Feelings for Don Bradman haven¹t changed in the half-century since runs stopped flowing from his blade ‹and won¹t change for his passing, which happened in his sleep on Sunday morning after a bout of pneumonia. He is revered, some think too much for a man who spent his best years playing cricket, merely a game. But Bradman unified and enthralled his country in times of need‹in the darkness of the Depression, in the gloomy plunge into World War II, in the uncertainty of its aftermath‹times when cricket, Ashes cricket, was the only game that mattered. Gaze at one of the grainy photographs, at the faces of the spectators who line the path from the dressing room as Bradman strolls to the middle: their eyes are alive with expectation. There¹s probably a lightness in their bodies and a quickening of their pulse as they produce what former Australian player Thomas A¹Beckett called ³a colossal roar that hit us like a tornado in a wind tunnel.² Does it matter what profession he chooses if a man can inspire this affection?

For all his batting mastery, Bradman was fortunate to have played before television, that instrument of demystification. Out in the middle of a cricket ground, he was safe. There were no all-seeing cameras and garrulous know-alls to pick him apart. Fans either saw him in the flesh or imbibed the heady radio calls of the day and the florid prose of the scribes. Today, we know him from books and the memories of ancients, but mostly from the magic numbers he left behind.

Slaves to technique, products of coaching, have their stories and may come to be celebrated. But Bradman was that rare type of sports person Australians treasure most: a natural, from the bush. His first bat was knocked together by his carpenter father, George. He grasped it unencumbered by expectation, without a sporting pedigree to live up to. He was never coached. His training grounds were his backyard and the dusty expanses of the inland New South Wales town of Bowral. At 14, he left school, went to work and for the next two years hardly touched a bat. In other ways, he was an atypical Australian hero, to the extent he forced some people to broaden their minds if they were to hold the embrace. A loner given to early nights, Bradman didn¹t drink or smoke‹he would celebrate a soaring innings with nothing stronger than tea. He was neither burly nor bronzed: this wrecker was short and light with bird-like feet, slicked and receding hair and a facial tautness betraying frequent ill health and a predisposition to stress. (The cocky West Indian fast bowlers of the mid-1980s, on eyeing The Don in his dotage, were said to have mused that they¹d have sorted out the little man; it might have been amusing to watch them try.) Some of Bradman¹s teammates found him selfish and aloof‹then, as now, grave vices in any Australian side.

He couldn¹t offer larrikin spirit or masculine chumminess, but something better: more talent than has ever resided within another cricketer‹and a resolve to squeeze it dry. Some have ascribed to him a sentimental streak. There wasn¹t one. He would have averaged 100 in Tests had he managed just four runs in his final innings, but was bowled for nought by spinner Eric Hollies at The Oval in 1948. It was a myth that Bradman¹s vision had been blurred by farewell tears, and a myth also that he dismissed the failure as a delightfully ironic denouement. To his last days he regretted not scoring those four runs.

While Bradman is cherished, he is also a trophy Australia brandishes to the world, proof this young country of unprepossessing beginnings can spawn greatness. ³When we spoke of literary figures, we spoke of Englishmen,² recalled writer Thomas Keneally of his schooldays. ³But when we spoke of cricket, we spoke of our own. No Australian had written Paradise Lost, but Bradman had made 100 before lunch at Lord¹s.² Australia has produced many great people, but none whose greatness is so readily demonstrable.

Great? Applied to him, the word is no more adequate than it is for Shakespeare and Mozart. Bradman doesn¹t belong among the some 50 cricketers regarded as greats, but on his own. The gap between him and them is as vast as that between the great and the merely competent. Only a small band of players in the history of Test cricket has averaged over 50, the benchmark for greatness. The next best record after Bradman¹s belongs to the South African Graeme Pollock (60.97). The West Indian Vivian Richards, recently honored by cricket bible Wisden as one of the five best cricketers of the 20th century‹along with Bradman, Jack Hobbs, Gary Sobers and Shane Warne‹bludgeoned bowling attacks with a mesmerising ferocity in the ¹70s and ¹80s. But with an average of just over 50, Richards is a Lilliputian at the feet of Bradman.

If Tiger Woods dominates golf for another 15 years, perhaps Bradman will have a peer. For now, no other sport has seen his like. Dissenters have suggested he wasn¹t the most marvellous‹that some other batsman was more elegant, another more powerful or charismatic. But always Bradman¹s record destroys their claim. Between 1928 and 1948 he played 52 Tests, 24 as captain, in which he scored 6,996 runs at an average of 99.94. For cricket followers, it is that average, pondered even for the thousandth time, which bewilders. MORE>>