Don Bradman: the serious Australian
Cricinfo
25-Feb-2013
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In the August edition of the the Monthly, an Australian magazine, Gideon Haigh takes an in-depth look at the career of Don Bradman. Some of the issues the essay investigates are Bradman's early cricket in Bowral, how his attitudes "faithfully reflect the deeply English roots of Australia's sporting culture", his skirmishes with the Australian board, his views on Bodyline, and his anxiety about his financial security.
Still the most compelling aspect of the legend is The Average. One hundred is not the maximum possible arithmetic mean score in cricket, but 99.94, with its tincture of human fallibility, its hint of Oulipian constraint, could not have been more exquisitely contrived. To a generation addicted to measurement and saturated in numbers, The Average is monolithic, unassailable, totemic.
Yet by The Average, it would seem, are we largely to know him. There is a certain comfort in calling Bradman great and leaving it at that; there is a certain contrarian glee, too, in deeming him an old dead guy, especially given his unwitting implication in the Howard ascendancy, and the unevolving bien-pensant snobbery about sport. If only he'd been less popular, one is left to conclude, Bradman might have occasioned deeper interest.