THE last time I saw Shane Warne live he wasn’t playing cricket, he was striding down the centre of a Royal Melbourne golf course fairway following one of the featured groups at the 2019 Presidents Cup.
From memory I think the group the cricket legend was accompanying included household golfing names Tiger Woods, Justin Thomas and Hideki Matsuyama. One thing is for sure though, I know the parochial Melbourne crowd wasn’t yelling out “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger”, or even “Thommo, Thommo, Thommo”. They were yelling out “Warnie, Warnie, Warnie.”
I remember thinking at the time that some of the big name golfers involved in the US versus the rest of the world cup, particularly some of the Americans, wouldn’t have a clue what all this “Warnie, Warnie, Warnie” thing was all about. And what’s cricket? After all, the big name golfers were supposed to be the stars of the show.
This morning when I opened an online news site and saw the big headline banner that Shane Warne, aged 52, was dead of a suspected heart attack, I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked and like others have reported I had to re-check it because I thought it must be some kind of hoax.
But no, larrikin Shane Warne, declared as one of Wisden’s top five cricketers of the 20th century and renowned as the greatest leg-spinner in history, was found on Friday unresponsive in a villa on Koh Samui in Thailand, where he had been holidaying with friends. His death was put down to a suspected heart attack.
I had roughly followed his cricket career, recalled his test debut at the Sydney Cricket Ground when a much hyped young Victorian leg-spinner got no wickets for a hundred and something, not a good score for a cricketer or a golfer; was up at some ungodly hour Sydney time to see Warne bowl “the ball of the century” to dismiss England’s Mike Gatting with the very first delivery of his Ashes Test career in 1993, and continued watching as he went on to achieve greater and greater milestones.
So we knew all about Warne’s cricket career, his record wicket hauls, and became more familiar with his larrikin ways and habits: the fact he’d prefer a ‘durry’ [cigarette] and a meat pie rather than anything more healthy, that on a tour of India it became known that while many of his teammates were sampling the delights of the host country’s traditional cuisine, Warne was on a strict diet of baked beans on toast, saw the strange manicured appearance of his eyebrows during his romance with British actress Liz Hurley, and the many other traits for which he became notorious.
We also assumed his love of golf was also a universal known but perhaps not for all outside the golfing world. We have read a number of tributes today where his obvious passion for the smaller-balled game is not even mentioned. Perhaps in a life writ so large, there is not always the space.
But on processing his death today our mind immediately went back to those Royal Melbourne Presidents Cup crowd scenes, where Warne did seem to be acting demurely and acknowledge that the focus really should be on the star golfers in front of him.
In later years more and more mentions of Warne were about golf. We also recalled seeing him at the World Cup of Golf in Melbourne in 2016 where he teamed up with Graeme McDowell in the Pro-Am and at a number of Australian Opens in Sydney.
Warne always seemed to be up for a game of golf, whether it was just a game with mates, or at a big pro-am or celebrity event. Searching back through the ASG site it was clear Warne had managed to wiggle his way into numerous stories. We took pictures of him at the Australian Open in 2015 presenting a bemused US golfer Jordan Spieth (his pro-am partner) with a cricket bat and giving him a few tips; in 2015 the spin king took time off cricket commentating to act as Peter O’Malley’s caddie at the Senior British Open and he was actually in contention a couple of times at the European Tour’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in the pro-amateur division.
We also found a video of Warne in 2014, a 10 handicapper at the time, saying “it would be a dream” to improve his game and play on the Senior Tour when he reached 50.
So to Shane Warne, a legendary cricketer, a genuine larrikin, and a passionate golfer, we have to say it:
Well played, mate.