Young Bradman

100 Chapter eight: Bradman or machine? His strokes were utilitarian rather than graceful. His main purpose at the wicket was to make runs with the maximum of efficiency and the minimum of effort. Cyril Washbrook, The Silver Lining (1950) Men were hanging back from proclaiming Bradman as extraordinary as he was. Centuries before, men might have explained Bradman in terms of God. Of all the many, many people who have had a say on Bradman, some hinted at it. His biographer Irving Rosenwater in a booklet for Bradman’s 90 th birthday called him a ‘cricketing miracle’; ‘a miracle has been removed from among us’, RC Robertson-Glasgow wrote in the 1949 Wisden . They did not mean Bradman actually did miracles – that is, events explained only by the supernatural. Whether because our age has become so secular, or for fear of blasphemy, no-one has pointed out how alike the stories of Bradman and Christ are: the carpenter’s son, from a small town, travels to the city to meet his destiny. More common is the idea that sportsmen, or artists or actors, are somehow better than the rest of us. During the 1953 Ashes series, Country Life told its English readers: ‘At least we are playing vulnerable human opponents again instead of cricketing supermen of the Bradman era.’ The magazine was airing a far more common belief; that the men before our time, and of our youth, were (on what evidence?!) greater than the latest young men; ‘the gods of our school days’, a young John Arlott called them around the same time. Again, however, no-one believed that Bradman or others really were gods; and by then the Nazis had given ‘supermen’ a bad name. A similar question rumbled in the 1920s: did Shakespeare write his own plays? ‘It is only a strange kind of intellectual perversity which persists in trying to find a mystery where there is no mystery to be found,’ said a book review in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1926. ‘For genius is a gift of the gods, and when it is given, it is given without respect of persons.’ Science would argue that genius comes from within, thanks to upbringing, schooling, or experience. If modern man to his credit shunned superstition, the easy way to explain Bradman, that did not make finding the true reason any easier. While a man could hardly decide when to be born, Bradman became a public figure at a bad time. Until a few years before, you could be famous, yet go unrecognised. Arthur Mailey, wearing ordinary clothes on the Headingley ground during the 1921 Test match, joined spectators who marched on the members’ stand, to ask for their money back because of slow Australian batting. In 1927 the Sydney Sun told the story of how Mailey, Oldfield and Macartney took a team to Canberra. Mailey was bowling. One batsman said at the end of an over: ‘When does Mailey come on?’ ‘He’s going off now,’ Mailey replied. The joke was that the batsmen had been hitting Mailey for runs, and did not even know he was the day’s attraction they had