Wearing his beloved baggy green and allowing himself a rare smile, Stephen Rodger Waugh left the Sydney Cricket Ground on January 6, 2004 with an imperishable legacy to the international game he graced for 18 years.
Born on June 2, 1962, in Bankstown, Sydney, Waugh made his debut as a 20-year old against India on Boxing Day in 1985. He had an inauspicious debut and famously confessed that he doubted "if I would ever score a run in Test cricket".
But few would have known then that the phrase 'end of an era' would not have fitted better the retirement of a cricketer other than him.
Nicknamed 'Captain Courageous' and 'Iceman', for Waugh, only India would remain the unconquered final frontier but it was a tribute to his captaincy skills that he galvanized a bunch of individuals into a fighting unit which won a world-record 16 Tests on the trot and was labelled by the pundits as 'The Invincibles'.