Young Bradman

24 Beginnings makers of the advert are in effect saying to Australian cricket-lovers; and if you don’t know, we’re not going to help you belong. In the background you hear that peculiarly Australian summery hiss of the wild; on the well-kept lawn where mishit golf balls have come to rest sits a rolled-up hosepipe. It’s the conformist suburb, that Australian intellectuals cannot stand. As an aside, are sports so important to Australians as one of the few chances for the gifted to show off, by being publicly better than others; which offends intellectuals because they don’t get the respect for their brains that athletes get for their bodies? The advert is all staged, of course; Clarke would not really train like that. He’s bending over so much, that what he is practising would give him bad habits – and is bad for his back. Yet it’s telling that Clarke can only hit the golf ball with the stump a few times before he misses, and he’s standing only a couple of feet from the wall. Presumably if he could have stood tall and hit the golf ball, from further back, he would have hit the ball even less often. We see the difference between one of the finest batsmen of his day, with a Test average of 49, and 99.94. In his earliest life story, the serial in the Sydney Morning Herald in December 1930, Bradman recalled standing ‘a few yards away’, and how he was ‘never satisfied’ – the first time we have met that word, remember it – ‘unless I could hit it, say, three times out of four’: The small bat made this no easy matter, as the ball came back at great speed, and of course at widely differing angles. I found I had to be pretty quick on my feet, and keep my wits about me, and in this way I developed, unconsciously perhaps, sense of distance and pace. The golf ball, he admitted in his 1935 book, How to Play Cricket , he found on neighbouring golf links, ‘where I had wandered in the hope of being able to carry somebody’s golf clubs’. In fairness to Bradman, he only took up golf – a costlier and hence more exclusive sport – once he had arrived as a cricketer, in the summer of 1928/29. The picture he painted of himself as an everyday Australian had much truth in it. In that instructional book, Bradman spelt out the lesson: …. I found hitting a small golf ball with a small stump much harder than hitting a cricket ball with a real cricket bat, and here is where the value of those early days came in. Playing with such a small ball and small bat must have trained my eyesight. His private game was more like squash than cricket. This may explain why – and so many authorities say it, there’s no point arguing – Bradman was ranked behind Archie Jackson and Victor Trumper as a stylist (whatever that means). ‘Third Man’, the Australian correspondent of The Cricketer , in the journal’s spring 1929 issue termed Bradman a ‘common sense batsman’. That might have been a shorthand way of saying that Bradman did what was most practical with the bat, such as ‘footwork, and plenty of it’, rather than what looked most beautiful. As early as his printed autobiographies, Bradman had plainly thought