|
|
|
|
|
  |
|
SIR DONALD™ Wisden CricInfo staff - January 1, 1998
THE AUSTRALIAN sporting public is notoriously fickle, bestowing and withdrawing devotion in a blink, apt to forget even the firmest of favourites within a few years of retirement. Yet the flame of Sir Donald George Bradman, seven decades since he first made headlines, has never burned brighter. No public appearances are expected for his 90th birthday on August 27: almost a year after the passing of his beloved wife, Jessie, Bradman finds them strenuous. But his continued health will be the subject of front-page encomiums, and feature in evening television bulletins: an annual vigil for some years now. Whatever the tribulations of state, the cricket-fancying prime minister, John Howard, will convey congratulations. Never mind that the youngest people with clear recollection of Bradman the batsman are nudging 60 themselves, for his feats appear to be growing larger, not smaller, as they recede into antiquity. In the last decade, the cricket-industrial complex has produced a trove of books, memorabilia albums, videos, audio tapes, stamps, plates, prints and other collectables carrying the Bradman imprimatur, while the museum bearing his name at Bowral continues to derive a tidy income from licensing it to coins, breakfast cereals and sporting goods. A Bradman bat from 1930 changed hands at Phillips in London last year for £20,700, a lifesize Bradman bronze at Christie's in Melbourne for $74,750 six months ago. A second collecting institution has opened in his honour at Adelaide's Mortlock Library. There has been yet another reissue of Bradman's 1958 instructional Bible The Art of Cricket and, despite full-scale biographies in 1995 and 1997, two more books are forthcoming: a complication of tributes and a volume on Bradman's 1948 side. Sir Donald Bradman has become Sir Donald Brandname. MENTION`The Don' in Australia and no-one mistakes it for a reference to The Godfather. Little bits of his legend can be found everywhere. Australian state capitals boast 22 thoroughfares named in Bradman's honour ( Victor Trumper has eight). Australians corresponding with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation do so to PO Box No. 9994: Bradman's totemic Test batting average, a pleasing notion of the Australian Lord Reith, Sir Charles Moses. A newspaper poll last year found that Bradman was the Australian most respondents wanted to light the flame at the 2000 Olympics: at 92, it would be a feat to rank with anything he accomplished on a cricket field. The irony of his beatification is that he was never, as one might imagine, an acme of Australian-ness Australians can count themselves blessed that The Don is still with them. It is 64 years since newspapers, fearful of his prospects after severe appendicitis, first felt the need to set obituarists on him. And Bradman was half his current age when he retried from stock-broking after a `serious warning' from his physician. In some respects, however, Bradman himself has been supplanted in importance by Bradmyth. The idea of him is at least as important as the reality. It is odd, but not really surprising, that the best biography of Bradman was written by an Englishman: Irving Rosenwater's superb Sir Donald Bradman. And, despite the recent proliferation of Bric-a- Bradman, no-one anywhere has tangibly added to the sum of human knowledge about The Don in 20 years. The most recent Bradman biography, Lord Williams's Bradman: An Australian Hero, is a case in point: of 428 footnotes, 244 referred to four titles, two of them pervious Bradman biographies. At one time, it was AtBradman who sought Garbo-like quietude, no less than he deserved after more than four decades as a prisoner of his prowess. Nowadays, Australians do just as much to preserve that distance. The last locally-produced Bradman biography – Roland Perry's The Don (1995) – had as much substance as a comic strip. The last public interview with Bradman– two hours broadcast in May 1996 by Channel 9's top-rating current-affairs host Ray Martin on the basis of a corporate donation to the Bradman Museum – was what Private Eye used to describe as a journey to the province of Arslikhan. It may justly be asked what more of the Bradman saga begs understanding. The Greatest Story Ever Bowled To is so beguiling as it is: uncoached boy from the bush rises on merit, plays for honour and glory, puts Poms to flight, becomes an intimate of sovereigns and statesmen, retires Cincinnatus-like to his unostentatious suburban home. But turning Bradman into Mr 99.94 is a little like reducing Einstein to Mr E=mc². Read most Bradman-arama and you'd be forgiven for thinking that his 80 Test innings were the sum of him. His family is invisible. Precious little exists about Bradman's three decades as an administrator. There is next to nothing about his extensive business career. And no-one, I think, has ever grasped what is perhaps most extraordinary about Bradman: his singularity as a man as well as a cricketer. For the great irony of his beatification is that he was never, as one might imagine, an acme of Australian-ness.
