Young Bradman

29 Beginnings In his 1930 autobiography, he told how his father took him by the hand – he was 12 and a half, and wearing a boy’s knickerbockers – and they walked around the SCG, ‘to take a peep at the pavilion and perhaps rub shoulders with players’. ‘I shall never be satisfied until I play on this ground,’ Bradman told his father, ‘who smiled with affectionate tolerance’. Telling the story in his 1988 interview, Bradman said ‘happy’ instead of ‘satisfied’ (that word again). Whatever the exact words, Bradman had ambition; except he did not name playing for New South Wales, or Australia. That implies Bradman had no idea of how he would achieve it, just as George Bradman’s silence suggested he wished his son well but had no idea either. Likewise when father accompanied his 18-year-old son to the SCG for a trial in October 1926, ‘I don’t think we said a dozen words to each other en route.’ Mr Bradman knew the train journey; he and the other Bowral Rifle Club shooters left town on the 6.06 am train on Saturday 2 November 1918, to shoot at Botany Bay in south Sydney, the same train that Don Bradman was about to take regularly on Saturdays to play first grade cricket. The journey Don Bradman was then beginning was into the metaphorical unknown; and the best George Bradman could do was to say nothing unhelpful. The difference between the playing fields of the Southern Highlands and the SCG was likewise as much symbolic as physical. JW Hearne, who was on tour in 1920/21 but did not play in the Test the Bradmans watched, in May 1921 called Sydney’s oval ‘perhaps the best in the world’, with six grandstands (‘one of which is kept for members, two for ladies, and one for smokers’). Hearne praised the pitch (‘as hard as rock and as true as steel’), as did Dr Robert Macdonald in the 1924/25 annual of The Cricketer . Macdonald wrote of the SCG’s pull on men: You will meet on the Sydney ground on the morning of the Test some who have been five days at sea to get there, others over 40 hours in the train and inlanders who have ridden or driven 400 or 500 miles. Despite the curse of distance, city and bush did come together through cricket. Bradman had already experienced it, when the city came to him; a story he did not include in any of his autobiographies. Instead he told it in a foreword to a 1989 book about an exclusive Australian club, I Zingari. The governor of New South Wales had a private cricket ground at Hillview, his country retreat at Sutton Forest, south of Bowral: I was present at one of these games and although only a youth in short white pants I had built up some sort of reputation as a promising schoolboy cricketer. As a result I was introduced to the great Dr HV Hordern ... and asked to bowl a few balls for him because despite my tender years I had already learned the art of delivering a ball from the back of the hand. His words of advice have not survived the passage of time but I recall the incident and the boyhood excitement which helped to kindle the passion for cricket which later engulfed my life. Bradman did not give a date for the meeting with the Australian Test cricketer, ‘Ranji’ Hordern; it may have been Saturday 20 December 1919.