Young Bradman

134 uncompromising. In his ‘how to’ booklet, Bradman said he had never gone out to bat in first-class cricket ‘unless perfectly satisfied that my bat had the best balance of any I could possibly obtain, and I am certain it has played no small part in my success in Test cricket’. While Bradman may sound like a perfectionist – machine-like again - that was only when he had a choice; for his first grown-up match, for Bowral aged 13, he had to use a full-sized bat ‘almost as big as myself’. Here again we see him ‘satisfied’ rather than ‘happy’. For your achievements to make you happy would imply that not achieving at cricket would make you unhappy; if you allow sport, or anything, to define your well-being, you run the risk of becoming ever more unhappy if you have a bad run – which can then make you play less well; and so on. Playing cricket was a process; taking years, or even lifelong-like learning. Other reflective men came to understand that the journey, with its ups and downs, mattered rather than the destination. The first man to sail around the world solo, Sir Francis Chichester – his only stop was Sydney – felt ‘an intense depression’ every time he achieved an ambition: ‘I had not then discovered that the joy of living comes from action, from making the attempt, not from success.’ The satisfaction – the sustained, necessarily balanced feeling of joy from doing something that tested the mind and body – came from within; success was a name given it by those watching. A man learned about himself, not only his chosen field. Bradman must have been level-headed, even in his teens. Aged 20, waiting to hear if his name was among the 12 for the First Test in November 1928, rather than torture himself with waiting – as if worry would change a thing – he told his landlady that he would go to bed and see the newspapers in the morning. According to his December 1930 life serial, he ‘had not been under the blankets ten minutes’ when the radio loudspeaker in a neighbour’s room broadcast the names (living in a house of strangers was one more thing this man who liked his privacy had to make do with, until he could choose). Bradman sat up, listened and heard his name; first, in alphabetical order. He didn’t feel excitement, or any reaction, ‘but felt perfectly satisfied that I had accomplished a task which I had definitely set about trying to do’. More proof of the machine-like man, without emotion? As in his story with a sting after his first century for his school, Bradman made sure his readers knew he was like them: the good news ‘acted as a sleeping draught – in fact I slept so soundly that I was late for work next morning (but forgiven)’. Bradman was the same in January 1930 when he beat Ponsford’s record 437 (‘my feeling was one of complete satisfaction’) and in England. That Bradman did not show off helped him fit in any team; it plainly came naturally to him. ‘I wasn’t a different person in myself, I was precisely the same as I had been before,’ Bradman said in 1988, of his 1930 tour of England: but of course I became conscious of the fact that I was now a public figure and what I did was news and I had to put up with publicity which I had never experienced before. This was the thing that probably bothered me more in my whole subsequent life than anything else, having to put up How did he do it?