Australians argue endlessly about sporting greatness. Was this footballer better than that one? How would a champion from the 1970s perform today? Is a modern tennis player superior to Rod Laver, or merely the beneficiary of modern racquets, training, nutrition and sports medicine?
Then there is Don Bradman (1908-2001). Bradman presents an unusual problem because his achievements are so statistically extreme that ordinary sporting comparisons begin to break down. You do not have to be a cricket tragic to appreciate the central number. Bradman's Test batting average was 99.94.
An average of 50 marks an outstanding Test batsman. Sustaining something around 55 across a long career places a player among the greats. Get into the high 50s and comparisons with the finest batsmen in history begin. Bradman averaged almost 100.
ESPNcricinfo's list of the highest completed Test career averages illustrates the gulf. Bradman sits at 99.94. Adam Voges is next at 61.87, followed by Graeme Pollock at 60.97, George Headley at 60.83 and Herbert Sutcliffe at 60.73.
This is not a normal record. Normally the greatest performers cluster together. The world-record holder may be a few percent ahead of the next man. Records are broken because another extraordinary athlete eventually appears and pushes the boundary a little farther. Bradman looks as though somebody made a mistake entering the data.
He played 52 Tests and scored 6,996 runs. He made 29 Test centuries in only 80 innings. Twelve of those centuries became double centuries. His first-class record was scarcely less ridiculous: 28,067 runs, 117 centuries and an average of 95.14.
And he did it without carbon-fibre helmets, computerised video analysis, modern bats, sports psychologists, dieticians, armies of coaches or all the scientific infrastructure surrounding today's professional athlete.
As a boy in Bowral he famously practised by hitting a golf ball against a corrugated water tank with a cricket stump. The irregular rebound forced him to develop extraordinarily fast reactions and hand-eye coordination. Whether that childhood exercise explains much of the adult Bradman is impossible to know, but it has become part of Australian folklore because it fits the man so perfectly: simple equipment, obsessive practice and extraordinary results.
Then came England in 1930. Bradman was only 21 when he arrived for his first English tour. There were doubts about whether his unconventional technique would survive English conditions. The answer was 974 Test runs. That remains the record for any Test series.
He scored those runs at an average of 139.14, with four centuries. At Lord's he made 254, an innings Bradman himself regarded as technically the finest he ever played. At Headingley he produced one of the most extraordinary days in cricket history. Bradman reached 100 before lunch. By tea he had 220. By stumps he had 309. He eventually made 334.
The English had discovered a serious problem. Conventional cricket did not appear capable of stopping Donald Bradman. Their eventual response was Bodyline.
For the 1932-33 Ashes tour of Australia, England captain Douglas Jardine employed fast bowlers directed at or around the batsman's body with a packed leg-side field waiting for defensive deflections. Whatever one thinks about its legitimacy under the rules then existing, there was no mystery about its strategic purpose. England had encountered a batsman so dominant that defeating Australia had become inseparable from finding a way of suppressing Bradman.
Bodyline worked, relatively speaking. Bradman's average for the series fell to 56.57. The most notorious bowling strategy in cricket history, devised substantially around neutralising one man, succeeded in reducing him to an average that would constitute an excellent career for almost any other Test batsman. That tells the Bradman story better than another list of records.
He returned to England in 1934 and made 304 at Headingley. His dominance continued through the decade until the Second World War removed six years from what should have been the mature centre of his cricketing career.
This point is sometimes forgotten when comparing Bradman with modern players. He played his last Test before the war in 1938, aged 30. Test cricket did not resume for Australia until 1946. Bradman therefore lost virtually the entire period between ages 31 and 37 to the war. Yet at 38 he returned to Test cricket.
In 1948, aged 39 and approaching 40, Bradman captained the Australian team that toured England without losing a single match. The Invincibles remain one of the legendary teams in Australian sporting history.
And then came perhaps the most famous duck ever scored. Bradman entered his final Test innings at The Oval requiring just four runs to finish his Test career with an average of exactly 100. Eric Hollies bowled him second ball for zero.
So Bradman finished at 99.94. There is something almost literary about it. Had he made those four runs, 100 would have been a beautifully rounded monument. Instead 99.94 is somehow more memorable. It looks like the number nature actually produced rather than one invented by a novelist.
The temptation is naturally to ask how Bradman would perform today. The question cannot really be answered. Modern batsmen face relentless international schedules, sophisticated opposition analysis and forms of cricket Bradman never encountered. Bradman faced uncovered pitches, primitive protective equipment, long sea voyages, radically different training methods and an era in which a batsman confronting hostile fast bowling did so without a modern helmet.
Transporting players between eras is therefore an entertaining parlour game rather than science. But statistical dominance relative to one's contemporaries can be examined, and this is where Bradman's case becomes extraordinary.
Cricket has produced a succession of magnificent batsmen. Jack Hobbs, Wally Hammond, George Headley, Garfield Sobers, Graeme Pollock, Viv Richards, Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Ricky Ponting, Kumar Sangakkara, Steve Smith and others belong in any serious conversation about batting greatness. None finished remotely close to 99.94.
That separation is what makes Bradman unusual even among the greatest athletes. His achievement is not simply that he holds the batting-average record. It is the distance between his record and everybody else's.
There are athletes who dominated their sports for years. There are athletes who accumulated more championships or competed for longer. There are athletes whose physical performances can be measured against progressively improving world records. Bradman's achievement has survived differently.
Generation after generation has arrived with better equipment, professional coaching, sports science, international experience and detailed knowledge of everything previous batsmen discovered. Still, nobody has got close.
The figures become almost comic when one moves beyond the famous average. In his 80 Test innings Bradman scored 29 centuries. More than one innings in three therefore produced a hundred. Twelve became double centuries. During the 1931-32 series against South Africa he averaged 201.50. Against India in 1947-48, when approaching 40, he averaged 178.75.
At first-class level he once scored 452 not out for New South Wales against Queensland, then a world record. His Sheffield Shield batting average exceeded 110.
These are not the statistics of somebody who was marginally better than his rivals. They resemble the statistics of somebody playing the wrong level of competition. Perhaps that is why Bradman became more than a sportsman in Australia. He emerged during the Depression, when Australians badly needed something about which to feel proud. A young man from Bowral crossed the world and demolished England's bowlers. Radio transformed distant Test matches into communal national experiences. Bradman's achievements became part of Australia's understanding of itself: a small and relatively young country could produce somebody who was not merely competitive with the old world's best but almost absurdly superior.
He became the Don. There is also something distinctly Australian about the fact that this extraordinary sporting hero was physically unremarkable. Bradman was not a gigantic fast bowler or an intimidating physical specimen. He stood about 170 centimetres tall. His gifts were coordination, concentration, anticipation, speed of thought, competitiveness and an almost pathological appetite for runs.
Perhaps that explains part of his continuing fascination. Bradman's greatness seems simultaneously impossible and strangely accessible. The legend begins not in an elite sporting academy but with a boy, a golf ball, a cricket stump and a water tank.
Nearly eight decades have passed since his final Test innings. Cricket has changed almost beyond recognition. Players fly between continents instead of spending weeks aboard ships. They train year-round. Every weakness can be analysed frame by frame. Bats are better. Grounds are better. Protective equipment is incomparably better. Professional cricketers have medical, nutritional and technical resources Bradman's generation could scarcely have imagined.
The number remains: 99.94. Perhaps somebody will eventually surpass it. Records exist to be broken, and sport has a habit of making supposedly impossible achievements possible.
But after almost eighty years, Bradman's average does not look much less extraordinary than it did when he walked back to The Oval pavilion after that final duck.