Young Bradman

147 The Himalayan Men Woolmer could not speak of Bradman from experience, but noted that ‘the basic principles of the game have not changed for 100 years. Sir Donald Bradman must have understood what was needed as he was quite simply the best exponent at not getting out.’ And, as Woolmer could have added, Bradman also scored so many runs before he was out. Helped by the men he played among as a ‘boy from Bowral’, let alone in Bowral, Bradman understood . Are the ever more coaches, psychologists, nutritionists, and media managers a help to understanding, or no more than crutches to nurse ever more pressed-upon elite athletes for a few years before they collapse physically or mentally, or both; or – unsettling as it is for any parent to think – are coaches and the like self-interested, blundering parasites, who would see Bradman, a lad who thought for himself, as a threat? We would like to think all’s for the best. ‘I believe there is a general tendency for mankind to improve,’ wrote Ray Robinson in 1951. The very last words of Brigadier Sir John Hunt’s 1953 book, The Ascent of Everest , were: ‘There is no height, no depth, that the spirit of man, guided by a higher Spirit, cannot attain.’ That was fair enough, as man soon was walking on the Moon. Everest was, as Hunt predicted, climbed again; indeed, while still deadly dangerous, it has become routinely climbed. Why has the Bradmanesque in batting not become routine? The new formats of cricket do not allow the time; only there’s more to it than that. The most gifted young cricketers in England and Australia may be playing for their university, at an age when Bradman made his first Test century. Any blame for those youths not progressing as fast as Bradman lies not with the youths – what else are they supposed to do? – but the adults that have become part of the furniture, as in any workplace, or army; the managers, the middle-men, who do not do the actual work of their organisation. Just as fairly few of the thousands in the British or Australian armies do any shooting, and the rest ‘support’ them, so fairly few of those earning a living from cricket in either country actually play it. All those hours, and expertise and tools, that were never around in Bradman’s day, lavished on young hopefuls – all the playing and re-playing of videos, the algorithms to tell you your best strokes and how you get out most often, the feeding of bowling machines (so much dearer than a back-yard water tank!) – for what? How many Bradmans have arisen? If the ever more complicated organisations of the 21 st century are bad at bringing on brilliant individuals, who is to say that they even ought to. In Bradman’s time, in politics and culture men argued about what a free society should be about; or even if democracy, rather than fascism or communism, was best. At the end of his 1945 novel Three Men in New Suits , JB Priestley had a character say: … I know now what our problem is. It isn’t how to produce a few brilliantly gifted individuals, how to procure for one small class the utmost luxury and refinement, how to give enormous power to a few groups, how to produce two or three colossal monuments of art or learning. Modern man is essentially co-operative and communal man. What we do best – and