Jackson Warne has spoken about the moment he found out his dad had passed away.
The 26-year-old told the Herald Sun he was with his mother Simone Callahan and his sister Brooke when his dad’s manager called to tell the family Shane Warne had died from a massive heart attack while holidaying in Thailand in 2022.
“Worst phone call of my life,’’ he said. “It was James Erskine, dad’s manager. It was in two separate phone calls — the first phone call was he’s had a heart attack, it was a massive heart attack and we’re trying to see what we can do.
“Then it was an hour and a half and the worst hour and a half of all time. I was with my partner, my mum, my older sister Brooke and her partner. It was just the worst hour and a half — we were like what the f…, what’s just happened.”.
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The former SAS Australia contestant then revealed that he found out about his father’s death at the “same time as the rest of the world”.
“As soon as I hung up on the first call I got messages from people saying ‘tell me it’s not true’ and it has to be fake mail,” he said.
While appearing on Ant Middleton’s podcast Headgame in 2023, Jackson said he’d “never be able to forget” where he was when he heard the news.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to probably forget where I was or what I was doing,” he said. “Because hang on. Who am I going to ask for advice now? You’re telling me I can never see him ever again?”
The now-26-year-old then recalled a dream he had where he was racing his father and then all of a sudden “the cars merged and I was in the driver’s seat of his car. Then I looked to my left and he wasn’t there”.
He told Ant he believes this was his dad’s way of giving him permission to be in charge and step up for the family.
The reality TV star says he now holds his head up high and enjoys meeting people who want to share their memories of his father with him.
“Everyone has a Shane Warne story,” he said.
Later in the interview, Jackson said he didn’t even have enough time to process the news before journalists turned up on the doorstep the next morning.
“When we got the phone call that night, it would’ve been maybe six o’clock maybe six thirty in the morning when we had reporters,” he said.
“It hadn’t even been 10 hours.”
He said in the following weeks, he still didn’t have any time to process it because he was so busy with the funeral and state memorial.
But the reality of the situation finally sunk in when he spoke at his father’s memorial.
“It might sound crazy, but I’m convinced that I’m confident I’ll at least have one conversation with my dad again, I don’t know whether it be in a dream or somewhere,” he said.
“There’s no way I won’t be able to talk to him about, you know, poker or St Kilda Football Club or any of our hobbies that we used to do all the time. There’s no way I won’t be able to talk to him about it.”
