Spinning A Headline

Newcastle Herald

Saturday December 23, 2006

Doug Conway Newsciope AAP

FEW cricketers will ever come within cooee of Shane Warne's achievements on the field, but can Warne now top his own reputation as a human headline off it?

By appearing to raise the possibility of a rapprochement with his divorced wife Simone, Warne gives every indication he will continue to star in his own real-life soap opera.

"Who knows what the future holds there?" the world's most successful bowler asked rhetorically as he announced his retirement from Test and domestic cricket. "We still live together, even though we're divorced. So that's sort of a pretty interesting set-up.

"She's been sort of my rock, I suppose.

"She's been probably my best friend for a long period of time. We're still friends now."

The two, who divorced earlier this year after a string of Warne sex scandals, attended last month's Melbourne Cup together.

They will spend Christmas together with their three children at their Melbourne home, according to women's magazine reports.

Warne also plans to spend much more time with his children now that the bulk of his cricket commitments are over.

One fly in the ointment could be Warne's decision to honour the final two years of a three-year contract with English county side Hampshire, where he honed the text-messaging skills that landed him in so much hot water.

His retirement sentiments, however, held glimpses of a maturity so glaringly absent during a career that produced a steady stream of salacious and scandalous stories.

They underlined a swimming official's perceptive observation on Olympian Ian Thorpe's recent retirement that Warne and Thorpe are the only two people in Australia who can appear on the front page, the back page and the social pages of newspapers on the same day.

The 37-year-old Warne attracts rock-star treatment that has included some of the staples of the genre sex, drugs and gambling.

Warne was the blond-haired, diamond-studded face of modern cricket, the most flamboyant and controversial star in a country that idolises its sporting champions.

He had flashy cars, fancy homes, his own company (23 Red Pty Ltd, after his favourite roulette number) and a queue of sponsors that made him a millionaire.

"Sometimes you just don't believe it's all happening," Warne said once of his whirlwind life. "Everything is going full steam ahead in fast forward."

But his high-velocity career was peppered by questionable behaviour and errors of judgement.

He accepted money from an Indian bookmaker in 1994, as did teammate Mark Waugh, for providing pitch and weather information, pleading stupidity and naivety when the incident came to light four years later.

Many considered he got off lightly when fined $8000 just $3000 more than he took.

He admitted "talking dirty" in a phone call to a British nurse he met in a nightclub, and was subsequently stripped of the Australian vice-captaincy.

After being axed from the Australian Test side in 1999, he "had a smoke one night when I was pissed" and was soon back on the cigarettes.

There was no crime in that, but the danger was to his reputation as well as his health he was still under contract after accepting $200,000 from an anti-smoking company to kick the habit.

A year later Warne was reprimanded for grabbing a New Zealand teenager who had snapped a photo of him smoking.

He was banned for 12 months in 2003 for taking outlawed diuretic tablets, which he said his mum had given him to look slimmer on TV.

But diuretics can also be used to mask steroid use, and World Anti-Doping Agency chairman Dick Pound remarked: "You cannot have an IQ of more than room temperature, and be unaware of this as an international athlete."

The judging triumvirate hearing his case found he had not been "entirely truthful" and had given "vague, inconsistent and unsatisfactory" evidence.

Warne expects plenty more media attention on his personal life, even as an ex-cricketer.

"It's nice to have that attention," he said during his retirement announcement, "but hopefully I won't have the same scrutiny, the same intensity, the same judgemental moralistic stuff." AAP

© 2006 Newcastle Herald

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