The Picador Book of Cricket

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The Picador Book of Cricket Page 51

by Ramachandra Guha


  At one time, it was Bradman who sought Garbo-like quietude, no less than he deserved after more than four decades as a prisoner of his prowess. Nowadays, though, Australians do just as much to preserve that distance. The last locally-produced Bradman biography – Roland Perry’s The Don (1995) – had as much substance as a comic strip. The last public interview with Bradman – two hours broadcast in May 1996 by Channel Nine’s top-rating current-affairs host Ray Martin on the basis of a corporate donation to the Bradman Museum – was what Private Eye used to describe as a journey to the province of Arslikhan.

  It may justly be asked what more of the Bradman saga begs understanding. After all, the Greatest Story Ever Bowled To is so beguiling as it is: uncoached boy from the bush rises on merit, plays for honour and glory, puts Poms to flight, becomes an intimate of sovereigns and statesmen, retires Cincinnatus-like to his unostentatious suburban home.

  But turning Bradman into Mr 99.94 is a bit like reducing Einstein to Mr E = mc2. Read most Bradmanarama and you’d be forgiven for thinking that his eighty Test innings were the sum of him. His family is largely invisible. Precious little exists about Bradman’s three decades as an administrator. There is next to nothing about his extensive business career. And no one, I think, has grasped what is perhaps most extraordinary about Bradman: his singularity as a man as well as a cricketer. For his beatification as a national symbol contains at least some irony: he is a strange choice for an acme of Australianness.

  For most Australian boys, for instance, participation in sport is a rite of passage, an important aspect of socialization. Yet, if Bradman developed close cricketing pals in his Bowral boyhood, they kept remarkably shtum afterwards. The rudimentary game with paling bat and kerosene-tin wicket in some urban thoroughfare is one of Australian cricket’s cosiest images: think of Ray Lindwall and his cobbers playing in Hurstville’s Hudson Street, trying to catch the eye of Bill O’Reilly as that canny old soul walked by; or of the brothers Harvey playing their fraternal Tests behind the family’s Argyle Street terrace in Fitzroy. Bradman’s contribution to the lore of juvenile cricket, by contrast, is one of solitary autodidacticism, his water-tank training ritual with golf ball and stump. As Rodney Cavalier explains in a perceptive introduction to the new Sir Donald Bradman AC, Bradman chose to practise alone not because he had no choice, but because he wished to.

  That carapace hardened as Bradman reached cricketing maturity, and set him still further apart. Where the paradigmatic Australian male is hearty and sanguine, priding himself on good fellowship, hospitality and ability to hold his alcohol, Bradman was private, reserved, fragile of physique and teetotal. Where the traditional Australian work ethic has been to do just enough to get by, Bradman was a virtuoso who set his own standards and allowed nothing to impede their attainment.

  Australia in the late 1920s, moreover, was not a country that seemed likely to foster an abundance of remarkable men. Even that big bridge was still to come. It was a small subsidiary of Empire, with an ethnically and culturally homogenous population of six million. Indeed, we might regard such homogeneity as a precondition to a personality cult like Bradman’s: it is hard to imagine a figure arising today with such effortlessly broad appeal.

  There were extremes of wealth and poverty in the Australia of Bradman’s rise, but social mobility was constrained both by economic hardship and prevailing belief in an underlying social equality. Visiting Australia for the first time in the year of Bradman’s first-class debut, American critic Hartley Grattan was amazed by the vehemence of this latter faith: ‘Australia is perhaps the last stronghold of egalitarian democracy . . . The aggressive insistence on the worth and unique importance of the common man seems to me to be one of the fundamental Australian characteristics.’ As D. H. Lawrence described it in his novel of 1920s Australia, Kangaroo: ‘Each individual seems to feel himself pledged to put himself aside, to keep himself at least half out of count. The whole geniality is based on a sort of code of ‘‘You put yourself aside, and I’ll put myself aside’’. This is done with a watchful will: a sort of duel.’