top The Don was a powerful voice in Australia long after he stopped playing above Bradman with Gubby Allen before the First Test of the 1936–37 Ashes series opposite The Bradman Stand at the Adelaide Oval
No bigger brand: a set of Bradman cards given away with Weet-Bix cereal in Australia, 1997. this page, from left Newsbill after Leeds 1930; the end of the 334; Bowral Cricket club, 1926; his favourite photo, taken during his 452* for NSW, Jan 1930 opposite, from left Receiving telegrams after the 452; going out to bat for last time at the SCG; during his last tour of England, 1948; Sydney hails the 452FOR MOST Australian boys, for instance, participation in sport in a rite of passage, an important aspect of socialization. Yet, if Bradman developed close cricketing pals in his Bowral boyhood, they kept remarkably schtum afterwards. The rudimentary game with paling bat and kerosene tin wicket in some urban thoroughfare is one of Australian cricket's coziest images: think of Ray Lindwall and his cobbers playing in Hurstville's Hudson Street, trying to catch the eye of Bill O'Reilly as that canny old soul walked by; or of the brothers Harvey playing their fraternal Tests behind the family's Argyle Street terrace in Fitzroy. Bradman's contribution to the lore of juvenile cricket, by contrast, is one of solitary auto-didacticism, his water-tank training ritual with golf ball and stump. That carapace hardened as Bradman reached cricketing maturity, and set him still further apart. Where the archetypal Australian male is hearty and sanguine, priding himself on good fellowship, hospitality and ability to hold his alcohol, Bradman was private, reserved, fragile of physique and teetotal. Where the traditional Australian work ethic has been to do just enough to get by, Bradman was a virtuoso who set his own standards and allowed nothing to impede their attainment. Australia in the late 1920s, moreover, was not a country that seemed likely to foster an abundance of remarkable men. It was a small subsidiary of Empire, with an ethnically and culturally homogenous population of six million. Even that big bridge was still to come. There were extremes of wealth and poverty, but social mobility was constrained both by economic hardship and the prevailing belief in an underlying social equality. Writing of Australia in 1928, the year of Bradman's Test debut, the American critic Hartley Grattan was amazed by the vehemence of this latter faith: ` Australia is perhaps the last stronghold of egalitarian democracy … The aggressive insistence on the worth and unique importance of the common man seems to me to be one of the fundamental Australian characteristics.' As DH Lawrence described it in his novel of 1920s Australia, Kangaroo: `Each individual seems to feel himself pledged to put himself aside, to keep himself at least half out of count. The whole geniality is based on a short of code of You put yourself aside, and I'll put myself aside. This is Done with a watchful will: a sort of duel.' Bradman, however, was not a `a common man', and he assuredly did not `put himself aside'. In the words of Ben Bennison, who collaborated with 21-year-old cricketer on Don Bradman's Book: `He set out and meant to be king… To the last ounce he knew his value, not only as a cricketer but as a man.' RC Robertson-Glasgow recalled that, at his first meeting with Bradman at Folkestone in September 1930, the Australian was surrounded by piles of correspondence to which he was steadily reaming off replies. `He had made his name at cricket,' wrote Crusoe. `And now, quiet and calculating, he was, he told me, trying to capitalise on his success.' THE TIMES may have been ripe for such individual aspiration. Certainly, Bradman's benefactors on that tour had no difficulty singling him out for gifts and gratuities, not least the Fleming & Whitelaw soap magnate Arthur Whitelaw, who bestowed a spontaneous £1000 (worth around £35,000 today) on Bradman after his Headingley 334. But nothing before or since has paralleled the Caesar like triumph that Bradman's employers, the sports-goods store Mick Simmons Ltd, organized for him when the team returned to Australia, where he traveled independently of his team and was plied with public subscriptions and prizes in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Goulburn and Sydney. It was the beginning of a career in which Bradman showed conspicuous aptitude for parlaying his athletic talent into commercial reward. Leaving Mick Simmons in 1931, he signed a three-part contract worth