A legend among legends

Few 20th century sportsmen and perhaps only a handful in history have enriched cricket as much as Don Bradman. So enormous was his influence that everything he did on and off the field evoked admiration and adulation. A survey on how the Don was different, (based on the assessment by men of his times), is compiled by S. THYAGARAJAN.

EULOGIES FOR the Don cascaded from every conceivable corner of the cricket community befitting a legend that he indisputably was. Idol, icon, immortal - the tributes have been cornucopian and exhaustive. For Bradman - as the inimitable Neville Cardus described, as the one who ``changed batsmanship into an exact science, but a science with a difference; he dwarfed precedent and known values'' - the flow of tributes was fitting and appropriate. Eventful and illustrious, the life and times of the Don constitute an ever illuminating chapter in the history of cricket, nay, sport itself, perhaps for humanity.

To portray the essence of the Don as a cricketer, as a human, who was the epitome of sporting virtues, is difficult. Those fortunate to witness the maestro with the willow are only a few left in this era. But it will be grave injustice if the youth of today is denied insight into what sort of a character the great man was from the obseverations of those who revered, admired and feared the boy from Bowral. The quotes and anecdotes on the stalwart are fascinating and will live for eternity.

``He was unique, a batsman appearing not just once in a lifetime but once in the life of a game,'' wrote Dennis Compton, in Compton on Cricketers, Past and Present.

``I wouldn't wait to bat. I never suffered from stage fright. The bigger the occasion, the tenser the atmosphere, the more I liked the game. It just happened to be part of my make-up,'' the Don was quoted by Roland Perry in the book, The Don(1995). If you want to know how he batted, turn to Jack Ryder, the Australian captain in 1928-29 ``Well, he just belts the hell out of every ball he can reach.''

Was Bradman camparable? No says a compilation from a radio talk of A. B. Paterson. It goes thus: ``How good was this fellow? Is he going to be as good as Trumper''? was the question. The reply ``Well, when Trumper got into good wickets he developed a free style, like a golfer that plays a full swing with a good follow. He trusted the ball to come true off the wicket. And if it bumped or short or kicked, he might be apt to get out. But this Bradman takes nothing on trust. Even after he has got on to good wickets, he won't trust the ball a foot, and he watches every ball till the last moment before he hits it. His eye is so good and his movements are so quick that he can hit a ball to the fence without any swing at all. That makes him look a bit rough in style compared with Trumper, and he hits across his wicket a lot. They say that's a fatal thing to do. But I never saw him miss one of them''.

The talk continues, ``I said, you wouldn't remember, W. G. Grace, can you remember Ranjitsinhji,'' Yes, he said. Ranji had a great style but he was a bit fond of playing to the gallery, If he had liked to stonewall, they would have never got him out. But he used to do exhibition shots - late cuts and tricky leg glances - and out he will go. There are no exhibition shots about this Bradman. ``I said, How will he get on in England? Will he handle the English wickets. Yes, he said, don't you worry about him on English wickets. He'd play on a treacle wicket, or on a corrugated iron wicket. He is used to kerosene tin wickets up there at Bowral. He will never be the world's most artistic cricketer, but he'll be the world's hardest wicket to get.''

On what a perfectionist the Don was can be gleaned from the admiration shown by Bill Bowes in The Great Ones (1967). ``When Don was in his early twenties, I saw him give a demonstration of bouncing a golf ball with a cricket stump, and he did it twenty times easily. `When my luck is in I get towards a century' he (Bradman) said. I found that other cricketers when there luck was in struggled to double figures.''

So remorseless and ruthless was Bradman on bowlers that it prompted Chapman Jocose to write in the London Daily Mail in 1930, ``So much has been written about Bradman that no superlatives are left. I said yesterday that he is a menace to English cricket. Today, I go further. I think he will be the death of it. If he comes over more than once again we shan't be able to spare the time to get him out, and English cricket will quietly fade away.''

What an amount of frustration Bradman caused to the opponent by his gruelling run making prowess is highlighted in the conversation between Len Hutton and Godfrey Evans in The Gloves Are Off. ``Bradman and Barnes each made 234, and it was during their stand of 405 that Len Hutton put his hand on my shoulder and said,'You know, Godfrey, there's nowt for it but run the b....... out.''

