Young Bradman

135 with publicity which I didn’t want. I was prepared to accept it whilst I was playing cricket or doing something to do with cricket, but I tried very hard to divorce my private life from my public life and this is an awfully difficult thing to do. There was no satisfaction there. The extreme publicity was one more thing that separated Bradman, even from his successful and gifted teammates; perhaps from them most of all. A telling contrast in attitude was in the answering of mail from well wishers. In August 1930, on his end as a player for England, Jack Hobbs told a reporter: ‘At first I determined to reply to each one personally but as the numbers grew I found it impossible and had to give up the idea …’ Hobbs hoped that people would not be disappointed. In 1996, Bradman told Ray Martin: ‘I probably get more fan mail now than I ever did, except on the 1948 tour of England, when it was absolutely incredible.’ It was taking him, a man in his late 80s, ‘about four hours per day’ to answer mail, ‘well into the hundreds’ of letters each week, sometimes asking for advice, ‘but mostly autographs’. It means that 21 st century collectors can easily buy a Bradman signature for £20; less famous, but rarer, autographs go for several times that. The critics could twist that – and all the signed prints, dinner menus and so forth - as Bradman cementing his legacy. If he had refused, he was stand-offish. Bradman, more than Hobbs, was a man of willpower; or a fanatic. Bradman could not leave things undone, or less than fully done, to his satisfaction. Cliff Cary and other critics accused Bradman of thinking of himself and not the team, and making ‘uncalled-for records’. How guilty was he? While it’s dangerous to generalise, let alone about something as vague as culture, because you can find evidence of the opposite of anything, we can at least say that sport was one occupation where only a few could ever How did he do it?