Young Bradman

37 School and district years rather curious dilemma’. Early that summer, Bradman had invites to play in the country tennis week, and cricket week, in Sydney; two weeks. ‘Don,’ Westbrook said: ‘You can only have one week in Sydney. You can have the tennis week or the cricket week, but you cannot have both.’ I thought the matter over. The cricket week came before the tennis week. That may or may not have decided me, but ultimately I decided to take the cricket week, and that was the end of the battle between cricket and tennis. As both men may have known, Westbrook was doing Bradman a favour by making him choose; because at the age of 18 the time was coming when Bradman risked falling short in both games, if he carried on seriously with both. In his autobiography, Bradman hinted that cricket appealed more as a team game. In truth, money also counted. The English tennis writer AJ Aitken reckoned in 1925 that girls who played often could not manage on less than £400 a year. Even though that included a change of stockings two or three times a day, the same applied for men; you needed money behind you to play tennis internationally. Mr Westbrook was not that generous. In Bowral Cricket Club’s 1924/25 season of nine matches, Bradman batted only four times, making 141 runs. His highest score of 66 came in the district semi-final against Wingello. On the first Saturday, 21 March 1925, at Wingello, the hosts were all out for 200. Bradman took four for 44. The next Saturday at Bowral, Bradman went in to bat at four, joining Sid Cupitt after both openers were out without scoring. At 53 for five, ‘the game looked as good as over’, reported the Southern Mail . Bowral were all out for 159, and so missed the final for the first time in years: ‘Bradman played a sterling, chanceless innings, and the Wingello sports gave him an ovation on retiring.’ The newspaper meant that Bradman left the field after he was bowled. Bradman was not yet 17. His season ended on Easter Monday, 13 April 1925, playing for a district team at Moss Vale against Western Suburbs, from Sydney. The visitors sounded much stronger, as they made 304. The locals replied with 126 for seven. Sid Cupitt and Bradman each retired, for 42 and 44. While in his published collection The Bradman Albums , Bradman wrote that his serious cricket career began in the season of 1925/26, he may well have decided to take it seriously after those successes. When the club met at the start of that 1925/26 summer, Bradman was ‘assistant honorary secretary’. From the start, we see a lad learning all sides of the game, on and off the field, not only batting. Earlier, he had been Bowral’s scorer. When Norman May for ABC’s 1988 interview asked if Bradman had hoped someone would not turn up, so that he could play, Bradman replied: ‘Yes in a way; this wasn’t uppermost in my mind, the main thing was I wanted to be there, I wanted to score [that is, be scorer], to see them play.’ Other senior cricketers took responsibilities at an early age. In 1926, his benefit year, the veteran Gloucestershire batsman Alfred Dipper brought out Cricket Hints , a mix of memoir and advice. The beginner, so he began, ‘must be prepared to swot, to train, to observe, to copy’. You had to want to do it; you had to be ‘born for cricket’, not made.