Young Bradman

119 Bradman or machine? Another reason was that the sheer number of boys compared to teachers meant a boy did not have much individual attention, the only way to bring out what was natural to him. Instead you had coaching ‘on mass- production lines’ in the words of Walter Robins (‘probably the best pal I had in England’, Bradman said in old age). Robins in 1949 saw many shortcomings – too few coaches, who mostly were not very knowledgeable. Nor did Robins know how to solve it, ‘unless it is possible to set up some central school of instruction’. That implied only more mass-production. And critics had the cheek to call the self-taught Hobbs, Hammond, and Bradman, the mechanical ones. Yet so many said it, there must have been something in it. Trevor Bailey grew up in the 1930s using a bat with Bradman’s (mass-produced) signature, and bowled at him during three of his centuries in 1948. Bradman was his hero. Bailey opened his book The Greatest of my Time with Bradman. Of all batsmen, ‘he is the one I would most like to have on my side’, he concluded, but not the one Bailey most wanted to watch, ‘for he appeared too machine-like’. Did Bailey merely mean that Bradman was without flaws? CLR James was one of the few to challenge the verdict of ‘machine-like’ batting: ‘This is absurd. I have seen some of his greatest innings and I do not wish to see anything finer.’ Opinions differed likewise when men tried to explain how Bradman did it. Colin Cowdrey, for one, connected the two. In the Australian summer of 1965/66, he taught Bradman real tennis in Melbourne one Sunday morning. ‘He was visibly excited,’ Cowdrey recalled in his autobiography ten years later. Bradman had Cowdrey go through the rules for him (‘by the time we began playing a game he understood every tactical situation perfectly’) and, aged 57, staggered the 33-year-old Cowdrey with his speed. Cowdrey was in awe: ‘I was aware not of a man but a machine whirring at my elbow. He was conscious of no mortal thing outside those walls. His concentration and determination were absolute.’ Cowdrey may have reached for the metaphor of machine because it was so unusual for him, an extremely talented games-player, to meet anyone better than him. That could have unsettled his self-confidence. As so often, when men tell stories about Bradman, they tell us more about themselves.