Don

Rest in peace Donald George Bradman of Bowral. The cricketing world will

miss you and will never see the like of you. That should suffice for an

epitaph. He was like Shakespeare in his domain or Ghalib or Chekhov or

Socrates or Babe Ruth or Jahangir Khan. For he changed the parameters of the

possibilities of his chosen passion as few have ever done.

There was a picture in the New York Times around seventy years ago of a

massive George Herman Ruth and a smallish Donald George Bradman shaking

hands. The pride of the Yankees - the World’s greatest baseball player

welcoming the World’s greatest cricketer. Ruth joked about his surprise at

the shortness of stature of Bradman. Don coolly replied,” There is more than

enough of me to get the job done.” They were polar opposites, Babe and Don.

Ruth was huge, a raconteur, a carouser, hitter of massive home runs and one

who changed the complexion of his sport for ever by the force of his

personality. Bradman was simple and unassuming, A great family man and one

to always keep his shots on the ground. He changed the nature of his sport

by the force of his own personality.

Cricket is a game of numbers. So many things get cataloged in the course of

a minute, a game, a season, let a lone a lifetime that in the end sometimes

all that remains is a mountain of numbers. The greatest number in the

hundreds-year old history of the game is 99.94. That’s the test match

average that Bradman ended his career at. 99.94 runs in each innings that he

played. The reason he is regarded as the greatest is that his average is a

mile to the kilometer of the next best in history – Graeme Pollock’s 60.97.

This is for all test batsmen of all time. When Michael Jordan retired, he

was considered the greatest basketball player of all time. His scoring

average – the greatest of all time was 32 points per game. The next greatest

player on average in history is Wilt Chamberlain – merely 2 points behind.

That is how it is supposed to be in the pantheon of greatness over decades.

But Bradman lapped the field of the greatest in the sport. That is why, the

passionate cricket fans – may they be Pakistanis, Indians, Australians,

South Africans or Englishmen consider the Don to be the greatest of them all

and consider him theirs – that he belonged as much to Lahore and Calcutta as

to Adelaide.

He grew up in the tiny village of Bowral in Southern Australia. Being an

only child, he learned to play in his backyard trying to hit a golf ball

with a stump. That simple act that he repeated thousands of time in

imaginary Ashes games against the arch enemy England were where he learned

all that would make him the most despised man in the Empire as he kept

hitting the great English bowling to all corners of whatever park he was

playing in. He once hit a hundred in three overs – THREE OVERS – in a second

eleven game. In test cricket, he scored a hundred every three innings.

He might have made more runs but for the war, that took away 7-8 years in

the prime of his career. But still he came back and ended his career with

that fabulous tour of England in 1947 with his “Invincible” team that did

not lose a single match on a long tour to England. For it was always in

England that he performed his best. He once made 300 runs by himself in a

single day’s play at Bramal Lanes in Sheffield, including a century before

lunch on the first day of a test match. He was so good that he almost caused

the end of diplomatic relations between the English and the Australians. It

was due to the English having come up with a plan to hurt him and his

friends in their quest to salvage some pride by bowling bodyline to the

Aussies. Bradman still came out with an astonishing average of 56 in a

series that was invented to destroy him. The rules of the game had to be

changed to keep the tensions down and the diplomatic relations alive.

In his last test innings, Bradman, at the age of 40 went out to a thunderous

applause and a standing ovation from an English crowd that wanted Australia

to lose yet wanted to see him off in a manner befitting the years of mastery

and pleasure they had gotten from him. They had watched some of his greatest

innings and wanted to let him know. Bradman was so overwhelmed by the

reception that he had tears in his eyes. He took guard and the cheers had

not subsided. He doffed his cap to show his appreciation to the crowd and to

the English team who stood in a line to cheer him. He then missed his first

ball from a leg spinner named Hollies. He got a googly his second ball and

got bowled. Bradman was out for a duck! A zero, when a four in his last

innings would have given him a career average of a hundred. It would also

have taken his career to 6000. That would have been perfection. An hundred

average, when no one else ever had or will ever have an average of 61. Only

Gods are capable of averaging a hundred. Bradman failed to achieve that

God-like perfection. The tears of appreciation that got in the way to

perfection were the manifestation of his humanity.