Death
After smoking heavily for most of his life, in 2003 Warren publicly announced that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Several months later FIFA president Sepp Blatter presented a frail Warren with the FIFA Centennial Order of Merit for his services to the game in Australia.
His last public appearance was made during the launch of the rebranded Australian domestic football league, the A-League, which replaced the previous National Soccer League.
Weeks before death, Warren was asked what he wanted his sporting legacy to be - his answer "I Told You So", a phrase which has become a catch-cry in Australian football and during the 2006 FIFA World Cup appeared on the scoreboard in the backdrop of the SBS World Cup studio.
He died of respiratory complications related to his cancer on 6 November 2004, at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. He was awarded a full state funeral, the first to be held for a sportsman.
Read more about this topic: Johnny Warren
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and onely declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the whip and in exile, watched over like wild animals, cast from one country to another, concealing the death of their souls with a beggar’s smile from the scorn of free men.”
—José Martí (1853–1895)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)