The Sunday Times Magazine • 19impression after his death. “Everyone thinks he’s a big
boozer but he’s not a big boozer at all. I sent him a crate
of wine — ten years later it’s still there.”
“What people don’t realise is while he had the image
of a beer-swilling sportsman, it was a myth,” said the
Australian fast bowler Jason Gillespie in a tribute in the
Mail on Sunday, adding: “He was a spirits man.” When
he was in party mode, gin and slimline tonic, shots and
vodka and Red Bulls were the Warne way. He discovered
his love of partying — and the fact that beer bloated
him — when he first came to England as a 19-year-old to
spend a summer playing cricket in Bristol in 1989. In the
documentary Shane, he admits he piled on a massive
“20kg” in six months and went home weighing 99kg
(more than 15 stone). When his parents came to pick
him up from the airport, they were shocked. “My God,
that’s Shane,” his father, Keith, recalled. “I could have
burst out crying at the time. He was really blown up.”F
or all Warne’s excesses, nothing got in the way
of the cricket. He had gone to England on the
invitation of a friend after his childhood dream
of playing professional Aussie rules football for
his beloved St Kilda was crushed: he’d played
at under-19s level for them before being let go.
It is a measure of his flinty toughness, his will
to succeed, that he reinvented himself in a
different sport and rapidly emerged as one of
the greatest bowlers of all time: he revived the
dying art of spin in an age when speed was everything.
The stand at the MCG now known as the Shane
Warne Stand was first filled for a Test match on Boxing
Day 1992. That day the 23-year-old leg-spinner Warne,
a chubby figure with spiky peroxide hair, took seven
wickets, including that of the West Indies’ captain,
Richie Richardson, with a delivery that almost
tunnelled beneath the bat — what the uninstructed
were advised was called a “flipper”. He would teach
a generation of cricket watchers a whole new
terminology, almost an entire grammar, of skill.
Warne was unmistakable. He would jog on to
the field as though he owned it; he would lounge
at slip in a sun hat. Then, with a proprietorial air,
he would seize the ball and generally not surrender
it. Nobody in cricket history so choreographed an
over like Warne, with his repertory of predatory
glances and meaningful pauses. Nobody in a game
prone to lulls and hiatuses so demanded of the
onlooker that they not look away.
He displayed a seemingly bottomless confidence.
The most memorable of his deliveries bordered on the
prankish, enjoyable to everyone but the hapless batter,and even then they usually came to see the joke. Mike
Gatting eventually hung a photo on his wall of himself
being bowled by the “Ball of the Century” — Warne’s
first delivery in an Ashes Test — at Old Trafford in 1993.
During his 15 years spent “retired”, Warne remained
a guaranteed newsmaker. He judged players firmly and
threw out outré opinions — from disputing that the
Egyptians could have built the pyramids (“You couldn’t
do ’em. Has to be [aliens]”), to what he would do as prime
minister (“First of all I’d probably ring Donald Trump
and I’d say, ‘Mate, I can fix that hair straight away’ ”).
It is no secret that Warne’s appetites were great.
But by wearing his blemishes and indiscretions
outwardly he avoided the trajectory of figures such as
Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong, who in their prime
seemed professionally untouchable and personally
irreproachable, only to be revealed otherwise. As his
friend, the actor Rhys Muldoon, puts it: “Warnie was
an open book. He was naughty, but never wicked.”
For all the cricket royalty and celebrity clout on
display at his memorial, Warne’s family were at its
centre. Warne travelled the world but made a home
almost all his life within a few miles’ radius, in the
unostentatiously well-to-do suburbs on the south
side of Melbourne’s Yarra River within easy reach of
the city’s beaches. His “beautiful parents”, Keith and
Brigitte, self-employed, upwardly mobile, are in some
respects the heroes of his autobiography. Keith worked
as an insurance salesman; Brigitte was a cleaner whose
family emigrated from Germany after the Second World
War. They sent Warne to Hampton High School until
he won a sports scholarship to the independent
Mentone Grammar aged 15.
“Of course, people will remember Shane in
their own way,” Keith said at the memorial. “But
for us it will be his unconditional love for family
and friends.” Also speaking were Warne’s
younger brother Jason and Warne’s children,
who talked of his warmth, his encouragement,
his silliness and his steadfast belief that
“manners cost nothing”.
With a lifetime’s experience handling
well-wishers, he developed great skill and
patience, never deflecting an autograph hunter
or a selfie seeker. “Warnie was outstanding with
a crowd,” remembers Ian Chappell, the former
Australia cricket captain. “He’d line them up.
He’d say, ‘Don’t push, don’t shove, I’ll get to
everyone.’ Then he’d talk to everybody. It was
amazing and impressive.”
Those people will all have stories to tell
GETTY IMAGES, PA their children and grandchildren now ■^
WARNE
WOULD TEACH
A GENERATION
A WHOLE NEW
TERMINOLOGY,
ALMOST
AN ENTIRE
GRAMMAR,
OF SKILL
From far left: victory
over England in the
fifth Ashes Test,
1997; Warne with
his father, Keith,
Liz Hurley and his
mother, Brigitte, at
Lord’s, 2013. Below:
with his ex-wife,
Simone, 2007