The Don

Ah,Don Bradman WAS also a squash champion,between '35-'36. S.A. Open Champion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bradman

In regards to Bradman's chances of making it past the first round of a decent squash tournament, here's a little tidbit from his wikipedia entry: "Further evidence of his supreme athletic skills was revealed when Bradman missed the 1935–36 tour to South Africa due to illness. During his absence from cricket, Bradman took up squash to keep himself fit. He subsequently won the South Australian Open Squash Championship." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bradman He was a freak, there's just no two ways about it. That starts to rank up there with Jim Thorpe's multi-sport achievements.

Re: Heather Mackay .... just goes to show, once a champion always a champion.

RORY - thanks for the update re Heather McKay. I didn't know she was still playing and still continuing her winning ways. What an athlete. She's got to be the Ken Rosewall of squash. You may have introduced another subject for Spiro's consideration: which athletes, in any sport, have most impressed the forum with their staying power. Could be a good one.

Jack, sorry to enter this conversation late, but I wanted to add to the force of your point regarding Heather McKay. It may be of interest to note that for the past two years she has been the Australian over 65 Womens tennis singles champion. Is it worth considering an athletes achievements outside of their "prime"?

JULIAN, sports in various countries rise or go into decline at different times. The great WI bowlers you refer to came to the fore in tandem with some very fine WI batsmen, so the WI cricket team of those years was the tops. But look at the team today. In the doldrums. The Wallabies last won the RWC just 8 years back, but they may not even make the quarterfinals this year. Tennis anyone? Australia and the US were both powerhouses for many, many years, but they're both in the doghouse now. And so on through a whole slew of different sports. Nobody has a satisfactory answer as to why this is. Interest, some people claim. Far fewer tennis courts in Australia, therefore less interest, therefore fewer good players coming through. Oh, really? Then how to account for the failure of the ABs to win the WRC since 1987? It wasn't through lack of interest - everybody knows that interest in all aspects and grades of rugby in the Shaky Isles is seldom anything but white hot. Similarly, how come US baseball and basketball teams were beaten in recent Olympics when every high school and college in the entire country plays in some kind of league, every small-town sandlot and asphalt court sees action, and a TV audience of millions tunes in the the majors and the NBA? Answer: it was just time for those particular sports to have a down period. Re. Roger Federer: he's a great player but he can't be spoken of in the same breath as Bradman unless he wins the grand slam three times. The great Rod Laver won it twice, but nobody put up his name as a rival to The Don. So I would suggest that Roger has to go Rod one better to make valhalla.

you cant say one era is better than any other.. thats just silly...

Julian, the point here is the rules of surfing were changed to suit Kelly Slater and not the other way around....

I think that the point about standards is that they are all relative - you can only be as good as those who you compete with at the time. However, in comparing greatness across different times, all time periods are not equal. For something like cricket, there are better times than others. Batting in 2007 is far easier than in 1987, for a whole host of reasons. For all bar one of the test teams it is infinitely easier - you didn't have to face four great express pace bowlers that the West Indies played. Marshall, Garner, Holding, Roberts, Ambrose, Walsh, could and did bowl at 150 km plus, for hours on end. Not only that, but they're control of pace, direction and bounce was devastating. Each individually would comfortably lead the popgun attacks of today's cricket nations. You make the point that athletes all start out equal. That's true in a wider sence, but in getting to the top, there are a lot more people of a higher quality which you would need to beat to get there. For example in Tennis the late 1980s was regarded as a standout era of great players (McEnroe, Lendal, Becker, Edberg, Wilander, Pat Cash (when fit)). However, the standard of the top 100 was nowhere near that of today. Today every player in the top 100 can beat 98 other players on any given day (a certain Swiss man is the exception that proves the rule). In the 1980s that wasn't the case. That means winning just one ATP tournament today requires you to be better on more days and against more opponents than before. A case in point, in 1990 John McEnroe got back to number 4 in the world by winning tournaments against weak fields where the top 3 (Lendal, Becker, Edberg) were not playing. He was well past his best and even admitted that there was a signifcant gap between him and the top 3. Today, he simply couldn't do that because the other players are all very good. This might sugget that in 5 years we are putting Federa in the same boat as Bradman.

JULIEN, that's a good post, but you've opened up a rather large can of worms. Two, in fact. Firstly, if you restrict the timeframe of sporting greatness, then you have to leave out all the greats who went before. You have to leave out not only Bradman, but Ruth and Hogan, Don Budge, Sugar Ray, Dally M, Fangio, Jim Londos...the list goes on and on. It's unquestionable that the competition today - now that talented people can earn a good living at a multitude of sports - is far more numerous than it was, but to achieve greatness, Bradman had to score off legends like Grimmett, O'Reilly and Larwood. Hogan had to outshoot Nelson and Snead. Budge had to beat Perry and Vines. Sugar Ray had to dominate Graziano and LaMotta. The competition was less in number in those days, but it was every bit as intense, not just for whatever money was involved - peanuts compared with today's purses - but because people back then had just as much desire to come out ahead as they do today. Wanting to be best seems to have been programmed into us a zillion years ago. And I must also take issue with your claim that the standard in sports was lower in the old days. It couldn't have been because it WAS the standard at the time. The fact that records keep getting broken reflects all the usual suspects: better-designed equipment, better nutrition, better training methods, better sports medicine etc. But athletes, whatever their disciplines, started out equal 50, 60 or 70 years ago just as they do today. Get back to us on this. You write well.

