Young Bradman

122 he was aloof and looking to make money (‘mercenary’, Cary wrote) or not - people interpreted differently the same words and behaviour. In a May 1931 article, Maurice Tate described a ‘genius’ as different from a coached, ‘made’ player. A genius had the talent: but he knows that this alone is not enough. He gets to work with determination, enterprise and patience to make the most of it. This may take him a good many seasons, but he keeps pegging away and often his genius is only recognised when he has forced recognition of it. Tate had aired the difference between men excellent enough to make a living at cricket, and those who kept improving to become the very, very best. AC MacLaren had seen that Clem Hill, Monty Noble and Reggie Duff, the earlier self-taught Australian batsmen, were ‘superior to the taught ones and always will be for a great batsmen invariably has some peculiarity which conduces to his prominence which no coaching can teach’. Any school, or workplace, would find that awkward; even if it was in its interest to bring on the genius, so that it could claim the glory, an institution was used to average people. A useful witness was the British sports broadcaster Raymond Glendenning. The closer you get to sport, he wrote in a 1953 book, ‘the more you realise how hard and narrow is the way of the would-be champion’: It demands a body able to stand up to an incredibly tough routine until physical action becomes mechanical. It requires a mind so absorbed in its subject that, even after that monotonous grind, it is still eager to cope with new situations, new problems and new difficulties. The champion is the man who always remembers that you have never finished learning, that the more you know about any sport the less you know about it. We either don’t want, or haven’t the time, to put in the work necessary to reach the dizzy heights. Men who shared the same dressing room as Bradman, those closest physically to him, may have known all that, even better than understanding observers such as Glendenning; and if those teammates could not or would not ‘put in the work’, they may have resented seeing Bradman do it. As Glendenning spelled out, elite sport (like the broadcasting of it?) as a ‘grind’ implied unsmiling professionalism, and that amateur cricketers would fall short, either because of weak characters or because they simply could not spare the time to master the routine. In fact any difference between amateur and pro’ was not that simple. Jardine, applier of bodyline, was an amateur. Bradman ended his 1930 memoir as ‘a firm believer in playing the game always as a sport and not a business’. Either Bradman was already a hypocrite or his amateur’s attitude was one reason he reached the ‘heights’, and stayed there. In the 1996 interview, it was telling that he responded with feeling to a long-dead choice in his life. Ray Martin asked: ‘Why did you never go to England and become a professional, in 1930?’ ‘Because I didn’t want to become a professional, I played cricket because I loved it, and not for a living. I think if I’d become a professional, I’d have lost the enjoyment of playing.’ How did he do it?