  Bradman, however, was not a ‘common man’, and he assuredly did not ‘put himself aside’. In the words of Ben Bennison, who collaborated with the twenty-one-year-old cricketer on Don Bradman’s Book: ‘He set out and meant to be king . . . To the last ounce he knew his value, not only as a cricketer but as a man.’ R. C. Robertson-Glasgow recalled that, at his first meeting with Bradman at Folkestone in September 1930, the Australian was surrounded by piles of correspondence to which he was steadily reaming off replies. ‘He had made his name at cricket,’ wrote Crusoe. ‘And now, quiet and calculating, he was, he told me, trying to capitalize his success.’

  The times may have been ripe for such individual aspiration. Certainly, Bradman’s benefactors on that tour had no difficulty singling him out for gifts and gratuities, not least the Fleming and Whitelaw soap magnate Arthur Whitelaw, who bestowed a spontaneous £1,000 on Bradman after his Headingley 334. But nothing before or since has paralleled the Caesar-like triumph that Bradman’s employer Mick Simmons Ltd organized for him when the team returned to Australia, where he travelled independently of his team and was plied with public subscriptions and prizes in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Goulburn and Sydney.

  It was the beginning of a career in which Bradman showed conspicuous aptitude for parlaying his athletic talent into commercial reward. Leaving Mick Simmons Ltd in 1931, he signed a tripartite contract worth more than £1,000 a year with radio station 2UE, retailer F. J. Palmer and Associated Newspapers (proprietor Robert Clyde Packer, grandfather of Kerry). He spruiked bats (Wm Sykes), boots (McKeown) and books (three while he was playing, two afterwards), irked the Australian Board of Control by writing about cricket in apparent defiance of its dictates, deliberated over effectively quitting Test cricket to accept the Lancashire League shilling for the 1932 season, swapped states in 1935 to further his career. At a time when Australian industry lurked behind perhaps the highest tariff barriers on earth, Bradman was the quintessential disciple of the free market.

  No dispute that Bradman deserved every penny and more. No question of undue rapacity either. As that felicitous phrase-maker Ray Robinson once expressed it, the Don did not so much chase money as overhaul it. Equally, however, Bradman’s approach betokens an elitism uncharacteristic of Australia at the time and not a quality many today would willingly volunteer as a national hallmark.

  It was this impregnable self-estimation – not arrogance, but a remarkable awareness of his entitlements – that distanced Bradman from his peers. Some criticisms of the Don by playing contemporaries were undoubtedly actuated by jealousy. All the same, he seems to have been incapable of the sort of gesture that might have put comrades at their ease. In his autobiography Farewell to Cricket, he commented: ‘I was often accused of being unsociable because at the end of the day I did not think it my duty to breast the bar and engage in a beer-drinking contest.’ It is a curious perspective on cricket’s social conventions, with the implication, as John Arlott put it, that Bradman had ‘missed something of cricket that less gifted and less memorable men have gained’.

  Bradman’s playing philosophy – that cricket should not be a career, and that those good enough could profit from other avenues – also seems to have borne on his approach to administration. Biographers have disserved Bradman in glossing over his years in officialdom. His strength and scruples over more than three decades were exemplary; the foremost master of the game became its staunchest servant. But he largely missed the secular shift toward the professionalization of sport in the late 1960s and early ’70s, which finally found expression in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket.

  Discussing the rise of World Series Cricket, Bradman told Williams in January 1995 he ‘accepted that cricket had to become professional’. Yet, as Dr Bob Stewart comments in his recent work on the commercial and cultural development of post-war Australian cricket I Heard It on the Radio, I Saw It on the Television, cricket wages de
clined markedly in real terms during the period that Bradman was Australian cricket’s éminence grise. When Bradman retired, the home Test fee was seven times the average weekly wage. A quarter of a century later it was twice the average weekly wage. Ian Chappell opined in his The Cutting Edge that the pervasion of Bradman’s attitude to player pay within the Australian Cricket Board ‘contributed to the success World Series Cricket officials had when a couple of years later they approached Australian players with a contract’.

