Young Bradman

124 by the 2008 crash had become ‘too big to fail’, and Muralitharan too important for Sri Lanka to give up as a chucker, so Australia insisted on the death of bowling at the line of the body. It was for the good of Bradman and all batsmen who had to face it, and might have been for the good of the game; except that bodyline (without the name, naturally) became habit from the 1970s, or 1960s, instead. By denying bowlers the final tactic they could think of against Bradman, the authorities not only limited bowlers, but Bradman as well; he did not develop into what he could be. Jardine did not only use bodyline against Bradman; as important, for cutting Australian runs, was the threat against lower-order batsmen. The Australians’ last four batsmen in ten bodyline innings only once made more than 21. Whoever left the dressing room to face bodyline may have agreed with John Arlott: ‘They call it a team game, but in fact it is the loneliest game of all.’ That suited Bradman’s character. Asked in his 1988 radio interview if he had a lonely childhood, Bradman gave another of his peculiar, defensive answers: ‘Not lonely in the sense that you use the word’; he went on to explain that he had ‘lots of young friends at school’, but none living close by. If a friend had been a few doors away, would Bradman have not become who he was? Vic was four years older, a big difference for youths; except that some brothers that far apart have stuck together. Whether Bradman was solitary by choice or chance, the commentator Brian Johnston spotted something that few others did: for Bradman, as for Boycott, ‘cricket came first in their lives’: ‘They were both loners who would be happier in their hotel rooms, conserving energy and resting, rather than being ‘one of the boys’ and enjoying a gay social life.’ If overdoing ‘gay’ pleasures - Johnston, growing up between the world wars, meant ‘jolly’ – was a vice, loners in hotel rooms could have vices too. The alcoholic homeless Londoner John Healy, who took up chess in prison, made a point in his memoir The Grass Arena easily taken for granted; about how champions and masters of chess led ‘normal lives’. A fellow prisoner told Healy how the champions began at an earlier age than Healy, and went to ‘good schools, they drink tea instead of methylated spirits’. Tea was, as Geoffrey Tebbutt wrote after the 1930 tour, one of Bradman’s How did he do it?