Young Bradman

133 How did he do it? ball Bradman may have got his century!’ And Duckworth suggested that England had never been so short of leg spinners, ‘or for that matter all bowlers of any real class’. Does that explain why Bradman’s average was so high; he was lucky after all; he flourished in a time of perfect pitches and fewer outstanding bowlers than before or after? Even if that were true, why was Bradman’s average so far ahead of everyone else’s. In August 1953, reviewing that summer’s Tests, Bradman wrote: ‘The greatest players must constantly be vigilant and strive to improve.’ Other outstanding players, that were ageing as Bradman was beginning, believed the same. Frank Woolley was a non-smoker; not teetotal, though he suggested the ‘strictest moderation’ in both. The ‘born’ batsman was very rare, Woolley wrote in his autobiography; he listed Trumper and Macartney, Hobbs and Bradman. Woolley recalled what must have been a crucial and evidently memorable moment in his life; when the Kent coach, Captain McCanlis, put his arm around the young hopeful Woolley’s shoulder in the nets: ‘You played quite well my boy. You would like to play for Kent, wouldn’t you?’ To which I replied, I would sir, very much indeed. And well I recall his reply. I commend it to every youngster who is on the threshold of a cricket career as well as to many already embarked on it. ‘You will my boy, you will, providing you always remember,’ he said in his slow thoughtful way, ‘that you have never stopped learning about cricket.’ I recall trying to thank him and then he sent me off to do some fielding. In his book that came out the year he was 49, Woolley said he felt he never knew much about the game ‘until I was about 30; that is to say after I had been playing for nearly ten years regularly. Actually one is always learning about it.’ Bradman in a 1960s foreword to the collection Cricket: The Australian Way used some of those exact words: ‘one is always learning’. Some learning could only come after mastering more basic things; Arthur Mailey, for instance, noted at Leicester in May 1930 that after tea Bradman forced the pace; he had learned to pace himself according to how strong or weak the bowlers were, or how tired in the day. Just as Woolley had McCanlis as a mentor, until well into adult life, so Bradman had Grimmett as an example of someone who was so inquisitive, he could not help himself. Arthur Gilligan recalled how Ranji gave a banquet for the 1930 Australians at Brighton. The pioneer googly bowler Bernard Bosanquet, then 52, and Grimmett were in deep conversation, only ended ‘by the night porter turning out the lights of the banqueting hall’. We may find it hard, or pointless, to separate, in others or ourselves, which comes first; does curiosity have to be natural, even a mania, to make us as good as we are, or can we be self-aware enough to treat learning and performance as two sides of a seesaw; if one side ever dips, we have to add weight to the other. It may sound a paradox, that a man can only excel if he is forever on the watch for signs he is not, except that Woodfull, in his 1936 book Cricket , suggested that ‘the man who is too self-satisfied will never get far because from his self-appointed high plain he will not be able to stoop to notice his shortcomings so that they may be remedied’. Such a man was