Australia’s amateur had a transcending pre-eminence in the history of sport
Frank Keating
Some sporting pundit in the United States the other day tried to forecast the huge impact Tiger Woods looks sure to have on golf. All he could think of as a comparison for what Woods might be headed for was an historical figure who, with indelible figures to prove it, had achieved greater domination than any other in his sport, and in a game the Americans did not understand.
See, even the Americans know of Sir Donald Bradman, the man whose lustrous and still almost unbelievable deeds at the crease insist that he was the most successful performer in a major international game there has ever been. Not Woods’s predecessors at golf, Jones or Nicklaus; not Laver, Hoad nor Navratilova at tennis; not Owens nor Lewis at running and jumping; not Muhammad Ali nor Ray Robinson at prizefighting; nor Dr Grace nor Hobbs nor Hammond nor Richards nor Gavaskar at cricket … no athlete in the antique history of sports can have sustained such a transcending pre-eminence as Australia’s amateur from the New South Wales up-country who went to the first-class crease 338 times between 1927 and 1949 and, outrageously, scored a century (and usually much more) on every third occasion.
The only possible way to write a history of cricket would be to divide it into two distinct blocks, BD and AD, you might say: before Don and after Don. His first Test match against England was in 1928, his last in 1948 at the Oval when he walked in needing only to hit one single boundary to average exactly 100 every time he had been to the wicket in a Test.
Famously, Warwickshire’s roly-poly Eric Hollies bowled him second ball with a googly for nought. So he ended with a Test average of “only” 99,94. Every cricketing person the world over knows those four digits like a mantra to be sure, to this day, having been perpetuated by Sydney’s broadcasting eminence Sir Charles Moses who, in 1950, nominated the postal address of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as, nicely, PO Box 9994, Sydney.
As soon as he first took guard as an uncoached fledgling at the Sydney Cricket Ground the shy, small boy from the sticks set such breathtaking standards that his successes altered completely the social and cultural conceptions and self-regard of his young post-colonial country. This was recalled by the Nobel prize-winning novelist Thomas Keneally from his rough, British-oriented Sydney schooldays in the 1940s.
Keneally wrote: “The only history we were taught was European. Poetry cut out after Tennyson. If we spoke of literary figures, we spoke of Englishmen. Cricket was the great way out of Australian cultural ignominy for, while no Australian had written Paradise Lost, we knew Don Bradman had made 100 before lunch at Lords.”
Keneally was born in 1935. The previous year newspaper libraries the world over had filed the first reams of Bradman’s obituaries. Some of them were probably pulled out from their musty corners at this week’s sad news all of 66 years later. For straight after his second tour of England, which was even more ruthlessly triumphant than the first had been in 1930, Bradman had been stricken with severe complications after an appendix operation in London. For two days the 26-year-old was on the critical list and in The Times the Court Circular page announced that “King George at Balmoral is being kept in constant touch with Mr Bradman’s progress.”
Such was the magnitude even then of the young man’s fame. And the scores and records were annually polished and re-presented in the game’s bible, Wisden, so the resplendence was never allowed to fade or be forgotten. Why, in 1990 it was said that the second question the first remains a mystery asked by Nelson Mandela on his release from Robben Island was: “Is Don Bradman still alive?”
I am in my 60s, so my generation is the last that can claim to have seen Bradman bat. Alas, I did not. I was due to when I was 10, when his Australians came to Worcester to open their invincible 1948 tour. But a Benedictine housemaster in Hereford, having promised us the treat, pulled the trip at the last minute as “I would lose you all in the crowds”. He was probably right.
On his previous matches at Worcester, Bradman had scored 236 (1930), 206 (1934) and 258 (1938). Now, 10 years and a world war later, the 40-year-old made only 107 and the local Worcester Evening News could finally trumpet in a banner-splash “THE DON FAILS AT LAST”.
So I never saw him bat. I had to imagine the hangman’s mercilessness with which those cricketing strokes had so cruelly treated the bowlers who toiled as he reaped his incredible harvest.
The papers can this time safely say that we, as far as batsmanship is concerned at least, will never, ever, see his like again.
Donald George Bradman 1908-2001