Dominic Lawson: Was it fear that drove The Don?

August 27 marks the centenary of the birth of the most famous of all Australians – and possibly the most celebrated man of the last century: Donald Bradman. Perhaps only Nelson Mandela among the still living has reached the same level of acclaim; and delightfully, one of Mandela's first questions after his release from 27 years of incarceration was: "Is Sir Donald Bradman still alive?"

Yet today, 5 August, is a more fitting one to mark Bradman's achievements: he would have been 99.94 years old. As every cricket fan the world over knows, that was "The Don's" Test Match batting average – a figure so improbably far ahead of any other player in history that a statistician with no knowledge of the game could only read it as a misprint.

Yet that remarkable figure also reveals Bradman to be both more and less than the run-making robot he so often appeared to be: it was only because he failed to score in his last Test innings that his average fell below 100. That final frailty was certainly at odds with everything the world knew about the phenomenon who emerged self-taught from the New South Wales highlands to dominate his sport as no human has matched in any other field of play: compared to Bradman, even Tiger Woods is an also-ran.

Perhaps Bradman's freakishness – and self-confidence– is best recalled by one of Neville Cardus' anecdotes. On the eve of the second day's combat against England in the Leeds Test of 1934, Bradman told the great Manchester Guardian cricket correspondent that he planned to score at least 200 runs off his own bat that next day. Cardus remarked that the law of averages was very much against him doing so, to which Bradman replied, with some vehemence, "I don't believe in the law of averages." The next day Bradman made 271 runs, slaughtering the English attack.

Bradman had achieved a similar feat of rapid fire and endurance at home against a South African side three years earlier – and that was in temperatures approaching 100 degrees fahrenheit (38C). What drove the South Africans to complete despair was that Bradman appeared not to break sweat: indeed they decided that he did not perspire at all, and was not entirely human.

His style of batting itself was also unlike any other great cricketer formed of flesh and blood; it was neither classical nor even aesthetic, but entirely functional, like a machine to mass-produce runs. As Bradman himself once said "Style? I know nothing about style. All I am after is runs." This attitude meant that he was never loved in the same way as those great players whose technique seemed more, well, human. As one contemporary commentator noted: "The reason why his batting did not always please those who saw it is that he did it too well. He was so much the master that he destroyed that sense of contest between bat and ball which is vital to cricket. All of us will concede that a tractor is the most efficient way of ploughing a field; but all of us would prefer to watch a team of horses."

Yet Douglas Jardine, that most ruthless of England cricket captains, believed he had detected an all too common human weakness in his apparently impervious enemy: he thought that Bradman was a coward. According to Jardine's daughter, prior to taking his side to Australia in 1932, the England captain had studied film of Bradman batting in 1930 on a rain-affected wicket against the lethally quick Harold Larwood of Nottinghamshire. Larwood peppered the bodies of the Australian batsmen, but only one appeared to flinch: Bradman. "I've got it!" said Jardine: "He's yellow." And thus Jardine invented the concept known as "Bodyline", in which the bowler would concentrate his line of fire at the batsman's body rather than the stumps.

Although it did terrible damage to relations between Australia and the "mother country", Jardine's strategy was psychologically well-judged. Bradman appeared to suffer a sort of nervous collapse before the first Test of the series, when it became clear in some warm-up games what was in store – the Australian captain, Woodfull, had been struck horribly over the heart by Larwood.

When Bradman regained sufficient strength – greatly encouraged by the support of his wife, Jessie – to play in the rest of the series, he batted in a manic fashion, refusing to get in line with the ball, but skipping out of the way. The former – and formidable – Australian captain, Warwick Armstrong, pronounced: "Had Bradman been built with more backbone, it is possible that the whole story would have been different." Bradman, he went on to declare, "showed unmistakeable signs of fright when facing every ball from Larwood."

"The Don", needless to say, deeply resented the accusations of cowardice and insisted that the technique he employed against bodyline was entirely designed to maximise his run scoring opportunities against a most unorthodox method of attack. Yet this episode might shed some light on a less well-known aspect of Bradman's life: his war record – or rather the absence of it. Like many of his country's leading cricketers, he volunteered in 1940 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Almost immediately, however, Bradman seemed to experience another psychological collapse – which partly manifested itself in a sudden deterioration of his hitherto phenomenal eyesight. His greatest biographer, Charles Williams, observed: "All the doctors could do, with the knowledge of muscular trouble and psychosomatic illness of the time, was to diagnose something known as 'fibrositis' – in layman's terms, no more than 'something wrong with your back'." Bradman was declared, in effect, unfit to defend his country.

On the first occasion that cricket battle was rejoined between England and Australia, in 1946, Bradman was fit again. But when he ordered his quickest bowler, Keith Miller, to aim at the body of the England batsman, Bill Edrich, Miller refused. "Nugget" Miller, who had flown fighter-planes with the RAAF in the Battle of Britain, declared pointedly to his teammates afterwards: "I'd just fought a war with this bloke. I wasn't going to knock his head off."

Yet who could blame Bradman for wanting to dish out to the English a bit of what they had served up to him – even if a world war had intervened? And if Bradman did have a streak of yellow in him, does that not in fact make him more like the rest of us – and therefore his achievements all the more remarkable?

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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