Young Bradman

25 Beginnings about how he had become so remarkable. ‘No one taught me to play cricket,’ he wrote. ‘I was not coached.’ He then chose his words carefully, knowing that he was treading on toes: I found out for myself, and perhaps it was the best way. It may sound peculiar, but I doubt whether I would ever have achieved any prominence as a batsman had I been coached as a boy. In making this statement, I am not intending to decry coaching, but refer entirely to my own particular case. Still the diplomat, he suggested that coaching can make the ordinary player good, but questioned whether it would work for the very best, such as WG Grace and Trumper; ‘a delicate matter’, he summed up. As Bradman went to the heart of the teacher’s dilemma – you can have a truly useful gift of helping others to do great things, but that’s not the same as doing things yourself – few coaches have taken to Bradman’s methods. In business, if a company or a branch of it did 30 per cent or more better than everyone else, you can be sure that everyone would want to know why, to copy it. Bob Woolmer in his great work Art and Science of Cricket did wonder that if Bradman’s brilliance resulted from those hundreds of hours playing by himself as a boy, whether young children ought to learn cricket by hitting a tennis ball against a wall with a cricket bat, and then graduate to using a golf ball and a cricket stump. Yet if children need to be told what to do, do they have it in them to become another Bradman, just as the Bronte sisters came up with their own stories, and hand-made books? A 1951 biographer of Bradman, the Australian writer Philip Lindsay, gave up trying to explain genius; many boys had played rough games by themselves ‘with a stick for a bat and anything round for a ball, but only Bradman has been able to turn these irritants into a recipe for success’. In truth, once Bradman told his story, ambitious lads could copy. England fast bowler John Snow, born in 1941, who saw Bradman at Worcester in 1948, tried it for hours in his back garden. ‘It doesn’t seem to have done me much good, maybe because I cheated after a while and ended up using a tennis ball!’ he admitted in his 1976 autobiography. Around then, Mark Taylor was learning to keep the ball down, batting in a carport. In his memoir Opening Up he quoted Bradman’s water tank story: ‘Every cricketer I knew in Wagga performed varieties of that – got out a stump or bat and bounced a golf ball against something. I sure did.’ Bradman was not inventing anything original; only his own version of Eton fives. Such a drill worked for other sports. An English tennis trainer, AJ Aitken, wrote in 1925: ‘Suzanne Lenglen [the Bradman of women’s tennis] for hours while she was learning did nothing but hit balls at squares chalked on the court. This is the secret of her marvellous control over the ball today.’ Bradman did nothing special, as the stories of four outstanding cricketers show, from various countries, before, during and after Bradman’s time. I devised a little game that involved a golf ball and our verandah. I would throw the golf ball on to the black polished floor; it would bounce against the verandah wall, come back to me – and I would try to hit it straight