not even Shane Warne could play the role of Shane Warne all day, every day. Walking through those crowds, sometimes he was in a hurry to meet an obligation. If he didn’t want to be Shane Warne, he buried his face in his mobile phone, which he used as a shield. It was not rude, just necessary. Sometimes, in an elevator, if he wanted a break from being Shane Warne, he would pretend to be on his phone, even when there was no possibility of reception. Bradman, the only other Australian whose fame has ever equalled Warne’s, spent much of his life shutting it out. Warne mostly welcomed it. Publicity was a bountiful exchange. But when he wanted seclusion, his phone was his bodyguard.

Warne at a tsunami refugee camp in Galle, Sri Lanka in 2005.Credit:Andrew Taylor

Warne’s dying in a Thai resort on last Friday afternoon gave rise to a wave of admiring, chuckling fancy. “So rock and roll,” said the ABC’s Tony Armstrong. Reporters went to Koh Samui to investigate. There was a frisson when a flower-bearing blonde woman was allowed to spend 40 seconds with his body in its ambulance. It turned out that she was a German tourism executive. Authorities stated that Warne had died from natural causes.

On Friday afternoon, after lunch, Warne had visited a tailor and received a massage. The evidence was that in his last moments he was up to nothing more than phoning his children and watching cricket on TV. His friends and manager conducted themselves with dignity as they described no wild party, just prosaic natural causes, so “relatable” it will send a population of 52-year-olds to get a medical check-up. A common preventable death that saves the lives of others could be his most powerful legacy.

What more could possibly be said about Shane Warne? As the twentieth-century American theologian Thomas Merton said of a deity of his time and place, nothing can be said about him that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. About Warne, nothing can be said that wasn’t already said by the force of nature he was on the cricket field. No tribute can match the wall-to-wall replays of his performances as a cricketer.

Tearful goodbyes: cricket fans pay tribute at Warne’s statue at the MCG.Credit:Jason South

He might have been only a cricketer – but what a cricketer he was. It is beguiling to watch the world’s best batsmen face him, terrified by a slow-moving ball which he could conjure to go past their bat, around or between their legs, behind their back, into their pad, or lure them to their doom by tempting them into panic, playing the shot they swore not to play.

He was a physical force that worked on the mind. If you had the slightest interest in cricket, you could watch Warne’s highlights forever. They leave a permanent afterglow of pleasure. He made the cricket ball talk, as they say; he made it shout and laugh and voice its opinions, he made it whisper and murmur and crack jokes and tell stories. When play got dull, he made it drone away without pausing for breath, and late at night he made it send text messages and Instagram posts. When it came out of Warne’s hand, the cricket ball said all that needs saying.

The grief will endure for those close to Shane Warne. The world can respectfully recede. In life he had, by all accounts, little desire to rest, and peace was fleeting. He can have both now.

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