The Bradman Legend is 100 not out and still going strong

In a recent television program on cricket, Mike Coward, one the game’s finest and most thoughtful writers, wondered whether Test cricket – and with it the memory of Don Bradman’s fabulous exploits – would survive in 50 years time.

The feeling behind this comment was that One Day cricket and, especially, Twenty/20 cricket might over-run the longer forms of cricket, a bit like the prickly pear infestation.

On 27 August 2007, the centenary of the birth of Donald George Bradman, let it be proclaimed that the Bradman legend of the marvelous boy from the bush who changed the record books forever will never be forgotten because, it can be safely said, there will never be a batsman who over a career of two decades will ever record the statistics that Bradman did.

Comparisons are made between Bradman’s scoring feats and Babe Ruth’s home run record.

But it is flattering to Babe Ruth and unfair to Don Bradman to link the two together.

Ruth’s achievements have been emulated. Bradman’s achievements with the bat will stand forever, in splendid isolation.

As Phil Derriman pointed out last week in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bradman averaged just above or below 100, no matter what level of cricket he played in: 86.8 in grade cricket, 110.19 in Sheffield Shield, 95.14 in all first class matches, 99.94 in Tests.

That 99.94 statistic is the most famous statistic in cricket.

Don Bradman needed four more runs to have the amazing average of 100 for every Test innings he played.

Charles Davis is a scientist who has done some wonderfully exact analyses of how much better Bradman was than any other batsman in terms of standard deviations.

Davis has written that an intense scrutiny of the score books in Tests Bradman played in suggests that there might have been occasions when runs scored by Bradman were given to another player.

He cites the score book for the eight-day fifth Test of 1928/29 against England at Melbourne with a ‘problem’ boundary attributed to Jack Ryder when it is possible that Bradman should have been credited with the four runs.

My view on this goes back to a practice of Japanese master potters who always made a small imperfection in their masterpieces to bring out the truth that perfection is boring.

The slight imperfection, if we can call his 99.94 Test average that, highlight the fact that Bradman was a batting Superman whose exploits are now for the ages to wonder about and admire.

The marvellous aspect of the Bradman legacy is that his mastery was maintained over an extremely long period of time.

He was no bright meteor bursting across the sky and then fading out quickly, like the other boy prodigy of his generation, Archie Jackson.

“I am as constant as the northern star,” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says. This was true of Don Bradman, too.

In all the adversity of the Depression, of a vicious bowling attack in the Bodyline Series aimed at maiming him, in frequent ill-health, with the expectations of a nation bearing down on him, Bradman, ‘Our Don,’ invariably produced the great innings.

And invariably with a slight smile on his face.

Millions of words have been written about Don Bradman. Sometimes they are as succinct as the newspaper billboard in London on one of the tours in the 1930s: ‘He’s Out!’

In a recent edition of The Southern Highlands Branch Newsletter, which is edited by Rodney Cavelier, himself the author of arguably the best essay on Bradman, there is a fine tribute by Andrew Leeming that does justice to the genre of Bradmania.

“While Don Bradman is regarded as the greatest batsman to have played cricket, he was more than just a cricketer. It was said of him that when it came to Bradman the batsman, there were never enough fieldsman; when it came to Bradman the man, there weren’t enough words. Don Bradman was also a contradiction: his batting was both visceral and cerebral, it was orthodox and yet unorthodox, it was poetry and murder. Don cherished cricket as much as any amateur could, yet he played it with a ruthlessness that even had professionals gasping.”

The Bradman legend is now 100 not out. Now for the seemingly inevitable second 100 to come …