Young Bradman

156 Bradman could only hark back to his earlier answer; he thought others had more talent. I remember I was talking to Neville Cardus [presumably on England’s 1936/37 tour] and he said, ‘I’m coming down to the game and I want to watch you make a hundred. I said: ‘Neville, we’ve got a little boy in our side named Ray Robinson,’ who played cricket for Australia very briefly, and came from Newcastle in New South Wales. I said: ‘Neville, if you see Robinson make a hundred, you’ll never want to see me [bat] again . And he didn’t do any good, and I can’t tell you why. Given a second chance to say something in an interview, people often say something new. Perhaps because he was tiring, Bradman said less: ‘I told you that I saw many players that I thought had more ability than I did. Why they didn’t make more runs than me, I’ll never know.’ In fairness to Bradman, the problem was not only, as Philip Derriman put it in Wisden Australia in 2001/02; that ‘contemporaries never quite managed to identify the secret of his success’. Just as only Bradman knew the inside of himself, so he was no more able than anyone else to look inside another man’s mind, to identify unsuccess. Bradman could not deduce the missing ingredient, the yeast that made one man rise and not another. After all the opinions, facts, and the perspective of generations, we are where Derriman was after Bradman’s death: ‘We still do not really know how this small, entirely self-taught cricketer from a country town managed to out- perform all others in the world by a staggering margin.’ The mystery of Bradman, or the awe that we should feel for him, is perhaps like that we should show for the builders of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, or any tight-rope walker, or survivor of Bomber Command; not for what they did, but that they did not fail. ‘It is so easy to fail,’ Jack Fingleton said of Denis Compton, who did so little in Australia in the 1950/51 Test matches. Every batsman has lean times, whether against a particular bowler, or sort of bowler, or on bad pitches, or because of some illness or private upset. If Bradman had a leaner run, he still did as well as anyone else. Tellingly, Bradman only faltered in first-class cricket in wartime, when he may have felt his ambitions in conflict with the crowd and his nation. Otherwise, he was like the chamois, as Samuel Butler described in Alps and Sanctuaries . The animal kept its feet among the mountain rocks, though its smooth feet should have made it clumsy. If the chamois knew how bad the odds were against it, it might fall to its death, Butler wrote: ‘… all we know is that some animals and plants, like some men, devote great pains to the perfection of the mechanism with which they wish to work …’ Man’s mechanism is itself changing. Given the changes of the last few hundred years, it may not be many hundredmore before men andmachines become more like each other. Machines may think like us; sensors may become part of everyday clothing, or limbs, making the wearers more alert (or as alert for longer); exoskeletons may make us stronger. Who knows, mankind might become able to pass thoughts to one other; or to read each other’s minds, which would make competitive games, such as chess, ridiculous, andmake any inner life doubtful. There might still be something These Our Actors