  Perhaps these paradoxes of the Bradman myth relate something about the complex Australian attitude to sport. As the Australian social commentator Donald Horne once put it: ‘It is only in sport that many Australians express those approaches to life that are un-Australian if expressed any other way.’ But, as Bradman enters his tenth decade fit for both commodification and canonization, two questions seem worth asking, with apologies to C. L. R. James.

  First: What do they know of Bradman who only cricket know? Surely it’s possible in writing about someone who has lived for ninety years to do something more than prattle on endlessly about the fifteen or so of them he spent in flannels – recirculating the same stories, the same banal and blinkered visions – and bring some new perspectives and insights?

  Second: What do they know of cricket who only Bradman know? A generation has now grown up in Australia that regards cricket history as 6996 and all that. Where are the home-grown biographies of Charlie Macartney, Warwick Armstrong, Bill Woodfull, Bill Ponsford, Lindsay Hassett, Keith Miller, Neil Harvey, Alan Davidson, Richie Benaud, Bob Simpson, even Ian Chappell and Dennis Lillee, plus sundry others one could name? Such is the lava flow from the Bradman volcano, they are unlikely to see daylight.

  So enough with the obeisances already. Yes, Bradman at ninety is a legend worth saluting. But as the American journalist Walter Lippman once said: ‘When all think alike, none are thinking.’

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Only one side can win a cricket match. This basic fact is often forgotten by even the most seasoned of men. Cricket writing in present-day England is marked by a tone of nostalgic lament, the decline of the present being set against the lost victories of the past. Australian writers find it difficult to accept defeat, Indian writers even more so. Salutary in this respect is the attitude of the West Indian writer B. C. Pires. When his team lost to England in 1991 and Australia in 1995 the breast-beating was tempered by a healthy admixture of sardonic whimsy.

  B. C. PIRES

  Coping with Defeat

  I: JUNE 1991

  If my attention wanders a little more than usual in the course of this column, please forgive me. I am watching what looks more and more like the West Indian demise at Headingley.

  Richardson and Dujon are at the wicket. Viv is gone. Gus is gone. Hooper? Gone. Haynes? Gone. Was Simmons in the line-up? West Indies are toppling and all of England is delighted. Richie Benaud, the man on television, has just said, ‘We’re staying with cricket here on BBC1. Starsky and Hutch can be seen at . . . some other time.’ England is smelling its first victory at home against the West Indies in twenty-two years and the antics of two television cops are not going to prevent the masses enjoying the execution.

  And now Richardson is gone. And it’s not even half past two. Have Dujon and Marshall ever had a 278-run partnership? I can’t believe this – Marshall is gone. I hardly even saw him come in. How could he have been in and out in the space of two sentences? It must’ve been done with mirrors. Couldn’t he have held on for enough time to allow my heartbeat to subside? If God has seen fit to give England a victory after all this time, why is He rushing the job at the end? Here comes Ambrose. The West Indian hopes are flapping from that gangly frame. Every delivery looks so much closer, so much scarier, when Curtly Ambrose faces it.

  The television commentary just switched from BBC1 to BBC2 and Dujon disappeared in the changeover. He was batting on BBC1. Now, on BBC2, there is a batsman wearing a helmet and beard but, on close examination of his face, or cursory examination of his batting technique, I discern it is not him. Dujon must be out, but how did he get there? More, I suppose, of the white man’s magic. 137 for 8 Walsh and Ambrose at the wicket. Rain, who normally plays for the other side, is the West Indies’ only hope now. The West Indies have pulled off all sorts of amazing comebacks but not one of them has featured Ambrose, Walsh and 150 runs; although, if there ever was to be such a comeback, it would be against England.

  But wait. There was a four, yes, a lovely straight drive from the normally wildly flailing Ambrose. Runs. But, more importantly, they are not getting out. Ambrose has been dropped in the slips by Lamb and, as I write, again escapes being caught and bowled by De Freitas. It seems England feels it can afford to allow them two or three goes each, and that raises not a hope but a doubt. Rain will fall, of course, because this is England and this is cricket, but can the West Indian bowlers hold on until it comes?

