Young Bradman

125 ‘eccentricities’; Bradman made his one third milk, then tea from the pot, and the rest hot water (‘he drinks it in its usual form when so poured out by ordinary mortals’). For Healy more obviously than for Bradman, and like so many others, their chosen intellectual pastime was all-demanding. In a foreword to Tony Shillinglaw’s 2003 book Bradman Revisited , Geoffrey Boycott concluded of Bradman ‘that it was his upbringing more than anything else that shaped his greatness’. By ‘upbringing’ Boycott, with typical single-mindedness about cricket, meant not Bradman’s family and small town, but how he tried to hit a golf ball with a cricket stump (‘a very difficult task for any Test batsman’). As that invented game was so unusual, it’s tempting to make it part of an equation, and add an equals sign and 99.94. Shillinglaw’s work is important because so many others have unthinkingly or explicitly had their own equation in mind; no-one else has ever equalled Bradman, therefore he is beyond understanding. In truth, scientists have long been at work on the mental and physiological processes behind sport. In December 1928, for example, while Bradman was making his debut for Australia, ‘an Anatomist’ in a Sydney Sunday newspaper described in detail how Bradman’s muscles and nerves, controlled by ‘that wonderful unknown quantity, the mind’, worked in the half second it took Maurice Tate to bowl. Among cricketers, Fingleton hinted at an answer beyond the foothills of known psychology: ‘He made his own rules and his imagination did not recognise the limitations which the average Test batsman found himself obliged to observe.’ As that and much other evidence suggests, there was more to Bradman than the technicalities of how he gripped the bat and stood at the crease. In his 1988 radio interview Bradman thought his grip – to be exact, how unusual or important it was – had ‘probably been exaggerated’: ‘I believe my grip was a little different in the sense that I had the blade of the bat slightly more closed,’ due to bouncier concrete pitches. Thus Bradman could keep the ball down, on the on side: ‘It isn’t so much the grip that matters, it’s what you do with it, when you are actually playing the shot,’ he went on: For instance, if you are playing a pull shot, it doesn’t matter which grip you have, you can either open the face so the pull will go up in the air, or you can close the face and roll over it as you play the shot, to try to keep the ball on the ground. It’s what you do with your wrists, with the actual production of the shot. The pull shot, to a ball rising about waist height or less, that he tried to pull between mid on and square leg was, as Bradman agreed, his trademark; ‘probably the best shot I had and developed it over the years’. As any batsman has to play the pull across the line of the ball, here, as Bradman said, people gained the impression that he played with a cross bat. Vivian Richards, Bradman went on, had ‘very, very much the same grip as I had, and his stroke production was very much in the same pattern. You don’t hear people going around saying how unorthodox he is, that’s just his style of play, that was his manner.’ The interviewer Norman May asked if the grip hampered strokes on the off side. For a cover drive, Bradman agreed, you had to angle your blade How did he do it?