Young Bradman

140 The Himalayan Men cricket] hold him in awe. His achievements are still to be marvelled at, never to be equalled.’ Ricky Ponting, one of the last generation to meet Bradman, said much the same in his 2013 autobiography: ‘… I was in total awe of him and his every word, his presence was extraordinary.’ This sounded like worship, which hardly equipped someone to inquire what made Bradman tick. And it had been so for a long time. The English scorer Bill Frindall first met ‘the Don’ in 1976: ‘It was like coming face to face with royalty, appropriately enough I suppose as he was undoubtedly a cricketing deity.’ Frindall was someone else who reached for a religious metaphor without thinking it through. He did make an important point; everyone around the old Bradman was on their best behaviour. Jonathan Smith, the teacher-father of English batsman Ed, recalled how, as a guest at Bradman’s home through the teacher-cricketer John Inverarity in the 1980s, the Smiths – husband and wife, and daughter and five-year-old son – ‘took it in turns’ to shake Bradman’s hand. After retirement, in a memoir, Smith asked: ‘Could this serene man really have punished bowlers the world over and dominated Test match cricket for 20 years?’ If someone as intelligent as Smith had to make an effort of imagination to see the young Bradman, how could anyone get to the bottom of him? This helps explain what Brett Hutchins in the first Wisden Australia after Bradman’s death called ‘the preferred version of Bradman’s story’, of Bradman as uncriticised hero. In truth, another version, by Jack Fingleton and Bill O’Reilly and others, was always there; only, people who liked the Bradman myth ignored the rest. Besides, much was said behind Bradman’s back, according to the commentator Alan McGilvray in his 1985 memoir The Game is not the same : ‘… it is extraordinary to look back on Bradman’s career and count the critics who continually looked for flaws’. There was more to it than that; just as we might get on with some people over a drink, but never as a workmate or relation, other cricketers had genuine differences with Bradman. Compton, in his memoir End of an Innings , contrasted the helpful and free-speaking private Bradman (‘the man I liked’) with the ruthless public one (that Compton ‘partly admired, partly disliked’). Again, Compton was saying as much about himself; he was not cut out to be a captain, which was why Hutton was England’s first professional captain. Compton should have known that by crossing the boundary rope, a cricketer enters a place apart from the rest of society where different rules might apply. In fairness, as Compton said, he had no issue with Bradman off the field, whereas Fingleton and O’Reilly and others went out of their way to have a go at Bradman, in print (and presumably they spoke more bluntly to anyone who’d listen). Fingleton left Bradman out of an all-time Australian eleven; at the back of his biography of Trumper (foreword by O’Reilly) Fingleton listed innings by Bradman, besides Trumper, as if seeking to equalise the two. Dick Whitington, who played under Bradman for South Australia – cricket was always a small world – once wrote: ‘You may wonder why I never describe Sir Donald as Australia’s greatest batsman. The reason is that I cannot discount what I have heard from so many of Victor Trumper.’ Was that called for in a biography of O’Reilly?!