Published The Advocate, July 9, 2005


HARD to believe, I know, but I can remember a time when Shane Warne was not in the Australian cricket side – even before text messaging was possible on mobile phones, that’s how long ago. The first time I saw him in action he was playing for Victoria in a game against South Australia at Adelaide Oval. I was in the members’ stand watching from the side as this chubby, blond kid spun rings around the batsmen. Warne was the fat boy who ate all the pies, the one who would later take his own supply of baked beans on a tour of India, and who no doubt will have big weight problems when his career ends. Umpire Tony Crafter was standing at Warne’s end that day. Crafter said afterwards that in all his years of umpiring he had never heard the ball fizz from a spin bowler’s fingers like that. Those nimble fingers, a gift from the cricketing gods, would later lead him into SMS temptation. Warne made it into the Australian side and was soon in strife. He did a sponsorship deal that hinged on him not smoking and he was caught smoking in the change shed. And on it went. Fast-forward the years and now Warne’s marriage is on the rocks, and not before time. The dissolving of a romance generally occurs over decades, through a piling up of small dissatisfactions. In Warne’s case, his dissatisfaction seems to have been with marriage itself. In the humdrum struggle of life, sporting heroes perform no better than the rest of us, and often much worse given the pressure of their fishbowl existence. We love to turn them into demi-gods and put them on rickety pedestals. And there is nothing wrong with that. The ancient world had a full pantheon of gods on pedestals and the best of them had at least one flaw that led to their downfall. Achilles had his heel. Shane Warne has his mobile phone, oh, and women. What is it about women? Why are they are so congenitally indiscreet? Why do they keep running to the papers and dobbing him in? Men, on the other hand, keep their thoughts to themselves except when they are text messaging. SHANE, PLS STP SNDNG SXY TXT MSGS. Whatever the morality or otherwise of his private life, I don’t think I care. I am only interested in his bowling action. He fulfils my need for a one-dimensional sporting hero, uncomplicated by difficult moral questions. Donald Bradman was another one. I know a lot of people in Adelaide who would not spit on him, such was his ill repute in certain quarters although, I hasten to add, it had nothing to do with sex. Whatever their flaws, Bradman and Warne are rated as genuine Boy’s Own heroes, as are explorers Matthew Flinders and Douglas Mawson, neither of whom was purer than the driven snow when it came to extra-maritals. People in glass houses, it seems, should not be spin bowlers.