Everything about Bradman was lapped up. R.S.Whitington in Bumper (1953) mentioned that ``When World War II broke out Bradman was given twenty-one lines in Who's Who-eight fewer than the more topical Hitler, seventeen more than Stalin.''

``Give him 300 and ask him to go out,'' shouted a spectator at the Australians v Worcestershire match in 1934 during Don Bradman's innings of 206, the second of the three consecutive double centuries he made against that County. A lady watching the Don score 452 not out in 415 minutes for NSW against Queensland on January 30, 1930, remarked ``Why don't they let someone else have a turn? I am sick of looking at him.''

That the Don was a nightmare to the bowlers is revealed in a despatch by Arthur Mailey in 1949. He wrote ``I felt sorry for those bowlers who were and will be up tomorrow against Bradman. Breaking through his defence is even more difficult than getting clearance from the Taxation Department.I've tried both.''

And what pride the bowlers had after scalping Don is illustrated by Bill Andrews, a Somerset all-rounder in a preface to the memoirs, The Hand That Bowled Bradman (1973). Andrews wrote, ``My life has been peopled by great cricketing names and great characters. This book is about most of them. They include the peerless Wally Hammond, who, I suspect, vetoed my one real chance of a Test place, and Don Bradman, who figures in the title of this book. At Taunton in 1938, he gave me his wicket. He took a blind swipe and I bowled him. Hence the light hearted greeting I have used ever since when meeting someone for the first time, `shake the hand that bowled Bradman'. Perhaps, I should add that he had scored 202 at that time !''

Anything linking the Don was news worth listening. And so was this apochrypal story in 1994-95 while England was touring Australia losing match after match. Sir Bradman was asked what he thought he would average against the current England attack. After thinking for a moment, Sir Donald replied, `probably about fifty,' Surprised, the other said, `But surely, Sir, you'd average more than that. After all, you averaged nearly 100 in Tests, facing bowling attacks that were much stronger than this one. ``True'' Sir Donald said, ``but you must remember I am now eighty five years old.''

Bob Wyatt, England's vice-captain in the infamous Bodyline tour of 1932-33 told an interviewer in 1987 about how Don would have fared against the West Indians roaring through the game at that point of time, ``I never saw a technical weakness in Bradman except that he did not like the really fast stuff, particularly if it was lifting a bit, but, then nobody does. I don't think Bradman would have liked batting against the West Indians, but I think he would have made runs against them.''

However, Ian Peebles, another great essayist of our times assessed in Talking of Cricket: ``A fair impression of a typical Bradman innings may be gained by thinking of all the best strokes one has ever seen, all played by one man in the course of an afternoon.''

An interesting observation on the Don's early years comes from Wally Hammond in Cricket's Secret History,wherein he says, ``Don Bradman was very nervous before going in to bat for at least the first half of his career, and I think it was always the same, but he contrived to hide the signs later. The first time I ever saw him on a cricket field, in a match on our 1928-29 tour, he was playing for NSW and I remember asking Pat Hendren who the slim boy was. `Oh, he's a lad from the backblocks called Bradman-bats a bit, they say. But he looks too frightened to do much today' was what Pat answered. We were to learn better before the game was over, for Don scored 87 and 132 not out.''

Gentleman he was, Bradman enjoyed everything about his batting. His pithy comments were grasped by the media with relish. An article in the Sydney Daily Mirror (1982) mentioned an incident when the Don was dismissed for a duck. ``Gilbert then took the ball. It came over so fast that Wendell Bill edged a catch to the wicket-keeper. Bradman then came in and fell over backwards in trying to dodge the second ball of Gilbert's over. It clipped the peak of his cap and knocked it off his head. The next ball smashed the bat clean out of Bradman's hands for the first and only time in his career. He swung at the next two balls and was competely beaten by each. Gilbert's sixth delivery struck the batsman on the body. Attempting to hook the seventh ball Bradman nicked a catch to the wicket-keeper and Gilbert had taken 2-0. When someone sympathised with Bradman about his dismissal when he returned to the pavilion, he smilingly said, ``it was the luckiest duck I ever made.''

Cardus assessed the Don's batting as one of ``eternal vigilance and a new economy. I asked him once what was his secret. `Concentration. Everyball is for me the first ball, whether my score is 0 or 200.' And then he took my breath away by adding: And I never visualise the possibility of anybody getting me out.' Cardus adds in a different context,'' one afternoon I was walking along Whiteall I saw a newspaper placard: ``Bradman Fails'' and in the stop press I read, ``Bradman b Ryan 58.''