more than £1000 a year with radio station 2UE, retailer FJ Palmer, and Associated Newspapers (Proprietor Robert Clyde packer, grandfather of Kerry). He endorsed bats (Wm Sykes), boos (McKeown) and books (three while he was playing. two afterwards), irked the Australian Board of Control by writing about cricket in apparent defiance of their dictates, deliberated over effectively quitting Test cricket to accept the Lancashire League shilling for the 1932 season, and swapped states in 1935 to further his career. At a time when Australian industry lurked behind perhaps the highest tariff barriers on earth, Bradman was the quintessential disciple of the free market. NO DISPUTE that Bradman deserved every penny and more. No question of undue rapacity either. As that felicitous phrasemaker Ray Robinson once expressed it. The Don did not so much chase money as overhaul it. Equally, however, Bradman's approach betokens an elitism uncharacteristic of Australia at the time, and a quality that few today would willingly volunteer as a national hallmark. It was this impregnable self-estimation – not arrogance, but a remarkable awareness of his entitlements – that distanced Bradman from his peers. Some criticisms of The Don by playing contemporaries were undoubtedly actuated by jealousy but, all the same, he seems to have been incapable of the sort of gesture that might have put comrades as their ease. The philosophy of Bradman's playing career emerged again in his approach to administration and selection. Biographers have served Bradman poorly by glossing over his years in officialdom. His strength and scruples over more than three decades were exemplary; the foremost master of the game became its staunchest servant. But he largely missed the secular shift toward the professionalisation of sport in the late 1960s and early'70s. His attitude remained that, if a player was good enough, he could profit from the game through other avenues. Again, this does not seem a response of one who understood the struggles of others less blessed. Discussing the rise of World Series Cricket, Bradman told Williams in January 1995 he `accepted that cricket had to become professional'. Yet, as Dr Bob Stewart comments in his recent work on the commercial and cultural development of post-war Australian cricket, I Heard It On the Radio, I saw It On the Television, cricket wages declined markedly in real terms during the period that Bradman was Australian cricket's éminence grise. When he quit cricket, the home Test fee was seven times the average weekly wage. A quarter of a century later it was twice the average weekly wage. Ian Chappell opined in his The Cutting Edge that the pervasiveness of Bradman's attitude of player pay within the Australian Cricket Board' contributed to the success World Series Cricket officials had when a couple of years later they approached Australian players with a contract'. Perhaps these paradoxes of the Bradman myth relate something about the complex Australian attitude to sport. As the Australian social commentator Donald Horne once put it: `It is only in sport that many Australians express those approaches to life that are un-Australian if expressed any other way.' But, as Bradman enters his tenth decade fit for both commodification and canonization, two questions seem worth asking, with apologies to CLR James. First: what do they know of Bradman who only cricket know? Surely it's possible in writing about someone who has lived for 90 years to do something more than prattle on endlessly about the 15 or so of them he spent in flannels– recirculating the same stories, the same banal and blinkered visions – and bring some new perspectives and insights. Second: What do they know of cricket who only Bradman know? A generation has now grown up in Australia that regards cricket history as 6996 and all that. Where are the home-grown biographies of Charlie Macartney, Warwick Armstrong, Bill Woodfull, Bill Ponsford, Lindsay Hassett, Keith Miller, Neil Harvey, Alan Davidson, Richie Benaud, Bob Simpson, even Ian Chappell and Dennis Lillee, plus sundry others one could name? Such is the lava flow from the Bradman volcano, they are unlikely to see daylight. So enough with the obeisances already. Yes, Bradman at 90 is a legend worth saluting. But as the American journalist Walter Lippman once said: `When all think alike, none are thinking.'
Matches 52 inns 80 No 10 Runs 6996 Average 99.94 © Wisden CricInfo Ltd |
|
|
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
| |||
| |||
| |||
| |||
|
