On the mantelpiece in my parents' lounge room sits my father's limited edition, porcelain, whiskey-filled figurine of Sir Richard Hadlee.
It was sold as an investment, a sports memorabilia keepsake, if you will, which would both celebrate the great New Zealand cricketing champion and, with its rare single malt whiskey, appreciate over time.
We loved King dick in our family.
He was the first true hero I had, other than my Dad, of course. Even though the spectre of dementia has begun to steal the luster from some of Dad's memories, he can still recount the story, with a glint in his eye, of me as a five-year-old sat in the dusty, beer can laden concrete bleaches of Eden Park's terraces, clapping two empty grass-green Steinlager beer cans chanting Had-lee, na-na-na, Had-lee, na… well you get the picture.
As I grew older, and the worship for King Dick grew, he continued to set the benchmark for what a New Zealand superstar looked like, shattering the unthinkable glass ceiling of 400 wickets and dishing out a raft of humblings to the brightest international stars both home and abroad.
The man who was the only bowler to cast a long shadow over the legendary Dennis Lillee.
Given my adulation, it came as a surprise, as I grew older, to discover that Hadlee had a somewhat prickly relationship with his teammates, the media and at times the public at large.
Marching to the beat of your drum in New Zealand, at least with its penchant for enforcing the scripture of the tall poppy syndrome, is a cause for angst and hand-wringing by the public.
The fact that he took a car that he won and didn't want to share it with his team. Shock!
That sometimes he played county cricket over his country to put food on his table. Blasphemous!
To read that the public could turn upon the great man so quickly during his career was somewhat baffling. Reflecting on this treatment reminded me of another recently retired New Zealand sportsman, who, whilst he did not achieve the same level of success on the world stage, has at times had a vitriolic relationship with the public throughout his career, Shaun Johnson.
In retirement, Johnson has morphed into a venerated figure, beloved by Warriors fans and the people of Aotearoa alike.
It's a turn of events that, following his departure to the Cronulla Sharks in 2019, looked as impossible as the brick with eyes Glen Lazarus becoming a minister of parliament in Canberra.
The rapturous love, evidenced in May during the Fox Sports broadcast of Magic Round, and his glowing reception as a pundit on the same channel, is a testament to how the often glamorised sins of Johnson's past have been forgotten.
This is a good thing.
For a player who should be regarded as New Zealand's most talented league exponent, it gladdens the heart that he can hang up his boots and be celebrated for what he brought rugby league fans on both sides of the ditch.
It was a shock when Johnson left the Warriors in a cloud of animosity at the end of the 2018 season.
He found out through the press, of all places, that there was no future contract on the table beyond the upcoming 2019 season.
The news soon became a hammer to beat him with as a salivating media and public were ready to jump on him and his lack of achievements. This was evidence, they said, that he was no longer up to being an elite NRL player.
That he would never lead the Warriors to a premiership.
That the club had realised he was ageing and slowing down, that the blistering step and acceleration wouldn't sustain him for many more years, and that he was not worth the million-dollar pay cheque.
The facts were, they said, that the Warriors had not reached a semi-final between 2012 and 2017 under his stewardship in the number seven jersey, and that the success of 2018 was all Roger Tuivasa Sheck, Isaac Luke, Tohu Harris and Blake Green's. They piled into Shaun, like they had done many years previous, blaming his shortcomings as the Warriors suffered a series of fade-outs at the back end of each and every season.
Cronulla tended to disagree, and promptly signed him on another million-dollar contract for the next three years.
As you may have gathered, I was heartbroken when he left for the Sharks, but I never gave up hope he would come home. It turns out neither did he.
In a quick-fire signing facilitated by Gus Gould, he returned to the Warriors for the 2022 season. He struggled in his return season, struck down with frequent injuries that cruelled his effectiveness, and he played injured when he shouldn't have.
Soon, the old refrains from the haters surfaced again, that he was past it, that he had learned nothing in his over 200 games, and even on a reduced contract, was an overpaid, selfish prima donna.
Over time, I have resembled a broken record trying to point out that whilst Johnson has of course at times struggled for form (as everyone does), you could not overlook that the years preceding his exit to the Sharks was a calamity of coaching and player roundabouts within the Warriors organisation with a divisive ownership split thrown in for good measure.