  Hope springs up for a moment, but not as high as the ball one of those tall wankers has just popped into the air . . . and this time the catch is taken. Well, that must be it, surely. Everyone knows it now. Jubilation in Leeds. White men – from Yorkshire – are dancing in the aisles. With no embarrassment. Nor, I observe, rhythm. The crowd is singing in one massive voice, as if Headingley were Wembley. The television commentators have finally thrown caution to the wind and are talking about how victory was achieved. Patterson is only a lagniappe. He can delay the end of the innings by only as long as it takes to adjust his pads and take a ‘middle’ from the umpire. But he is not even going to face the ball.

  There it goes, off Walsh’s bat and up, up and away again, in the air long enough for Atherton and Ramprakash to quarrel about who is going to take The Catch That Won The Match. It would be lovely to see Atherton drop it after running halfway across the field, but he takes it in spectacular fashion, running, diving, turning over, coming up with ball in hand and smile in high beam. Where is the England cricket team I knew and loved, the one that could be counted on to select a team of eleven men, each and every one of whom would unfailingly drop precisely that catch?

  So that’s it, then. It takes only a moment to lose a Test match and there it went, the longest moment in the history of sport. West Indies has lost the match and my column is going to be early, for once. But do I dare leave this room? The entire English male population of London is lying in wait for me, waiting to pounce on my accent. ‘You from Trinny-dad?’ they will say. ‘Get off,’ I will reply, or something of a similar nature. Twenty-two years in the build-up and I have to be here for the denouement.

  My friend Samantha, English, but very pleasant about it, just looked in to commiserate. She noted the position of my chin, between knees and ankles, and advised me to cheer up. ‘It’s only a game,’ she said. Yeah, Sam, and ballet is only a dance. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be West Indian and lose a game of cricket,’ I said. ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘look how long we’ve been losing.’ ‘It’s OK for y’all,’ I told her. ‘You’re used to it. This is very new to us.’ She was less sympathetic after that, for some reason. The English! They colonize us for 400 years and then beat us at cricket once every twenty and still cannot figure out why we’re upset. They still don’t understand our rules. We would rather lose a governor, a job, anything but a match. As David Rudder and C. L. R. James said, this is not just cricket, this thing goes beyond a boundary. But that, it seems, is beyond the pale.

  II: MAY 1995

  Well, I’ve just watched the first ball of the fourth – last? – day of the fourth Test at Sabina Park. Sheesh! Ian Healy just dropped James ‘Jeemee’ Adams off the second ball. My heart is in my mouth and the first over isn’t even halfway through yet. Jimmy has to bat for two days to save the West Indies.

  And now they’re putting Shane Warne on to bowl the second over. Isn’t it a bit late for the Australians to convince us of this best-bowler-in-the world thing? I mean, we’ve seen him for the rest of the series. Look, even Winston Benjamin can get a run off
him, even with this tension. The first run of the day. Will we have more wickets than runs in the next few hours? My goodness! Winston Benjamin should have been caught off Paul Reiffel. Whew! This is sport?

  All good things must come to an end, and it looks very much like the West Indies’ fifteen-year domination of world cricket is going to do just that today, perhaps even this morning. No team I can remember ever had a better chance of beating the West Indies: seven wickets to go, still nearly 200 runs to make to reach zero, star batsman gone for the same zero, two full days of play left, not a cloud in the sky and Paul Reiffel bowling like a demon. Thank God for two dropped catches already. Can we hold off the second-most-successful – soon to be the best? – team in the world?

  How do you avoid buckling under this pressure? It’s not just this game. The world is waiting for these islands to fall. Sports writers everywhere (but here) have been fantasizing of writing about the West Indies losing and composing the most exciting opening sentence of their careers since Viv Richards went. Mike Selvey, cricket correspondent of the Guardian (the real Guardian, not d’ Impostor) fully expected to write his during the third Test in Trinidad, which we won in three days.

 

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