Donald G. Bradman

Australian cricket player

• Born: August 27, 1908
• Birthplace: Cootamundra, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: February 25, 2001
• Place of death: Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

One of the greatest cricket players in the history of the sport, Bradman shaped the modern game with his complete mastery of the arts of batting and captaincy.

Early Life

Donald G. Bradman was born in Cootamundra, a town in New South Wales, Australia, where his father worked as a carpenter. A little more than two years later, his family moved to Bowral, a small quarrying and agricultural center of about three thousand people.

The career in cricket that was to make Bradman Australia’s most honored and admired athlete began simply and inauspiciously. Bowral had no organized cricket for boys of primary school age, so the young Bradman was restricted to watching older boys playing informal games in the schoolyard. These games inspired him, however, to a series of solitary exercises that were to hone physical attributes and batting and fielding skills rarely matched in the history of cricket.

These exercises were of several kinds. Some, such as hitting a tennis ball against a garage or kicking a football about a paddock, were quite conventional, but the young Bradman proved particularly innovative when it came to cricket. His tools were a golf ball and a cricket stump. For many hours on end, he would throw the ball at a rainwater tank, which guaranteed an irregular rebound, and then protect a wicket he had improvised using the door of an outdoor, covered laundry. Bradman warded off tedium by inventing imaginary games peopled with whole teams of well-known cricketers.

When Bradman became old enough to play on his school’s one team its “First XI” these routines served him well. He immediately began to score freely and soon was asked to play on the Bowral team, where he amassed enormous scores against teams of adult men from other towns. His three hundred runs against Moss Vale in 1926 so impressed his mother that she bought for him a cricket bat it was the first he had ever owned. The performance also prompted the New South Wales state selectors to invite the young batsman to the home of Australian cricket, the Sydney Cricket Ground, so that they could see him in action.

Bradman’s future seemed assured. Bradman was not convinced, however, that he preferred cricket to tennis. To devote himself to the latter, he did not play cricket at all in the 1923-1924 season or in most of the next. He chose cricket only when his employer told him that he could not continually take time off for both. In 1925, at the age of seventeen, he had gone to work in an estate agent’s business in Bowral.

Soon after his appearance before the New South Wales selectors, Bradman’s services were enlisted by the St. George Cricket Club in Sydney. In his first game, he scored 110 runs. His early performances for the team were rewarded with a position in the New South Wales Second XI.

Life’s Work

Bradman’s career in what is called “first-class cricket” international and interstate competition began soon afterward, in 1927, when he played on the New South Wales First XI against South Australia. He again scored a “century” a hundred runs or more in one inning. Doing so in one’s first innings in first-class cricket was, and remains, a rare feat.

The young batsman quickly set about breaking many batting records and quickly caught the eye of the Australian selectors. In the third “test” (international game) of the 1928-1929 series against the English team, he scored his first test century. He would go on to score twenty-eight more before retiring from the Australian team, in 1948.

The statistics of Bradman’s performances suggest the extent of his mastery. He scored a century once in every three times at bat. In test matches, he scored a century twenty-nine times in eighty innings, on ten occasions continuing on to double centuries and twice to triple centuries. In first-class cricket, he scored 117 centuries in 338 innings, for an astounding total of 28,067 runs. His highest score ever 452 not out against Queensland, an inning that set a world first-class individual scoring record was at the Australian interstate level, where he represented New South Wales until 1934 and then South Australia until 1948.

His skills as a batsman were unrivaled in his time extraordinarily quick eye-hand coordination and speed of foot, a supreme power of concentration and relaxation that was visible in his comfortable batting stance, and a rare skill in playing shots so as to steer the ball between fieldsmen. He achieved this despite, or perhaps because of, an unconventional batting style and relatively slight build. He was, however, very strong, lean, and agile.

Bradman’s consistent high scoring prompted the English team of 1932-1933, led by Douglas Jardine, to adopt tactics that disrupted international cricket as none ever had before or has since. To contain the Australian hero, Jardine instructed his fast bowlers to pitch the ball short on the Australian batsman’s “leg” side for a right-handed batsman, this means to his left side. In seeking to protect their upper bodies and heads from the fast-rising ball, batsmen were virtually forced to pop the ball up on the leg side, where up to eight of the eleven English fieldsmen had been stationed to take the catch. Only Bradman proved equal to the challenge, which soon passed with the introduction of rules forbidding the tactic.

Bradman’s athleticism during his mature years was not restricted to cricket. When illness caused him to miss the 1935-1936 South Africa tour with his team, he took up squash to keep fit and later took first place in the South Australian Open Squash Championship. During the Depression, in fact, Bradman became a national icon, proving that Australia was not a backwater of culture. Moreover, as a nonsmoker and teetotaler, he dispelled the idea that Australian sportsmen were crude and dissolute.

