Young Bradman

142 The Himalayan Men had argued for the past. ‘Not at all,’ Robinson replied: ‘Next time I’ll argue the opposite side.’ From the next seat Bradman said: ‘But could you argue it as convincingly?’ Once again we come close to Bradman in semi-private. Not only was it an era when journalist and touring cricketer shared the same space – which like so many things had its good and bad sides – but, as Robinson commented, ‘these fragments of conversation show that cricketers at the top of the tree share the interest humble followers of the game take in a topic everlastingly contentious’. While commentating on television on a ‘Big Bash’ match in Hobart on Boxing Day, 2016, Andrew Symonds recalled inviting Sir Viv Richards into an Australian dressing room. The team gathered to listen about West Indian and Australian names of the past they had heard of. As a sign of how hard indeed it is to agree about the past, you can read Symonds’ story two ways. Either it showed an enduring interest in the past, or a collapse in it. Anything before the recent, televised past has become mythical, that you can only respond to with awe, not the intelligence (and, if we are honest, ignorance and prejudice) that we apply to the everyday around us. Irving Rosenwater ended his 90 th birthday tribute to Bradman by wisely likening Bradman’s batting to Dame Nelly Melba’s singing. Each had ‘long passed into folk legend’. Even if you had a recording of either, you could not feel as those who saw or heard the original work. Rosenwater predicted that it would ‘become almost impossible to separate fact from fiction’. In some ways that has proved a strange remark. Even before people on the internet were denying that hijacked jet aircraft on 11 September 2001 hit New York at all (or they did, but in a plot by the United States authorities), some were denying the Nazis’ extermination of millions of Jews. No-one is denying any of Bradman’s innings. The sheer number of news stories about Bradman was sure to throw up some ‘fiction’, even by journalists trying to be accurate; and some were more at home speculating than others. The peculiar nature of fame – that strangers felt they knew the famous and could yarn with them – forced Bradman himself into fictions. His biographer Philip Lindsay recalled that Bradman on retiring as a player was leaving the Melbourne Cricket Ground when a newspaper boy recognised him; Bradman denied who he was; no doubt for the sake of a quiet life. Having to do that often could weary a man. ‘I’m just an ordinary human being,’ Bradman told Ray Martin towards the start of their 1996 interview. As Bradman knew better than anyone, even if he were, he had done extraordinary things. Perhaps that was why he shunned publicity; and truly did, despite the twist by critics that for a man shy of publicity Bradman had a lot of it; in effect, calling him a hypocrite. In truth Bradman could have had twice or ten times as much publicity. He managed his publicity carefully, which is something else; again, Bradman showed self-taught skill, one more thing that in the 21 st century has become a profession. Rosenwater reconciled as well as anyone that Bradman was a normal family man, and golfer; and that ‘Donald Bradman stands for batsmanship as Mark Twain stands for American humour and Sherlock Holmes for inexorable logic’. Rosenwater himself appeared to have trouble separating fact from fiction, as one of his comparisons came out of an