Don Bradman

1908-2001

Australian cricket player

Sir Donald Bradman was widely regarded as the greatest batsman ever to play the game of cricket. Scoring an average of 99.94 runs in Test matches over the course of his 20-year career from 1928 to 1948,

Bradman far outshone players who were considered great if they averaged fifty runs. He scored more triple centuries (6) and more double centuries (37) than any other batsman in the history of the game. On average, he scored a century in every three innings he played.

"I Was Just Enjoying Myself"

Born in the small Australian town of Cootamundra in New South Wales in 1908, Bradman grew up in an agricultural family. When he was two years old his parents, tired of attempting to scratch out a living on difficult land, moved Bradman, his brother, and his three sisters to Bowral, a small town in the southern highlands of New South Wales, where the climate and soil were more hospitable. Bradman was a quiet child, with few friends, and often entertained himself by tossing a golf ball against a brick water tank near his house, rebounding it and hitting it again, hour after hour.

A cricket stump is used much like a bat is used in baseball, but is much narrower than a bat—only an inch in diameter, so this was a difficult feat. As Dave Kindred noted in Sporting News, Bradman said many years later, "I was just enjoying myself. It never entered my head that I was training my eyesight and movements."

Later, Bradman received a cricket stump from his father, a battered and repaired hand-me-down. He was delighted with it. His mother told him that if he played well in an important game and scored more than 100, he could have a brand-new bat. Instead of 100, he scored 300, so he got three bats.

Bradman left intermediate high school when he was fourteen, but he played on local cricket teams, and was soon noticed by scouts for the New South Wales team. In 1927, when he was nineteen, he was invited to play for New South Wales. In his first match with the team, he scored 118, the first of his 117 first-class centuries.

Five-feet-seven and lightly built, Bradman made up for his lack of brute strength with speed, footwork, timing, and strong wrists, as well as stamina and a determination to keep scoring runs. Other batters might be content to score one century; Bradman kept batting, aiming for two, or even three.

In 1928, Bradman moved to Sydney and was chosen to play for Australia against England in a Test match at Brisbane. Although he failed and was dropped, he returned to play in the third Test at Melbourne. He made 79 and 112, and finished that Test series with an average of 66.85.

"A Beacon of Hope"

In the following year, Bradman scored an average of 139.14, and was widely praised as a hero of the sport. According to Kindred, sportswriter E.W. Swanton wrote of Bradman in 1930, "The stranger seeing him for the first time must have noticed the exceptional quickness of his reactions, his speed between the wickets and the lithe fitness that enabled him to take the longest innings in stride.… If perfect balance, coordination and certainty of execution be accepted as the principal ingredients of batsmanship, we who watched Don in his early manhood will not hope or expect ever to see its art displayed in a higher form."

In those days of the Great Depression, Bradman was such a hero in his native Australia that when he was batting, avid fans following the game on the radio would stop driving in order to hear the plays; people would not catch a train or a tram home from work or to do errands until he had finished batting. Outside the offices of newspapers in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Brisbane, crowds gathered to watch the scoreboards that the papers sponsored and cheer for every run Bradman scored. As a reporter for the London Times wrote in Bradman's obituary, "He was, for the army of the unemployed, their beacon of hope."

All this praise led some other players to be jealous of him, and some criticized his self-assured manner. Others, playing on the English team against Australia, developed a strategy of "bodyline" bowling, which involved deliberately throwing the cricket ball at the batsman's unprotected body and head. The tactic, which was legal at the time, was successful in intimidating many players and securing wins for England, but ultimately led to injuries, bad feeling between the two nations, and even threats of canceling the competition. Bradman disliked being the target of bodyline bowling as much as any player, but when asked about it, only said coolly, "It was not, you might say, in the spirit of the game," according to Kindred. The practice of body-line bowling was soon made illegal.

In April of 1932, Bradman married Jessie Menzies, whom he had known since childhood. They would eventually have one daughter and one son. In the ensuing years, he suffered bouts of illness, culminating in appendicitis and peritonitis; his condition was so grave that the Australian press reported that he had died.

Chronology

Awards and Accomplishments

While recovering, Bradman did not play. He and Jessie moved to Adelaide in 1935, where he had been offered a job as a stockbroker; he accepted it, believing that he should not rely on cricket alone to provide an income. However, as soon as he moved to Adelaide, he was chosen as captain of the South Australia team, and then as captain of the Australian team for the Test series against England in 1936-1937. Although Australia ultimately won the series, the competition was marred by various rifts between factions on the team, and by the fact that players' wives could not accompany them to competition. In the 1938 season, Bradman broke his ankle in the final test, which Australia lost to England, and spent the rest of the season out of play.

In 1939, when World War II broke out, Bradman volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force, but was assigned to teach physical education in the Army. However, various injuries led the authorities to discharge him from service in 1941. He returned to the stockbroker's firm, but by 1945 it was bankrupt and his employer was arrested for fraud. Bradman founded his own company and did well.

He was back in play for the first postwar tour in 1946-1947, and led Australia to victory. His presence in the game became for many Australians a reminder of "normal," pre-war life, as well as a reminder of Australia's cultural and historic links to the British Empire.

"I Don't Laugh Much About It"

In 1948, his final year of play, he vowed that he would go the whole season without losing a match, and he did. His triumph was only marred by the events of his last game. As Kindred noted, Bradman needed only four runs in that game to reach a 100-run average for his entire 20-year career. Surprisingly, he did not score at all, an event known as a "duck." In an interview in 1996, a television reporter asked Bradman if he ever laughed to think his duck was the most famous one in the history of the game. Although forty-eight years had passed since that day, and although he had received a standing ovation from the English fans when he left the crease for the last time, Bradman said seriously, "No, I don't laugh much about it."

Bradman was knighted in 1949, the first Australian cricketer to receive this honor. He continued to work as a stockbroker until the mid-1950s, when poor health forced him to sell the business. After this, he became involved in the administrative levels of Australian cricket, working as a Test selector. He was also chair of the Board of Control from 1960 to 1963 and from 1969 to 1972.

In 1979, Bradman was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Bradman's wife Jessie died in 1997, and grief struck him hard. He died at his home in Adelaide, Australia, in 2001, after suffering poor health for some time. He was ninety-two. In summing up Bradman's popularity, a reporter in the London Times wrote that Bradman was so admired by Australians that "for most of the second half of the [twentieth] century, he would have been the people's choice as President of Australia." And as former England captain Brian Close told a reporter in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, "He gave Australia a lot to live for and I doubt he will ever be surpassed."

FURTHER INFORMATION

Periodicals

"Don Bradman: Obituary." Times (London, England) (February 26, 2001): 21.

Kindred, Dave. "A Bat, a Ball and a Ruthian Legend." Sporting News (April 23, 2001): 70.

"Sport Mourns for Sir Don: Cricket." Coventry Evening Telegraph (Coventry, England) (February 26, 2001): 43.

Sketch by Kelly Winters