The Beatification of Sir Donald Bradman
Beatissime Pater, Ordinarii Terra Australis humillime a Sanctitate Vestra petit ut Venerabilem Servum Dei Donald Bradman, numero Beatorum adscribere benignissime digneris.
The only religious pilgrimage I have ever made was to Bowral. In a December downpour, I drove in silence down the Old Hume Highway, watching the felt-topped hills of the Southern Highlands roll by on either side of my car. Coming into Bowral, I turned onto St. Jude Street and pulled into the gravel parking area of the Bradman Museum. It is hard to overstate the reverent air that gathers around the place. The museum sits adjacent to the oval which, since 1947, has carried Bradman’s name, and where, at age 12, Bradman played his first game of senior cricket for Bowral Cricket Club. The term ‘hallowed ground’ tends to be overused in sports writing, dragged out for promotional material seeking to contrive a sense of historicity to an early-season derby between two middling teams. However, as I walked beside a rain-sodden Bradman Oval, I felt that it was hallowed ground, in the truly religious sense. Bradman had padded up here; he had marked centre on that wicket; he had fielded at mid-off, there, where a divot in the grass was collecting a pool of consecrated rainwater; he had been here, where I was now.
And did those feet in ancient time / Bat upon Bowral’s ovals green?
To address those for whom the sobriquet ‘The Don’ bears little meaning: Sir Donald Bradman was Australia’s greatest cricketer, probably the world’s greatest cricketer, and, slightly more contentiously, the best cricketer that the sport will ever see. In a test career which spanned the years 1928 and 1948, he achieved the greatest ever test batting average of 99.94, a number which will likely never be beaten.
Cricket is unique amongst other sports in the way it is played, interpreted, and understood. It is distinguished from most popular sports in the way athleticism and sporting prowess seem to be secondary, mediated by an anachronistic set of what are, especially to the unfamiliar viewer, broadly silly conventions. In the traditional format of the game, the match pauses for lunch and for tea, and players spend the majority of their time either sitting in the pavilion or standing around in the field. It is an absurdity in modern sport that a professional athlete might wear a woollen cable-knit sweater vest as part of their uniform, yet cricket retains these genteel oddities. These anachronisms conjure the roots of modern cricket as a gentleman’s pastime. Popularised and codified by the English leisure class, then exported to British colonies for the imperial purpose of moral edification, cricket’s use as a morally instructive game gives rise to a very specific interpretive framework, which cricket demands of its players and spectators. This demand retains, in the practice and culture of the sport, an abstract moral character animated by an obscure spirit of cricket. Whereas in many other popular modern sports, competition is instantaneous and direct—for instance, the presence of both teams on the field in direct contact in rugby or in football—competition in cricket is mediated: only one team bats at a time, and only one team bowls at a time. As such, success in cricket, at least before the final result, is much more abstract and subjective, as anyone who has attempted to ask a grumpy father or uncle “who’s winning?” while the cricket is on may attest to. What constitutes goodness in cricket is only discernible through catechism, through the opaque machinations of inherited cricketing wisdom. You’ll never know who’s winning in the first innings. You can only trust in our cricketing clergy, having faith in Uncle Johnno when he says, “This is a three-day deck,” or absolute belief in the crabby old bloke muttering into his Resch’s about how Marnus Labuschagne’s head falls out of line when he plays to a ball on a 5th-stump line.
As a latecomer to cricket, I felt out of my depth, mystified by the byzantine intricacy of cricket knowledge, which seemed only to be accessible to those with an inherited knowledge of the sport. For those raised around cricket, who grew up watching the test summer every year, and learned the game from parents and siblings, understanding cricket is second nature; the significations of cricket are immediately understood and interpreted. There is an essential mystery to the ebbs and flows of cricket, the liturgy of summer rituals, that gives rise to a need for a spiritual pastoralism. The cricketing public look to clergy and holy men to catechise the sport: the venerable Ricky Ponting, Fr. Allan Border, Prior Steven Waugh. To become a cricket fan, to understand the sport, demands of the convert that they look to the Church. The burgeoning believer is only able to rationalise, to understand and interpret, the theological complexity of cricket through a kind of Catholic pastoral education. Former Australian captains are held to speak with papal infallibility, giving homilies ex cathedra in the Fox Cricket studios during the lunch break. We can never really understand the Holy Spirit of cricket directly, rather, we mediate our understanding through ecclesiastical cricketing heroes; all squinted eyes and sidemouthed suggestions that “they need to bowl fuller.”
Writing for Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack on the occasion of Bradman’s retirement in 1948, Scottish cricketer and writer RC Robertson-Glasgow famously analogised the effect of the Don’s exit from the sport on English cricket: “So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.” How many sporting figures live in such mythic company? The neologism ‘Bradmanesque’ is the highest adulation for an Australian sportsperson—the apogee of Australian sporting success is to, even barely, come close to emulating the perfection of the Don. There are few other heroes in sport who enjoy the sacralised status of Bradman; his comparisons veer into the mythical. Bradman was described by South African fast bowler Sandy Bell as having a “sort of cynical grin, which rather reminds one of the Sphinx.” Cricket writer Gideon Haigh quotes Indian cricketer Vaisant Raiji, who describes the lasting, deific influence of Bradman on a country which he never toured as a cricketer: “God is perfect. In the eyes of the Indians, Bradman is the perfect batsman. God is unseen. Indians have not seen Bradman play.”
Why does Don Bradman rise to this beatific state? The sanctification of Bradman is particularly unusual, especially in Australian sporting culture, where we are generally reluctant to elevate our sportspeople beyond their flawed humanity. The sporting Bradman—certainly distinct from Bradman the man—is exempt from this rule; he is beyond reproach, he is infallible, he is perfect and whole. Bradman is beyond human, because he is closer to God than we. It is near impossible for the cricket spectator, or the vast majority of those who have ever stood on the wicket with willow in hand, to even conceptualise how Don Bradman could have been so good. There are no metrics we could apply to assess how well he saw the ball, how prudent his shot selection was, or the impregnability of his batting mindset. Because cricket can only be understood through mediation, through the intercession of a ecumenical cricketing culture that functions as a structure for belief, we can never understand the Don’s greatness directly. This is what makes Bradman unique amongst the annals of sporting heroes, and places him in more mythic company. We cannot know the essence of cricket, and we sanctify Bradman because he came closer than anyone to doing so, and in the process, became more than human.
“…to the first, the whiche is a knowyng might, God, That is the maker of hem,
is evermore incomprehensible; and to the secound, the whiche is the lovyng myght,
in ilchone diversly He is al comprehensible at the fulle…”
The Cloud of Unknowing