It is absurd to look beyond Jack Fingleton among the Don's contemporaries for someone to have a more objective analysis and assessment of the genius. Both as a cricketer, eloquent writer and chronicler, Fingleton's credentials to speak on the master are unimpeachable. Apart from the great work, Brightly Fades the Don, Fingleton had enriched cricket literature painting Bradman in iridescent colours with his uncanny felicity of expression. ``The World has not seen his equal, nor anybody approaching his equal, in consistency and degree of big scores. I particularly stress the word consistency. Some of aesthetic tastes might have preferred the cultured charm of a Kippax or a Jackson to Bradman's flaying piece; I saw Macartney and knew his genius to be of a different mould from that of Bradman. Repute also has Trumper to be different mould; but in the sheer consistency and robust profligacy of their respective arts, Bradman far outshone others, the English eras of Grace, MacLaren, Haryward and Hobbs not excluded,'' Fingleton wrote in Cricket Crisis. When asked why it was that Bradman made batting look so easy, Ponsford, another legendary star, replied, ``the reason is very simple. Don sees the ball about two yards sooner than the rest of us.''

Jack Fingleton continues, ``His batting stance was unique. His bat touched the ground between his feet, not behind them, like every other batsman and photograph I have seen. He stood perfectly still as the bowler approached; the end of his bat did not act as an escape conductor for energy with that nervous tap, tap, tap on the pitch so common to most batsmen as the bowler ran to deliver the ball.''

``He was at once the despair of the bowlers, the captain and his fieldsmen, the batting worthy struggling at the other end and his comrades in the pavilion. He made it all look so easy, so simple, so pre-arranged. He always made the onlooker feel that a loose ball would be lifted for four to the very place on the boundary to which science required that ball should be sent''.

``His genius was absolute. To bat with him was an education and revelation, not given by any other batsman of the period. Great artists like Trumper and Macartney varied the direction of the shot for sheer artistic satisfaction but Bradman was implacable. He was more interested in runs than art, and in the days when he was playing for Australia you would have searched a long time before you found an onlooker who seriously disagreed with him. He was the undisputed hero of the new-found public, the broadcasting public. He was the darling of the spectator's heart - and justifiably so, because no batsman in history had been so prolific and none of the moderns could approach the standard he set for consistency and sheer honesty of batting purpose.''

And Jack Fingleton concludes, ``All bowlers with the possible exception of O'Reilly, whom he first met in a country game, came alike to Bradman. At one time or another he took up Tate, Larwood (before bodyline), Geary, Voce, Freeman, Verity, Constantine, Francis, Griffiths, Grimmett, Fleetwood-Smith, Ebeling, Blackie, Ironmonger, Oxenham, Quinn, Bell, Morkel, McMillan, and the rest of the world's best. He was wary and respectful always with O'Reilly, but the others he closely analysed and then slashed them apart before he left them bewildered, abashed and out of breath.''

Can any other string of epithets better mirror the character and competence of the Don than what has been quoted above from a stalwart?

Bill O'Reilly whom the Don respected and admired spoke in 1986 on the Don. He said ``There's never been and never will be in my estimation a batsman so good as that fella. I don't care how many you like to pour into one - all the Chappells, the Borders and so on. Forget them, they're just child's play compared with Bradman, and I've seen them all. Bradman was a bloke whose ability with the bat was absolutely inconceivable. The Yanks talk about Babe Ruth and all that. To hell with Babe Ruth. This boy was a modern miracle.''

When the Don faded brightly in 1948, Lindsay Hassett took over as captain in 1949. Hassett was quoted in the Sydney Mirror ``The hardest thing about taking over from Bradman was that you didn't have him in the side.''

A parish magazine in Cheshire (UK) described the Don as ``a living witness to the very important truth that men are not equal.''

The adulation for the Don came in poetry too. The Sunday Sun- Guardian carried the following in November 1936.

``Don, Don, lay the willow on
there was none like you before you;
there'll be none when you are gone.
Come and bat again before us
till the arching sky that's o'er us
rattles with the mighty chorus
``Don, Don, Don!''

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