A yellowed 1949 Bradman biography found on my dad's shelf shaped my love for cricket for life. I read it a dozen times and still remember entire lines from it decades later.
A tattered 1949 biography, its pages yellow and fragile, shaped my love for cricket more than any match I ever watched live. The book was simply called Bradman, written by Arthur Norris, and I found it as a 10-year-old on my dad's bookshelf. I must have read it a dozen times or more. Decades later, I still remember entire lines from it.
What that book did was give me the great Australian cricketers not as statistics or grainy photographs, but as living, breathing presences. Woodfull, calm and commanding like an army general. Ponsford, dependable, solid as a rock. Bradman himself, quick, slim and almost superhuman. And Stan McCabe, smiling, graceful, unforgettable. I could picture the crowd's roar as Woodfull and Ponsford walked out to open the Aussie innings, the buzz that rippled through the ground when Bradman stepped onto the field, the silence and pure tension as Larwood began his long run-up to bowl, and the fierce snarl of Bill O'Reilly before he unleashed a wicked leg break.
The mind's eye, with the help of a great storyteller, can transport you to places sometimes more real than reality itself.
The passage I returned to most was Stan McCabe's legendary 187 against Larwood's bodyline attack. The writing was so vivid that I felt I was sitting in the front row, watching history and sheer courage unfold. That is the particular power of great sports writing: it doesn't just describe what happened, it puts you inside the moment so completely that the experience becomes yours.
Years later, I met someone who claimed to be the world's leading authority on Bradman, a man who said he had read everything ever written on the subject. When I mentioned the Arthur Norris book, he had never heard of it. He asked me to check whether I still had a copy, because it might be worth a great deal today.
"He'd never heard of it. He asked me to check if I still had it because it might be worth a lot today."
I didn't have it. After I left home for higher studies in England, my mum had cleared out all my old books. That priceless copy was gone forever. Some treasures physically disappear over time, yet they live on in the memories of the lucky few who once held them close. The book no longer exists in my hands, but Woodfull, Ponsford, Bradman, and McCabe are still right there in my mind, exactly as Arthur Norris put them.
