At 92 Don Bradman Died Alone, The Sad End of a Legend

He was the greatest batsman who ever lived, and for most of his life he was also one of the loneliest men in Australian sport. Don Bradman came out of Bowral with nothing but a golf ball, a cricket stump and a brick water tank stand, and by the age of twenty-one he had taken England apart on English soil while his own country queued at soup kitchens. Then came Bodyline, an entire Test tour designed by one nation to break one man. Then peritonitis in a London hospital in 1934, an obituary already set in type, and a wife crossing the world on a ship after being told her husband was dead. Then a first-born son who lived only days, a boy in callipers after polio, a daughter born with cerebral palsy, and a modest house in Kensington Park where the body was the enemy every single day. This is the whole story: the Invincibles of 1948, the guard of honour at The Oval, the four runs he never got, the Hodgetts collapse that Adelaide never quite forgave, the son who changed his surname, and the sixty-five year marriage to Jessie that held all of it together until 1997. If you grew up listening to the wireless, if your old man told you where he was standing when the news came through, this one is for you. Tell us in the comments what The Don meant in your house.