Not that Warne would have minded the staginess of this celebration. In fact,as friend and former St Kilda footballer Aaron Hamill said beforehand,he would have been aggrieved to miss this one. He loved a stadium and a show. He once said that he felt his life was a soapie.
He said it himself this night on videotape:“I wanted to make every single ball an event.” He might have added that he wanted to make every event a ball. His MCG valedictory became one. If a memorial can be called an extravaganza,this one was.
Celebrity might have been thrust upon Warne,but he embraced it,revelled in it,even wallowed in it. He rubbed shoulders with stars,and they with him,but all without ever losing his essential suburban earthiness,which is why no mere cathedral would do for this service;it had to be the G,the self-styled people’s ground.
It had to be his ground (and being the people’s ground,it had to send up the merest of boos when Prime Minister Scott Morrison was announced). At night’s end,it formally became at least half his ground for good when the new Shane Warne Stand nameplate was unveiled. Needless to say,spotlights were playing on it.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison was heckled on arrival. It was the MCG after all.Credit:Getty
Warne was the subject of so many books,documentaries,TV specials and even stage dramas that his life story tells itself. Cameos threaded this night. In all,he looked and sounded what he was,full of midlife beans,too young to die.
It ought to have made the night sobering,and yet it did not. Somehow,the force of Warne’s effervescent personality and his natural generosity was abroad in the stadium again and would not let the night descend into sombreness. His children,Summer,Jackson and Brooke,fought back tears as they spoke of a father and friend now frozen in time,but they carried and made the day. It’s what Warnes do on the MCG.
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The MCG was Warne’s stage. But so was the world. What was clear this night is that it is impossible to disentangle the cricketer and the man;the one made the other.
He came among us as one of the most extravagantly talented and fiercely competitive cricketers the world has known,but he leaves us - all too soon - as a cult figure,a bon vivant,a man who embodied the zeitgeist,larger than any life.
This might have all been too much for some until,and so it is necessary to add one more sobriquet,manifest in this recapitulation of his life:disarming to the last.
“He’s the best thing that’s happened to the game of cricket for many,many years,” said Sir Donald Bradman,early in his career.
But,as related by Warne’s father Keith on Wednesday night,he said about himself:“I smoked,I drank,I played a little cricket.”
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