Who Was Don Bradman?

1. Cootamundra: a boy, a stump and a golf ball

Donald George Bradman was born on 27 August 1908 in Cootamundra, a small town in New South Wales, and grew up in Bowral, in the Southern Highlands. His father was a farmer and carpenter, and the family was comfortable but not wealthy. As a boy, Bradman practised alone in the backyard, hitting a golf ball against the curved base of a water tank with a cricket stump, a drill that taught him the quick reflexes and precise timing that would define his batting. He later said that the golf ball, which came back at him faster and more unpredictably than a cricket ball, was the best training he ever had, and the story has become one of the most retold anecdotes in Australian sport.

Bradman left school at fifteen and worked as a real estate agent in Bowral, playing cricket for the local club and for New South Wales. He made his first-class debut for New South Wales in 1927, scoring a century in his second match, and he was selected for Australia's tour of England in 1930 after only a handful of first-class games. He was nineteen when he made his Test debut against England in Brisbane in November 1928, and he scored 18 and 1 in a match Australia lost by 675 runs, the heaviest defeat in Test history. It was an inauspicious start, and he was dropped for the second Test, but he returned for the third and scored 79 and 112, his first Test century, and he never looked back.

The young Bradman was not a classical batsman. He gripped the bat unusually, with his hands close together, and he played with a cross-batted style that coaches of the time considered incorrect. He scored mainly on the leg side and behind the wicket, and he played the ball late, with a quick flick of the wrists. Traditionalists disapproved, but the runs kept coming, and by the time he was twenty-one he was already the best batsman in the world. His technique was his own, and it worked because of his extraordinary eyesight, his speed of foot and his concentration.

2. The 1930 tour: 974 runs and a world record

Bradman's first tour of England, in 1930, was the most extraordinary batting performance in the history of Test cricket. He scored 974 runs in the five-match series, at an average of 139.14, including 131 at Trent Bridge, 254 at Lord's, 334 at Headingley, the first triple century in Test cricket in England, and 232 at The Oval. The 974 runs remain the record for a single Test series, and the 334 at Headingley was the highest individual Test score at the time. He was twenty-one years old, and England had no answer to him.

The tour made him a celebrity in Australia and in England. Crowds flocked to see him, newspapers followed his every innings, and he was mobbed wherever he went. He was also, by the standards of the time, well paid: he received money for writing newspaper columns, and he was offered commercial endorsements, which caused tension with the Australian cricket authorities, who believed in strict amateurism. Bradman, who had grown up in modest circumstances and who understood the value of money, was not willing to play for nothing, and his disputes with the cricket establishment over pay and conditions would run throughout his career.

The 1930 series also established the pattern of Bradman's career: he scored runs in large quantities, at a rate far above his contemporaries, and he did so in all conditions. His average of 99.94 across his whole career is often quoted, but it is worth remembering that he averaged over 100 in several series and that he scored a century, on average, every three innings. No other batsman has come close to that rate of scoring, and the gap between Bradman and the next best batsman in history is larger than the gap between the next best and an ordinary Test player.

3. Bodyline: the most controversial series in cricket

The 1932-33 Ashes series in Australia, known as Bodyline, was the most controversial in the history of cricket, and Bradman was at the centre of it. England's captain, Douglas Jardine, devised a tactic in which his fast bowlers, above all Harold Larwood, bowled short-pitched deliveries at the batsman's body, with a ring of fielders on the leg side waiting for the catch. The tactic was designed specifically to stop Bradman, who had tormented England in 1930, and it worked, after a fashion: Bradman's average in the series fell to 56.57, still high by any normal standard, but far below his usual level.

The tactic caused outrage in Australia. Batsmen were hit, crowds were furious, and the Australian Cricket Board sent a telegram to the MCC in London calling the bowling unsporting and a threat to the relations between the two countries. England's supporters replied that the bowling was within the laws of the game, that Bradman himself had used similar tactics as a captain, and that Australia was complaining because it was losing. The dispute became a diplomatic incident, and it led, eventually, to a change in the laws of cricket to limit the number of fielders behind square leg and to restrict short-pitched bowling.

Bradman's own view of Bodyline was complicated. He disliked the tactic and believed it was dangerous, but he also believed that it was his duty to face it and to score runs against it, which he did. The series is remembered as the moment when cricket's gentlemanly traditions collided with the reality of professional competition, and Bradman's role in it, as the target of the tactic and as the man who survived it, is central to his legend. England won the series 4-1, but Bradman emerged with his reputation enhanced, and Bodyline remains the most discussed episode in the history of the game.

4. The Invincibles: the unbeaten tour of 1948

After the Second World War, during which he served in the Australian Army and suffered from ill health, Bradman returned to cricket and captained Australia on the 1948 tour of England. The team, which included great players such as Keith Miller, Ray Lindwall and Lindsay Hassett, won all five Test matches and went through the entire tour of 34 matches without losing a single game. They became known as the Invincibles, and the tour is regarded as the greatest team performance in the history of cricket. Bradman, who was nearly forty and suffering from fibrositis, scored 2,428 runs on the tour at an average of 89.92, including 11 centuries.

