Another feature of these onslaughts was their duration: they went on and on. Bradman couldn't have plundered bowling more savagely than Stan McCabe, Clyde Walcott or Ian Botham, but these players' innings were eruptions that petered out, often consumed by their own fury; Bradman's were like Niagara Falls. Among his 117 hundreds in first-class cricket, he carried 37 of them past 200, six of these past 300 and one to 452. The simplistic but inescapable explanation for Bradman's Test average is that, compared to the lesser greats, he was harder to get out. "He was the original smiling assassin," said A'Beckett, "the most gentlemanly, polite, ruthless and efficient sporting dominator who ever lived." There were few things he did better than concentrate. "Every ball is for me the first ball, whether my score is nought or 200," he said. "And I never visualize the possibility of anybody getting me out."

In preparation for Bradman, opposing captains visualized little else. It was one of these men, the imperious Englishman Douglas Jardine, who used Bodyline in 1932-33 as a means of making it happen. The tactic of targeting Bradman's body (and his teammates' bodies) with short-pitched, fast bowling highlighted the fear in which rivals held him. Jardine was prepared to risk his reputation to quell the destroyer-and Australian crowds loathed him for it.

Bradman was in many ways a lucky man: he had prodigious talent, a wife he adored to the end, and longevity (though not quite one last century). But there was a payback. He was often sick during his 92 years; he nearly died in his twenties from an infected appendix. He and Jessie's first son died a newborn; their second, John, survived polio and, for a time, changed his name to Bradsen to escape what he called the "metaphysical glass cage" of being a legend's son. Their daughter, Shirley, has cerebral palsy. And Bradman had to endure the corollary of greatness, in his case a fame so massive it was given its own name: Bradmania. It was the bane of his life and, with the stress it brought, the cause of much of his ill health. For a tired, introspective old man, reclusion was a sanity-saving last resort.

But he still contributed on some level-before and after his withdrawal. After retiring as a player, he served Australian cricket for many years as selector and administrator. In the late '60s, he persuaded a youthful Greg Chappell, later to become one of Australia's greatest batsmen, to adopt the Bradman grip. The singular quality of his own record was a mystery to him. "I saw many players who I thought had more ability than me," he said in his last interview, in 1996. "Why they didn't make more runs than me, I'll never know." One of those players was the Newcastle-born Ray Robinson, of whom Bradman once told the writer Neville Cardus: "Neville, if you see Robinson make a hundred, you'll never want to see me bat again." (But Robinson would achieve more as a writer than a cricketer.)

In the same interview, he called Sobers "unquestionably the best cricketer I set eyes on," and said he saw elements of his own technique in the Indian gem Sachin Tendulkar. Nearly until the end he spent four hours a day replying to the hundreds of fan letters he received weekly.

Bradman lived two lives. On the first-as the greatest cricketer to have walked the earth-words fall short. All have been applied to lesser players. As for the second-an old man living quietly-perhaps it was his final stroke of genius. There's enough sound and fury in the world, enough fading stars who won't leave us to our memories, so eventually spoiling them. Bradman remained Bradman to the end.