Even 2022 turned into another coaching debacle with Nathan Brown walking away from the side with rounds still to be played. If we look throughout Shaun's eleven years as a Warrior, he had nine coaches and eleven halves partners, hardly the stability a play-maker needs to develop his game amid a constant shifting of game plans and personnel.
Stability is the bedrock of development for a half, especially when that half has grown up in the New Zealand domestic league, where there is an absence of quality coaching at the junior level to adequately prepare a half for NRL responsibilities.
Shaun's speed, step and ability to ball play, all honed on the fields of Auckland, couldn't cover for the lack of an adequate coaching/development structure around him to evolve his knowledge of the game and to compete consistently at the pointy end of an NRL season.
Ask Cooper Cronk and Jahrome Hughes about the seismic impact the Storm infrastructure had on their development into premiership-winning halfbacks. Ask Nathan Cleary about the impact the Penrith halves academy had on his skill levels and composure in the big games. Shaun figured it out himself, eventually, and become the type of player able to control and manage a game, to forensically unpick defences, but imagine if he could have developed that skill four to five years earlier for the Warriors?
2019 will always be the season of what might have been for me. Tuivasa-Sheck had just won the Dally M, Tohu was in his pomp, Blake Green had unlocked Shaun again, David Fusitua had the makings of the next Israel Folau, and Isaac Luke was reinvigorated back to his 2014 form.
The Warriors bombed out to a young Panthers side in the finals that year, but Kearney's Storm-lite football had established a foundation with the critical chess pieces at numbers 6, 7, 9 and 1. A foundation to build upon for years to come.
But they ditched Shaun for Adam Keighran and Kodi Nikorima, and everything fell apart. It was another five years until the next semi-final, which Johnson himself led the club to.
I met Sir Richard at a speaking event in London in 2005, where he spoke gregariously about his time in the game and some of the relationships he had built throughout his career. He was warm and funny, even a touch vulnerable at times.
As the evening wrapped with a Q&A session, one wag from the audience asked if he ever gave back the car money to his teammates. Hadlee's demeanour shifted, and he soon wrapped up the talk, visibly angry.
So many years later, the barbs still hurt. At the end of the evening, as he was leaving, I plucked up the courage to ask for a photo from the great man, to which Sir Richard said no.
Luckily, Dame Hadlee intervened and told him to “stop being a d**k, and take the photo” and thus I have in my collection a small slice of history of the moment I met my stone-faced cricketing idol, still ruminating on those memories of critique.
Leading the Warriors to the preliminary final in 2023 and the season as a whole is a body of work I think Shaun would be most proud of in his career.
It was a season that allowed him to put into practice everything he had been building towards since his debut in 2011. A season where everything on the pitch seemed to move in slow motion for him. A season when he should have won the overall Dally M prize. My guess is he would have performed like that, given the opportunity in 2019 as well.
Shaun has spoken often about the impact the haters had on him throughout his career and courageously uses his position in the media to call out criticism on players when it gets personal.
Players, coaches, managers, and administrators in the NRL must accept that their performance will be criticised at times; the large sums of money that accompany their jobs will guarantee that. But it need not turn into character assassination. Nicho Hynes knows this pain all too well.
As Johnson walked the lap of honour around Go Media Stadium to a standing ovation in the 2023 semi-final, with victory against the Knights guaranteed, there must have been a part of him wondering where the love was all those years ago when he left. And therein lies the trick. Rugby League has a great propensity to forgive and forget.
As a community, it's our greatest redeeming feature. Sure, we hate, and many times we are misguided in our hate, no question, but we also love in equal measure, and I think for the most part, as fans, we search for that love more often than not. It's the reasons that we can move on so quickly from past transgressions, the reason we give second, third and fourth chances as a way to experience that love again.
The whiskey has long soured, and the porcelain figurine has lost its veneer, yet the legacy of Sir Richard lives long in the memory of all New Zealand cricket followers.
I don't doubt that Shaun Johnson's will also continue to appreciate with time. That we will remember those tries, those steps, those games when he was a magician covered in spiders.
We will remember the joy he brought us.
And me? I will remember the look on my son's face when Shaun signed his Warriors cap, and the happiness in my son's eyes knowing he had secured the signature of his Dad and his favourite player.