The final Test of the tour, at The Oval, produced the most famous moment of Bradman's career. He came to the crease in Australia's second innings needing only four runs to finish his career with a Test average of exactly 100. The crowd rose to applaud him, and the English leg-spinner Eric Hollies bowled him second ball, for a duck, with a googly that went between bat and pad. Bradman's average finished at 99.94, and he walked back to the pavilion to a standing ovation. He later said that he had not been thinking about the average, and that the ball had simply beaten him, but the number 99.94 has become the most famous statistic in sport, a symbol of perfection just out of reach.

Bradman retired after the tour, at the age of forty, and he never played first-class cricket again. His final record was 52 Tests, 6,996 runs, 29 centuries, 12 double centuries and a highest score of 334. He had captained Australia in 24 Tests, losing only one, and he had been the dominant figure in world cricket for twenty years. The Invincibles tour was a fitting end to a career that had begun in a backyard in Bowral and had taken him to the top of the game.

5. Why 99.94 has never been approached

The most remarkable thing about Bradman's record is not just that it is high, but that it is so far above everyone else's. The next-best career averages among batsmen who played a substantial number of Tests sit in the low sixties, a gap of nearly forty runs per innings. Statisticians have calculated that a batsman would need to score a century in every third innings for a whole career to match him, and no one has come close. Modern greats such as Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Jacques Kallis averaged in the fifties, which is to say that they scored, on average, about half as many runs per innings as Bradman did.

Several explanations have been offered for the gap. Bradman played in an era when pitches were less well prepared and protective equipment was minimal, which should have made batting harder, not easier. He played against strong bowling attacks, including the Bodyline attack and the great West Indian fast bowlers of the 1930s. His advantage, most experts agree, was a combination of extraordinary eyesight, which allowed him to pick up the length of the ball earlier than other batsmen, and a technique that was perfectly suited to his own body and reflexes. He also had an exceptional ability to concentrate, and he rarely gave his wicket away.

There is also a statistical argument: Bradman's career was relatively short, 52 Tests, and a longer career might have brought his average down. But even if his average had declined in later years, the gap would still have been enormous, and his first-class average of 95.14, over 234 matches, suggests that his Test record was no fluke. The consensus among cricket historians is that Bradman was not merely the best batsman of his time, but the most dominant sportsman, relative to his peers, in any sport, and that his record is unlikely ever to be broken.

6. After cricket: administrator, selector and icon

After his retirement, Bradman became one of the most powerful figures in Australian cricket. He served as a selector for the Australian team for more than thirty years, from 1952 to 1986, and he was a member of the Australian Cricket Board for a similar period. He was a conservative administrator, suspicious of professionalism and of the commercialisation of the game, and he opposed Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket in the 1970s, a stance that made him unpopular with some players. He was also, by all accounts, a difficult man to work with, private, stubborn and convinced of his own judgement, and his relationships with other great cricketers were not always warm.

He was knighted in 1949, the only Australian cricketer to receive that honour, and he was voted the greatest Australian sportsman of the twentieth century in a poll conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2009 he was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame, and his image appears on Australian postage stamps and coins. The Bradman Museum in Bowral, near the ground where he learned the game, attracts visitors from around the world, and the Adelaide Oval, where he played much of his cricket, has a stand named after him.

Bradman was also a man of strong views and a private life that he guarded carefully. He married Jessie Menzies in 1932, and they were married for 65 years until her death in 1997. He was a keen golfer and a lover of music, and he wrote books about cricket, including his autobiography, Farewell to Cricket, published in 1950. He rarely gave interviews in his later years, and he disliked the attention that his fame brought him, but he remained, until his death, the most revered figure in Australian sport.

7. Death and the place he holds in sport

Bradman died on 25 February 2001, at the age of ninety-two, in Adelaide, after a long illness. His death was marked by tributes from around the world, and the Australian prime minister, John Howard, described him as the greatest cricketer of all time and the greatest sportsman Australia has produced. His funeral was a private family affair, as he had wished, but the public mourning was extraordinary, and the Australian flag was flown at half-mast. He had lived long enough to see his record survive the careers of every great batsman who followed him, and to see cricket change beyond recognition, from a game played by amateurs in white flannels to a global professional sport.

His legacy is not only statistical. Bradman changed the way cricket was played, by showing that a batsman could score at a rate and in a quantity that had seemed impossible, and he changed the way Australians thought about themselves, by giving a young country a hero who was the best in the world at something. He was also, for all his private nature, a public figure who represented a certain Australian ideal: modest, hard-working, unpretentious and extraordinarily good at what he did. That ideal has been challenged and complicated by later revelations about his disputes with other players and his conservatism as an administrator, but it remains the core of his reputation.

The number 99.94 will outlive everyone who saw him play. It is quoted by people who have never watched a cricket match, and it has become a shorthand for excellence that cannot be matched. Cricket has had many great batsmen since Bradman, and it will have more, but none of them has averaged 99.94, and the evidence of almost a century suggests that none of them will. That is why Don Bradman is not merely a great cricketer, but a figure who belongs in any discussion of the greatest sportsmen of all time, in any sport, in any era.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Don Bradman
• Wikipedia — Don Bradman
• ICC — Don Bradman inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame

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• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.