On the death of our childhood heroes

In Memoriam, Shane Keith Warne

I was a month away from my nineteenth birthday when Steve Irwin died in September 2006. Many people that I had only the slightest connection with sent texts and Myspace messages - it was a different time, alright? - asking if I was “OK” and wondering if i’d “heard the news?”

It was a grey and close end-of-summer day, the kind of day where hesitancy between seasons was palpable, and I had, indeed, heard the news. I had loved Steve Irwin for years up to this point. There was something refreshing, something emboldening about the bristling vitality of a man who communed with the most dangerous of God’s creations, and seemed so invincible. Most of the conversations of my late teenage eventually wound their way back to the Crocodile Hunter in some way or other.

When I found out he died I felt numb. I had never felt this way before. Luckily, none of my relatives had died at this point, save my Granddad whose death I was too young to be impacted by. I was inexperienced at grief. I had to go for a walk.

Sitting in a field where the lapping waves of Birmingham meet the shores of the countryside, I watched the M5 tumble past and picked aimlessly at a few daisy heads. How could the death of a man I didn’t know leave me so bereft? I didn’t know then, and sixteen years later I still don’t.

This afternoon, about 2pm, in a Friday afternoon lull at work I absentmindedly opened my phone and saw that Shane Warne had died. I halted on the spot. A joke, surely? I didn’t know how old Shane Warne was, but he wasn’t old enough to die. I clicked the link expecting a phishing scam or some trite prank. No such scam. No such prank. It was true.

The thing about your childhood heroes, and Shane Warne was very much one of mine, is that the very thing that makes them heroic is the way they rise above the mundane and the ordinary. Death is the most commonplace mundanity of them all, and seeing one of your heroes succumb to such ordinariness fills you with—well, grief.

I had watched Shane Warne destroy my belovedly shabby England in the summer of 1997 - my first Ashes series. Under the covers in two winter’s time I dozed in and out of sleep as the sacred sounds of Test Match Special relayed the calamities from Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide as Warne loomed large in 1998/99 and had seen him repeat the trick in 2001 and then another dark winter in bed with the radio (stolen from the kitchen after my parents had fallen asleep) in 2002/3.

2005 was the first time I saw him bested, and he very nearly won that on his own too. During my second year of university, I stayed awake all night completing an assignment whilst the traumatic Adelaide test of 2006 tried its hardest to ruin my Christmas. And who was at the centre of the mischief? The ringleader. SK Warne.

It’s hard to understand, objectively speaking, why someone who has inflicted so much misery upon me as a child could be considered one of my heroes. As an adult I am much less parochial about sport, able to appreciate fine play from both sides. As a youngster I was entirely partisan and a football or cricket loss would send me into paroxysms. Yet not with Warne. When he came on to bowl, you knew that was that. The idea that England were going to win had been entertained, but now Dad was home and the nonsense must stop. He elicited a Pavlovian response in me, and yet I was rapt.

I bought a “Learn to bowl legspin” kit from the back of a magazine, endorsed by Warne himself. I copied his run up and convinced myself I could bowl a flipper (I couldn’t). Even now, as an adult on the long descent to 40 I have spent the winter telling myself this is the season i’m going to bowl legspin. I drift off at night to visions of me ambling in. It’s really Warney i’m thinking of, my frame substituted for his like a deepfake. Maybe this really is the season.

In days to come, much will be written about his cricket by far better writers than me, I can only comment on what he meant personally. And that was everything. One of my most cherished moments - and thinking back tonight in the light of a beer it has become just that bit more cherished - was seeing Warne play at Kidderminster in 2007. His final away game in England, on a tiny club ground. The assembled audience sat on plastic school assembly chairs hastily put out to cater for the vastly increased crowd come to pay homage to the Greatest of All Time. I am a Worcestershire fan, but seeing him toy with the Worcestershire lower order like a cat playing disdainfully with a mouse was a delight. To see it in so intimate a setting, on a ground I have played on, just sublime.

When our childhood heroes die, it reminds us that we too will die. That we are no longer children and in many cases no longer young. Our heroes are those whose attributes we admire because we wish they were our own. As children we must live vicariously through others because we have had no life to speak of, but our childhood imaginings shape who we become, and our heroes offer us templates to follow. When they die, we realise that they are also human with faults and frailties. The illusion is shattered, a hero is just another person. It is doubly sad.

So farewell Shane Warne. The unorthodox Aussie bombshell whose best performances were fuelled by a diet of baked beans and chips, who loved the birds, who couldn’t give up the fags and the booze but who simply couldn’t be bettered on the cricket field.

“Bowling, Shane!”