Terry, that's an interesting point about changing rules to depower somebody who has an overwheming ability in a sport. A couple of instances come to mind: there's a story - whether apocryphal or not I'm not sure - that when Dally Messenger went on tour with the Kangaroos, and they played a midweek, secondary team in the North of England, a special rule was brought in for Dally M whose prowess was already legendary. When getting the ball, so the story goes, to give the other side a chance to tackle him, he had to run to the nearest sideline, then run to the other sideline before going for the tryline. How about that? The other instance has to do with Bob Falkenburg, the American who won Wimbledon in '48 (he beat John Bromwich because The Brom made an awful mistake when holding match point). Falkenburg, in the era of wooden racquets, had the biggest serve of anybody - bigger than Parker or Gonzales or Hoad. And at one exhibition tourney, the organizers asked him to serve from three feet behind the service line. It didn't matter. He still served blinding aces. (Second in the wooden racquet speed department was the Aussie, Colin Dibley. But that was years later.) However, these rule changes were only one-offs, and Lindrum's sensational break against, was it Joe Davis? resulted in a permanent change.

I believe that the best person to compare the Don with is none other than Kelly Slater. While surfing is one of those sports (like diving and gymnastics) where there's more subjectivity than objectivity in the scoring, the simple fact is that 7 world titles, 3 more than anyone else, the spread of time between them (over 10 years between first and latest world titles), length of time he's been surfing, and the shear difficulty in continually going to the well to be 'up' month-in-month out, flying around the world, living out of a suitcase, is very difficult. Also consider this in a sport who's community values are almost the antithesis of professional sport. The fact that he single-handedly destroyed Australia's previous dominance of the sport is just another by-product of an incredible determination. And that's what elite sport is. The ability to not only use your talents, but to do so time and again when the pressure is on. The other sports you talk about (Lindrum, Mackay) while very notable, are just not comparable because of the timeframe. There were very few opponents - sport was not a worldwide phenonmena and standards in all sports were much less.

How many players in any sport have forced a change in the rules to try and restrict their dominance? Walter Lindrum was truely dominant in his sport of Billiards and was rarely, if ever, beaten. I agree that the Don, Heather Mackay were also greats in their sports, but so was Lindrum, and trying to compare competitors in varying sports is a mission impossible.

steve redgrave? 5 gold medals at 5 different olympics is a fair effort....

Jack has convinced me that Heather McKay must rank with Don Bradman as an athlete who was so much better than her other competitors she set standards that will never be reached again in her sport. I wouldn't have bet against the Don, though, winning the first round of a major squash tournament. He gave up cricket for a year when he was 16, I think, to play tennis. He was good enough at tennis to ponder about the possibility of making a sports career in the game. And many decades later he was such a good golfer he beat his age in rounds in his 70s. My guess is he would have been a handy squash player.

Hi Zolton, Sorry, I went by your comment on my comment, and have only just found it. Re. Michael Jordan and Jim Thorpe. There's often somebody who dominates a sport in their time - like Tiger and Roger do these days - and MJ certainly topped the NBA in his day. But so did, at various times, Bob Cousy, Wilt Chamberlain, Larry Byrd et al, and today you have Cobie Bryant ruling the roost. But all these players excelled, at the greatness level, at one sport only, while Jim Thorpe was, I believe, and I may be wrong here, the last athlete to win an Olympic gold medal and go on to truly star as a football player. He also played pro baseball with the Giants, the Reds and the Boston Braves. Although good enough to make these teams you won't find him in the baseball record books, while his prowess on the gridiron is legendary. But that was in the days when American football was mainly a running game, and Jim was a fabulous ball carrier according to the top sportswriters of the day like Granny Rice . These days, in the NFL, on third and short - maybe even just two yards - the QB will, often as not, pass the ball. Which is one of the reason why I'm a rugby fan.

jesse owens in his sport was pretty good

I take your point, Spiro, that a batsman in cricket has had it for the innings if he makes a mistake and is made to pay for it. But bear in mind that there is no law that says a batsman must offer a stroke. Conversely, he can legally block the ball for the entire over then get a rest. A squash player, however, must stroke the ball well enough, on his opponent's serve, in order to regain serve, retain it and go on to win. Don Bradman had a century-rate of 36% in his 80 test innings, a remarkable feat. But Heather McKay won a total of 30 Australian and British (read World) championships in a row. And also found time to win 5 North American racquetball titles, and racquetball, with its much biggest court, its super-bouncy ball, and its killer rollout shots, is a vastly different game. Let's just say this: Don would never have got past the first round of a quality squash tourney, and Heather would have been lucky to score 5 runs against Harold Larwood.

On a Bell curve Don Bradman was several standard deviations better than any other batsman in the history of cricket. I quess Heather McKay was on the same plane, too. I would argue, though, that the degree of difficulty in being overwhelmingly better than any other player in the history of the game goes with cricket, mainly because in theory, at least, one mistake and you are out as a batsman. A squash player, like a golfer, has many chances to put right the mistakes that he or she makes. A feature of these clips is the bat speed that Bradman generated. Sometimes his bat looks like the wings of a bird, all blurred with the speed of its movement. Bradman used a light bat, two pounds three ounces, and played many cross bats shots which would have been difficult using the modern three pound bat.

yeah its an interesting debate. Lots of poms will use the ol' "but the bowlers were much worse back then" and the Kiwis say "but you only ever really played against England back then" to try and talk Dons status down. The truth is yes, he did play most of his games against England, but England were the worlds best team of that era. Yes the bowlers were not as good as they are now but also the pitches were not covered, the bats were like the ones you buy 8 year olds from Kmart and on average the fields were larger (very few ropes in those days). I think the only way you can judge great players over generations is how much they dominated their era. Don averaged 99.6 - his close rival of that time was still around 60 odd..... If you can show me another sports person that on average is over 30% better than anyone of their time I would be very very shocked.