of course my greatest memory of the match was that this was on the
Sydney Cricket Ground, which I�d never seen before, and it was a magnificent ground, and I said to my father, �I shall never be happy until I play on this ground.�
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Bill O'Reilly: Bradman was the greatest cricketer ever that I saw walk through a gate onto a cricket field anywhere that I�ve been, there�s no doubt whatsoever about that. He had everything it needed to take charge of a game and to call the tune all the time he was out in the middle, which he generally did. To bowl against Bradman with my way of
bowling, I regarded it as the greatest experience that you could have out in the middle, because I acquitted myself � I think I just about broke even with him, too. Someday some researcher will tell me how I stood with him. For instance the first time ever we played against
each other as kids, he got 234 on the first Saturday. I did get him spilled a couple of times under tragic circumstances in the slips. And 234 not out, and I spent the rest of the week wondering (I was then a
university boy, home on holidays at Bowral and Wingello) and the rest
of that week I spent saying to yself, �Well God blimey, forget about cricket, go back to Botany Harriers and start high jumping and running again. If a kid like that, 17, can do what he did to you there,
there�s not much hope.� But then again, the next Saturday, I rolled him head over heels first ball of the day, and I thought, �God, this isn�t a bad game at all; this�ll do me, I�ll stick at it.� And I think
probably a little bit of research along the track would show that my duels with him weren�t lopsided.
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Bill O'Reilly: I would say old Walter Scott writing one of his novels would have regarded him as a recluse. He was a man who had nothing really to contribute socially amongst any of the boys at all, and in fact what�s more, looking back now, I don�t think I ever really got to
know Bradman, and I knew him longer than any other cricketer that has ever lived, because we met as kids in the bush.
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Charles Williams (Labour life peer in the English House of Lords and biographer of Bradman) on Don:
Now why a sporting hero? Well Australia has never had a war of independence, it�s therefore never had a George ashington, it�s never had a civil war, never had a Lenin, it�s never had a war against a
close enemy, it�s therefore never had a Joan of Arc, and so on and so forth. Its heroes have mainly been sporting heroes, and because of the climate and individualism of Australia and those who live there, sport has been particularly attractive, and particular attention has been given to it. So in the circumstances it�s not wholly surprising that a sporting figure who achieved what Don achieved, should be much more than just a simple sporting figure; he was almost, as it were, an amalgam of, say, Joan of Arc and George Washington and Lenin at the
same time, if I can use that expression.
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Williams on Don unpopularity with some of team mates:
Within the ranks of the Australian cricket side, however, Bradman wasn�t always as popular with his team-mates as he was with the public. Charles Williams says that one of the reasons for this, that bubbled away under the surface, was the ectarian divide in the team, the division between Catholics and Protestants that was potent in Australian society and politics throughout the first half of the 20th century.
Williams: Like all these things it�s a mixture. Certainly there was that, and as Don said to me in a slightly bitter tone, it�s the only time he got rather bitter during our conversation, �Fingleton was the ringleader� and he said when they went to Melbourne they were met by
priests in cassocks. You know, it was quite powerful stuff. That was part of it. Part of it of course was jealousy, straight jealousy, that Bradman was the hero, Bradman was the man that people wanted to see. If Bradman got out, all the grounds emptied even if Jack Fingleton was going in to bat. And that was irritating for people like O�Reilly and
Fingleton, who were in their own right, cricketers of the highest standard.
The third problem was that Don himself was not the easiest character to get on with. He was, in his playing days, he was quite sharp, he was a pretty fierce Captain, he played to win and there wasn�t much quarter given to the opponent or indeed sometimes his own side. He was also, up until the late �30s he was a teetotaller, didn�t like all
this noisy stuff, couldn�t understand why people drank beer, didn�t understand why people smoked, didn�t see what good it did them.
Whereas the O�Reilly/Fingleton/Fleetwood-Smith those people, they all of them enjoyed a beer and enjoyed having a good time and there was a good deal of social tension of that nature. The classic story is when Don came out at Headingley in 1930 and all the boys rallied round and said, �Well, you know, Braddles, you know, have a drink and
celebrate�, and he said, �I�d rather go up to my hotel room and write a few letters�, which he did, and listened to some music. Now that was an odd thing in a way, if I may put it like this without offence, for
an Australian to do. An odd thing for anybody to do, but for an Australian particularly in a side like that, in a touring side, it was regarded as being pretty stand-offish, they didn�t like it. So there
was a combination of all these factors.
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Charles Williams: He talked at some length about the vendetta, he
called it, that Fingleton led against him, as Fingleton was the ringleader. And he talked about the problems he�d had in �36/7 and the England tour of 1938, and he said that one of the factors in 1948, after the War, which led him to accept at a relatively advanced age,
the Captaincy of the Australian touring side, was the fact that O�Reilly and Fingleton had both retired. And the fact that the �48 side was in his view a very happy side, which is borne out by every
other commentator, was due to the fact that the schism that was there in �36/7 and �38 was no longer there. So although there may have been no overt rows about religion, because I don�t think Don�s the sort of person who had that sort of row, it was an underlying theme that was an irritant when they all, for instance, on board ship, he said, they
all went off together to mass on the Sunday, and they made a point of doing that, in a rather sort of pointed manner. Where of course Bradman and the other Protestants didn�t go to mass, it was a Catholic mass. It�s that sort of thing rather than overt rows I think that made
for tension in the team
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It has been well documented that until poor health beset him, Bradman was a keen golfer. Some years ago, he was playing a round with Dean Jones. At one stage, Jones was in the rough, and he was circling his ball, trying to figure out how to get it past several tall trees
between it and the fairway. As his playing partner was deep in thought, Bradman said: 'In my day, when I played here as a young man, a three-iron was good enough to get it through those trees.'
Presumably thinking that any sporting advice from The Don was good advice, Jones pulled out his three-iron, reared back and ... THWACK!
Straight into the trees. Seeing Jones's perplexed expression, Bradman stated calmly, while holding his hand at knee level: 'Of course, in my day, the trees were only so high'
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Bill Lawry:
In the 1928-1940 era," Lawry aid, "Bradman used to fill the grounds.
In my era, I used to empty them.''
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Dennis Batchelor:
During Bradman�s second century I learned that he was suffering from
ill-health. I fancy it was a touch of �flu with a rising temperature. I dare say if he had had plague we should have got rid of him for 150.
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Was Larwood the fastest bowler you ever saw?
Don: No he wasn't. At his best he was very good, very fast, but the fastest bowler I've ever seen was Frank Tyson ... he wasn't a good a bowler as Harold but he was exceptionally fast.
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