His humongous accomplishments in just 52 Tests — 6996 runs and 29 hundreds — will stand forever on the cricketing landscape like the Everest surrounded by gentle hillocks.
Between his august achievements and any pretentious challenger across space and time, there exists enough daylight to play countless Test matches, and there remains scant chance of any umpire bringing out his light-meter.
A handful of sublime greats have managed to average just about 60. There remains a gap between Bradman and the next best of nearly 40. One way of looking at it is that he remains one-full-decent-batsman ahead of the greatest of the others.
Maybe slightly lesser known, but almost as phenomenal are certain other statistics. He walked out to bat 338 times in First-Class cricket and 117 of those ended in hundreds — including three triple-centuries and a 299 not out in a Test match. The average in First-Class cricket was 95. His nearest rival in that regard, Vijay Merchant, scored at 71. In Sheffield Shield, he scored at a staggering 110. In the fiercely competitive Ashes, where Harold Larwood unleashed Bodyline to stop him, he scored at an average of just under 90.
Having dealt in hundreds during his playing days, Bradman continued almost in the same vein in life. He had outscored his greatest teammates and rivals, and now he outlived them. With time, several eyewitnesses of his greatness at the crease departed for the Garden of Eden.
Even when he entered his nervous nineties, Bradman took painstaking efforts to respond to every request and invitation personally. The responses became more and more negative as time wore on, with interviews politely refused and invitations to events and dinners regretfully turned down. But all of them bore his signature, itself a treasured possession for many.
At The Oval in 1948, Bradman was stopped four runs short of a career average of 100. In life, it was pneumonia which stopped him eight short of a hundred in life on February 25, 2001.
A year before his death, in 2000, Wisden panellists voted him as the cricketer of the century. It was a 100-member panel. The number of votes The Don got was — fittingly — one hundred!
Text: Arunabha Sengupta
Illustration: Maha