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'The Don' Bradman still casts a giant shadow over cricket
Posted: Thursday December 23, 1999 02:23 PM
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- For all of cricket's glittering revolution -- the helmets and colored clothes, the soaring light towers and TV hype -- the game remains awed by a quiet little man who quit 52 years ago. Sir Donald Bradman, 91 and living a reclusive life in Adelaide, Australia, was a pioneer of self-promotion, using his enormous profile to make money off the field decades before sports were engulfed by commercialism. On the playing field his dominance was so complete that former English cricketer Denis Compton described him as "a batsman appearing not just once in a lifetime but once in the life of a game." The rise of limited overs cricket from the 1970s to the current day, hastened by Kerry Packer's rebel World Series Cricket, was the biggest change this century in a game proud of its traditions over the past 100 years. Countries such as Sri Lanka, the World Cup winners in 1996 with an exhilarating new approach, emerged to challenge the established nations. Others, notably England with Jack Hobbs, Walter Hammond, Herbert Sutcliffe and later Ian Botham, and then the West Indies, with their fearsome fast bowlers from Wes Hall to Curtly Ambrose and the genius of Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards and Brian Lara, enjoyed periods of greatness before falling from the peak. Pakistan had a run-scoring machine called Hanif Mohammed and later produced great allrounders like Imran Khan. India matched him with Kapil Dev, New Zealand with Richard Hadlee and England with Botham, whose amazing 149 against Australia at Headingley in 1981 produced one the most astonishing turnaround victories of the century. A generation of South African players, including Graeme Pollock and the great opener Barry Richards who found work in Packer's WSC, were denied full test careers by their government's apartheid policies. The nation returned to competition after two decades of isolation and is now challenging for top status again. But it was Bradman and his prolific batting which unites the sport and links the fans and players of today to the days of old. His career average was 99.94, a figure learned by most Australian kids before they get to the two times table. It was monumental compared to those of other great players. Next was Pollock on 60.97 and West Indian George Headley on 60.83. Other giants of the game included the brilliant allrounder Garfield Sobers on 57.78, India's Sunil Gavaskar on 51.12 and Greg Chappell, the second best Australian with 53.86. Of thoe still playing, India's little master Sachin Tendulkar is 11 places below Bradman on 56.68 and Lara, the world record holder for most runs in a test innings with 375, is 21st at 51.98. "Figures are not entirely conclusive but it is difficult to avoid their significance if a man produces them year after year against every type of opponent and under all conceivable conditions," said Bradman in his book "Farewell to Cricket." And there he was, after 6,996 test runs, conclusively averaging 40-50 ahead of the rest. "Poetry and murder lived in him together," wrote English journalist R.C. Robertson-Glasgow. "He would slice the bowling to ribbons, then dance without pity on the corpse." Bradman played just 52 tests -- Tendulkar has already played 71 -- and his first tour of England in 1930, aged 21, was his greatest. He scored 974 runs in seven innings at 139.14, including two double centuries and a triple century. He rated his 254 in the second test at Lord's his finest moment because "practically without exception every ball went where it was intended to go," and it made him the youngest player to score a test double hundred. With that flawless innings behind him, he became the first player to score a triple century in the next match. He scored 309 on the opening day, a rate which seems unnatural now, and the 334, in just his seventh test, took 378 minutes. When former Australian captain Mark Taylor reached the same figure in 1998, then declared to be forever linked to The Don, he took 720 minutes. Bradman's dominance in 1930 led to the biggest sporting rift of the century between Australia and its mother country. England arrived for the 1932-33 series with an odious tactic specifically created to nullify Bradman but also used against his teammates. England captain Douglas Jardine surrounded the Australians with a legside fielding cordon and then ordered his bowlers to aim at their opponents bodies and heads with short-pitched balls. The English called the tactic "leg theory" but the Australian description of "Bodyline" better reflected the menace and the pain suffered when several players were hit by paceman Harold Larwood's thunderbolts. Jardine was hated Down Under but he restricted Bradman to a series average of 56.57, the worst of his career, before authorities banned the dangerous tactic. Just as most cricket fans know Bradman's average, they also know how it all ended. He needed four runs in his final test innings to average 100 over his career but was bowled for a second-ball duck by England's Eric Hollies. There were suggestions he missed the gentle off-spinner because his eyes were full of tears. "Of course, that's rubbish," Bradman said in 1996. "I was certainly emotional, but I wasn't that bad." Bradman became a selector and official with the Australian Cricket Board before disappearing from public life. He granted a rare audience to Tendulkar last year, happy to meet the man whose batting he says most reminds him of himself and whose best days might come in the century ahead.
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