Young Bradman

143 The Himalayan Men author’s head. In a supplement to mark the ‘Turn of the Century’ in January 1950, the Daily Mail reporter Geoffrey Simpson summed up Bradman after his playing days as well as anyone. In 1930, Bradman startled the game: The huge scores which flowed from his bat in subsequent years are too numerous to list, but they established Bradman indisputably as the greatest run-maker the game has known. He may have lacked the artistry of Woolley, the majesty of Hammond, the perfection of Hobbs, but for stamina, concentration, mastery of stroke, ability to rise to the big occasion, Bradman surpassed them all, and we may never see his like again. Already Simpson was posing the question that would decide, at least partly, Bradman’s reputation; would someone be like him? At first, everyone in England had memories of Bradman, having last seen him in 1948. As teenagers around 1946, at Reading cricket club, the future Surrey and England batsman Ken Barrington was batting and bowling in the nets with Colin Crombie, who recalled for Barrington’s biography: ‘He was Bradman, I was Hutton.’ In his English Cricket in 1945, Cardus had given his verdict: ‘it is certain and can be deduced almost mathematically or geometrically that Bradman’s records will be surpassed before we are much older …’ Time would show how stupid Cardus was. Doubly stupid, because he guessed wrong, and pretended to be so sure about the future – and the past, as he claimed that Bradman before the war – having made 3840 runs against England at an average of 91 – was ‘inevitable’. Surely something so far from the norm was the opposite of inevitable? By 2008, Ed Smith opened his book What Sport tells us about Life with what he called ‘the Bradman problem’, that ‘for all the new training, better diets and vast talent pool – no one has got anywhere near him. How’s that for human evolution.’ Smith was as certain as Cardus had been: ‘there really will never be another Bradman’. At least rather than giving himself Cardus’ bogus cloaks of mathematics and geometry (and nonsensically adding ‘almost’ – surely something is mathematical, or it isn’t?), Smith offered three reasons, all valid: ‘better defence, more information and a higher base level of achievement’; all signs of evolution, by the way. Smith however, for someone who as a five-year-old had come away with a precocious memory of Bradman (‘I remember meeting a shrewd-looking old man who seemed to have a sharp, analytical expression’) was oddly inexact. For cricketers had overhauled some of Bradman’s records – the shortest ones, for a single innings. The record for runs in a Test series, let alone his career averages, were the unscaled, Himalayan ones. This was because of a reason that Smith missed from his list, presumably because although good enough to play for England, he never made a winter tour. He either never felt, or took for granted, the sheer grind of elite cricket, the same as in other sports and related entertainment, such as orchestras, and business generally. To take as much money as the market would give, a sport’s calendar had spread to more or less fill the year. That calendar’s routine had become, while outwardly glamourous, a boring round of hotels, airports, and venues. That everything was luxurious and looked