Until Saturday morning I thought that waking up sitting bolt upright was something that only happened in the movies. Then my clock radio told me Shane Warne was dead.
The shock didn’t last too long. A heart attack in a Thai villa was an incredibly Shane Warne way to go, after all.
When the news ended, I sat there in the dark thinking about his kids and Simone, the Gatting ball, every summer of my childhood, hair loss products, Hawaiian pizza, the relentless march of time, Liz Hurley, the phrase “bowling Shane” and my own fruitless attempts to bowl a single leggy that actually turned for the Drummoyne public school B team.
Finally I was left with a sense of dread that if I went on social media, the sadness would be compounded by someone dragging up every unsavoury thing he ever did to make a point.
(I’m aware that getting pre-emptively mad about an opinion you haven’t even seen is probably a symptom of some sort of pathology. It’s definitely a sign of spending too much time online. But we all do that, so we may as well talk about it.)
In any case, I stayed away until the next day, at which point I logged on and saw exactly what I feared/desired: a bunch of people saying we should remember Warne as a sexual predator, among other things.
These takes were couched in the language of nuance, the idea that they were bringing balance to an otherwise uncritical outpouring of adoration. The fact that every obituary of the man covered his missteps mattered not at all.
It wasn’t the arguments themselves that annoyed me – though I think it’s a huge leap to conflate “bad husband” with “misogynist”. Nor, as a rule, do I think there’s anything wrong with speaking ill of the dead, though waiting until the body is cold is usually tasteful.
What got to me was the all-too-familiar tone. The rush to label. The total lack of forgiveness. The terrifying idea that a person’s whole life should be defined by the worst things they ever said or did: a standard none of us would want applied to ourselves. A standard that, if broadly applied, would make for a miserable, unworkable society.
It’s reassuring that this position was only held by a small minority. On Facebook and Instagram it seemed most of Australia had a story about meeting Warnie, how glad he had been to make their day, and how sad they were that he was gone.
That wasn’t because they ignored his flaws. It was because they made the calculation that, on balance, he brought them joy. That his sins, whatever they were, were forgivable. And that felt good. We forgave him because we loved him, but we also loved him because we forgave him.
Just one of the dozens of times Warne embarrassed himself in the national spotlight could have caused any of us to either spontaneously combust or not sleep for the rest of our lives. If he could survive telling the press that his mum gave him diuretics or the world reading his horny DMs, surely we could survive our memories of hurting others or singing No Woman No Cry in a Jamaican accent in year 7 music (just one example, many such cases). That he was allowed to keep doing his thing was oddly comforting.
Yes, the reason Warne got away with being boorish and cringey was that he was the greatest dude ever to throw a spinning red leather ball. And it didn’t hurt that he was white and rich and male.
But instead of using him as an example of how we should hold everyone to ever-higher standards, maybe we should note how good it felt to give him the benefit of the doubt and widen the circle of people we think are worthy of being seen as “complex”.
That doesn’t mean automatically letting people off the hook or giving them a licence for bad behaviour. It means acknowledging that though some of us can bowl better leg breaks than others, we’re all just apes with smartphones, making mistakes and trying to be happy.
• Alex McClintock wrote a book called On the Chin about his short and painful boxing career. He lives in Sydney
