In a 2018 interview, Warnie had remarked, “I’ve never pretended to be something I am not, and I think that’s why people still like me.” He would have never been the poster boy for the game, and was considerably far from being an idol. Cricket has forever venerated the gentleman, whose control defines his game more than his means, an image for the world to worship, an idol for the kids to look up to. Shane Warne could never be the pristine, unsoiled leader of a cricketing nation that has always basked in the legacy of leading moustached men taking calls on the pitch.
Zinc cream on his nose, expletives spraying from his mouth with aggressive ease, Warne was the sport’s greatest showman. His flamboyance was forever a statement, though some people could never look beyond his abrasiveness and his portly stature. As Brett Lee said, “Warnie was never meant to pass away, it was never in his script”, one can only hope to let the memories of the greatest deliveries ever bowled in history to immortalise a man who would have never wanted to live forever.
For somebody beginning to be invested into the game, and follow it regularly, the initiation is always peppered with stories, lived and passed on. My introduction to Shane Warne was through a height chart that we had on one of the walls. There were numerous stories one comes across, when it’s household cricket discussions — often sanitised— but equally intriguing even when one was hearing it for 11th time, just to partake in the usual exaltation which followed. I had no idea who Gatting was, as a boy of seven. It was on a memorable highlights programme that I came across a ball which pitched outside the leg, only to gloriously cut in and rattle the off and middle stumps, with this particular Mr Gatting bamboozled to the core walking back, and that is when I knew I had to know who this weird bowler was. I have always felt spin bowling has a story to it, with a googly or a flipper always more toothsome than a flat yorker. The flavour stews in the time it takes.
Growing up, it had always been Murali, Harbhajan and Kumble. But Warne was not like any of them. He was brash, he was reckless, he was out there doing everything he was not supposed to do. And, it certainly did up the intrigue. It was a retrogressive discovery for me which followed.
For a 22-year-old lad from Victoria, and after an almost forgettable debut, to be able to have his very first ball on English soil be called the Ball of the Century is not the most common of things. The action of wrist bowling was almost but waning as the last two decades were all about the swing and brute pace. A country that had witnessed Thommo and Lillee at the absolute peak of their games could have never hoped a leg spinner to be the next big name to own the pitch he was put on. Amidst the early ’90s swing fever which Pakistan had brought forth, Warne’s ball was an unfamiliar gust of air, something never experienced before and umpire Dickie Bird’s face had it all. What followed was an infamous reign of Warnie fooling every batsman with the most vicious of turns. However, piquing my interest was his place at the heart of numerous scandals, which he had written about in his autobiographies. How could the prodigal son, who knew no fetters in his life outside the pitch, come back to claim his throne, every time?
When Rajasthan Royals lifted the first IPL trophy back in 2008, there was something different about the way Warne celebrated it. It was skipper Warne, the only Warne which had never really been out there. He had been the vice-captain of the Australian team which lifted the 1999 World Cup, but it was an outburst, which deservedly crowned him with a contentious tag of a skipper.
Warnie had nothing to lose, but it was always about an untamed desire to keep scripting stories, to keep entertaining. A day before the start of the 2003 World Cup, he was sent home for consumption of a banned diuretic, and what followed was a one-year ban. Like all of my favourite fictional characters, Warnie’s multidimensionality drew me. He embodied the absolute brash school hero who flouted more than he respected, but could not be challenged by a single person when the results came out. It was a story which traced the leader, but never the captain. He came back in 2004, as if records were just distractions which he hardly cared for, cricket’s contested anti-hero broke the record for the most career wickets, surpassing Murali.
To go out on top, Warne retired after having a thousand international wickets to his name. It could very well be just about the records, or the numbers, but Warnie was a storyteller. To call him a personal hero would be limiting him, something he fought against through his life. Unlike the usual icon, who would tire his teeth with a smile on every glossy magazine cover, Warnie was always the story which travelled the other way. For every record, there was a disclaimer which would precede, and a scandal which unfurled. It would be frankly disrespectful to talk about routined discipline and ethical gentility when Warne walked on to the pitch, pressing his fingers against the stitch of the ball, perfecting the clasp, unnerving every batter on the pitch. For a pre-teenage boy, Warnie was a wizard who made him imitate his action every time he walked on the street, and apply talcum on the nose before going out to play. But it is in knowing him, one knows he was never meant to be a hero. Warnie was a renegade, a maverick without a hoot to afford. It is a loss and an absence that is incredibly difficult to digest, but more than that, it’s a chain of memories so comfortable to relish and celebrate. The world was Warne’s pitch, and we were just mere stump cameras.