At the outbreak of World War II, Bradman enlisted but was soon discharged because of an injury. When international cricket resumed in 1946 with the English tour of Australia, Bradman was thirty-eight years old and suffering a variety of physical ailments. He again scored freely, however, and led a very young and inexperienced team to a resounding series of victories that ushered in an era in which Australian teams mastered all others. Bradman’s career, however, soon came to a close; after the 1948 series in England, he retired. At the end of his final test match, players and spectators alike formed an honor guard as he left the grounds.

Only a year later, Bradman was knighted, the first cricketer to be so honored. He served as chairman of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket from 1960 to 1963 and from 1969 to 1972, selector for the celebrated Australian-West Indies Test series of 1960-1961, and selector for Australian’s national team for thirty years. He also continued a career as a stockbroker and company director that he had begun during World War II after his medical discharge. Throughout his playing days, he had been well versed in international affairs, which so complemented his stature as a sports hero that the long-serving Australian prime minister, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, later asked him, without success, to serve as the Australian high commissioner in London. In 1979 he was named a Companion of the Order of Australia, his nation’s highest civilian honor. He became one of the first ten inductees to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame in 1996 and was selected as one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Century in 2000. Two years later the Wisden panel voted him the greatest test batsman of all time. A further national tribute came in the form of a government regulation: “Bradman” may not be used as part of any trademark except by government-approved institutions.

He married Jessie Menzies in 1932 and was devoted to her until her death in 1997. They had two children, John and Shirley. Bradman died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Adelaide on February 25, 2001, after a bout of pneumonia, at the age of ninety-two.

Significance

No cricketer has ever enjoyed stature to match that of Bradman. One critic called him “the most devastating and triumphant batsman.” Another can think of “no finer cricketing strategist.” Another stated plainly that he “controlled cricket from 1930 to 1948.”

Bradman was also a ruthless player. Even great bowlers commonly admitted that they were so daunted by his skills that they were afraid to experiment in attempting to dismiss him, while at the same time they knew that conventional tactics were poor, at best. At all times, Bradman batted with a determination that the bowler must never be allowed to dictate the rate of scoring a tack that very few batsmen are sufficiently skilled to adopt successfully. His lifetime test batting average, 99.94, far outstrips that of all other cricketers and has been hailed as the most dominating statistical performance in any major sport, greater even than Pelé’s goals per game in soccer or Michael Jordan’s points per game in basketball.

Bradman’s supreme prowess made him a constant target of critics bent on spotting weaknesses. As a player, he had so few that his naysayers, some teammates among them, often pointed to personal qualities. He was often called cold and aloof, for his concentration was such that it permitted no fraternization on the field and no mercy for even the slightest weakness in any and every ball bowled to him. He was also highly successful as a captain of Australia. England never won a series against his teams.

During the twenty years of Bradman’s reign in test cricket, crowds were consistently at capacity. Fans often referred to him simply as the Don. Much of his popularity stemmed from his behavior on and off the field. While he was a ruthless competitor, he was perfectly fair and gentlemanly at all times; he once claimed that he wanted to be remembered more for his integrity than for his physical prowess. It is said that he never challenged the decision of an umpire. He was well liked, moreover, for faithfully replying to fan letters until late in life.

Bibliography

Fingleton, Jack H. Brightly Fades the Don. Sydney: William Collins, 1949. An anecdotal depiction of Bradman on and off the field. Fingleton played with Bradman in three series of tests against England and two against South Africa.

Hutchins, Brett. Don Bradman: Challenging the Myth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hutchins looks beyond Bradman’s iconic image to examine how his heroic status was created and sustained and what his popularity says about Australian nationhood.

Moyes, A. G. A Century of Australian Cricketers. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950. Includes good anecdotal depictions of Bradman by a former New South Wales teammate of Bradman who, as a sports editor of the Sydney Sun, was associated with Bradman from early in his career.

Page, Michael. Bradman: The Illustrated Biography. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1983. An excellent, well-illustrated guide to Bradman’s life and the cricket and cricketers of his era. Drawn largely from contemporary newspapers, magazines, and other materials contained in the fifty-one Bradman scrapbooks compiled by the State Library of South Australia.

Parker, Helen, ed. The Spirit of Cricket. Hexham, England: Kensington West Productions, 1999. A picture books that reveals the culture of cricket, with photos of Bradman at his height.

Rosenwater, Irving. Sir Donald Bradman. London: Batsford, 1978. A good biography, which, unlike many earlier books about the cricketer, was able to gauge Bradman’s achievements against those of both earlier and later stars.