Who is the greatest GOAT of them all? And how do you measure greatness anyway? We invited our writers to rank their top 10 greatest athletes of all time, and asked some to write about their favourites. We’ll publish one GOAT a day this week. On Saturday, we’ll reveal our top 50, based on our experts’ votes.
GOAT vote: Sir Donald BradmanCredit: Matthew Absalom-Wong
For reasons beyond our remit to explore here, a Clinton era aphorism coined by a presidential adviser is back in vogue: “It’s the economy, stupid”. Varying it only slightly to explain why any contemplation of the all-time greats of sport must have Don Bradman at the top, it’s the numbers, stupid.
Bradman’s average, 99.94, is Australia’s PIN, the way into everywhere anyone needs to go. The tale of how he landed there, making a duck in his last Test innings when one boundary would have given him an average of 100 dead, is one of the country’s founding stories. But the margin between his average and everyone else’s looks like some sort of corruption in the planet’s software.
Statistician Charles Davis compared Bradman with other prominent sportsmen, including soccer’s Pele, golf’s Jack Nicklaus and basketball star Michael Jordan, using the number of standard deviations above the norm in their sports. Bradman was far and away the best.
Donald Bradman playing at the SCG in 1947.Credit: Archives
More than 40 other men have averaged greater than 50 in Test cricket, but the next best to Bradman is barely more than 60. That makes the Don worth two players, at least. Cricket writing doyen Ray Robinson once noted: “Don Bradman had at least one great advantage over other Test captains – himself batting for his own cause”.
You can put in all the caveats you like about the strength of the opposition, the depth and breadth of the game, covered and uncovered wickets, balls, bats, all the ways the game has changed, but the fact is that Bradman was light years ahead of anyone in his time and anyone previously or since. The game changes, but the margin between Bradman and mere mortals does not.
No one younger than their mid-80s can claim to have a cogent memory of watching Bradman play. Camera technology was rudimentary, leaving us now a few flickering glimpses and his own nasally accounts. Bradman exists almost entirely now in our folklore rather than in the mind’s eye with the still vivid force of, say, Shane Warne.
So to flesh out the figures, it is worthwhile, indeed important, to see him as his peers, contemporaries and fans did.
Something that lives on down through the pages is his clear view of his own powers, so characteristic of greats, exalted in him. Playing Queensland in a Sheffield Shield match, he set himself to break the then record first-class score, Bill Ponsford’s 437. In the first innings, he made three, yet was quite unchastened and in the second innings duly reached 452 not out. He was 21.
So many others tried to demystify his unique talent. Near-contemporary Bill Ponsford distilled it to its most pure form. “The reason is very simple,” he once said to cricketer/author Jack Fingleton. “Don sees the ball about two yards sooner than the rest of us.” Ponsford was no mean run-maker himself.
Bradman was not particularly a stylist, not as for instance Victor Trumper and Charlie Macartney before him or Stan McCabe in his time and Mark Waugh in ours.
Fingleton, who as a teammate and journalist studied Bradman from near and far, noted: “Great artists like Trumper and Macartney varied the direction of the shot for sheer artistic satisfaction, but Bradman was implacable. He was more interested in runs than art, and the days when he was playing for Australia you would have searched for a long time for an onlooker who seriously disagreed with him.”
Incontrovertibly, Bradman changed the game’s psyche. Neville Cardus, after watching him play one day in a carnival match at Scarborough, observed: “A bowler bowls, Bradman makes a stroke, not a single fieldsman moves and the ball is returned from the boundary. The essence of any game is conflict. And there was no conflict here; the superiority on one side was too overwhelming.”
As Bradman processed to 309 in a single day at Headingley in 1934, English dignitary Sir Pelham Warner turned to Lord Hawke in the pavilion and remarked despairingly: “This is like throwing stones at Gibraltar”.
Bradman was a recluse; the world’s fascination with him made him so. “The ordinary citizen has not the remotest idea what it feels like to be a public figure, recognisable at sight in the trains of Melbourne, the buses in the Strand, or even in the shops at Port Said,” he wrote in the conclusion to his Farewell to Cricket. “Try it yourself for 20 years and see what it does to your nervous system.”
By the time he was done, he’d become so much more than just a cricketer. At the outbreak of World War II, Bradman had 21 lines in Who’s Who, only eight fewer than Hitler and 17 more than Stalin.
Bradman in action in 1948. Credit: Allsport
When he arrived in England in 1948, English cricketer and author R.C. Robertson-Glasgow wrote: “We want him to do well, but not too well. We feel we have a share in him. He is more than Australian. He is a world batsman.”
Watching England in his thrall that summer, John Arlott wrote: “More people are interested in Bradman, and not in cricket, than are interested in Bradman and cricket.”
When he retired the next year, he was knighted, and saluted in an editorial in The New York Times, and Robertson-Glasgow wrote: “So must ancient Italy have felt she heard of the death of Hannibal.
Who’s Who International’s top 100 shapers of the 20th century named only two Australians. One was Bradman, the other was Rupert Murdoch. When South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela was released from his 27 infamous years of incarceration in 1990, reputedly his first question was: “Is Bradman still alive?” Now that is greatness.
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