The Shorter Wisden 2013 (13 page)

After all, Sir Donald Bradman left cricket on 99, not a hundred. Tendulkar and Bradman have long been twinned in one of sport’s impossible comparisons. Would Bradman have worn a helmet and
played the Dilscoop had he been a 21st-century cricketer? Would Tendulkar have gourmandised in the manner of the Don? In a game obsessed with statistics like almost no other, Bradman has a Test
average with a number that sings out to cricket followers like a line of poetry: 99.94. The poetry is all in the missing 0.06 – the six lost hundredths.

For a long while, it seemed as if Tendulkar’s ultimate stat would have the same sort of humanising fallibility, the not-quite-purposed flaw. For unending months, the figure of 99
overshadowed everything he did. He claimed he wasn’t thinking about it; certainly, he did all he could not to. But everyone else in India was mad on the subject. He couldn’t order a
paratha on room service without the floor-boy asking when the 100th hundred was going to come.

India’s tour of England in 2011 was memorable for the hundred that never was. I could feel in my bones during that series – and I don’t think I was alone – that the 100th
hundred would eventually come as a moment of supreme bathos. The situation demanded it. I even predicted it would be against Bangladesh or Zimbabwe. I didn’t, though I should have done,
suggest it would come in a losing cause, as Bangladesh beat India by five wickets at Mirpur in the Asia Cup. The only glory of that day was in the number itself.

Which is not to say that numbers lack glory. Sport’s all-time great numbers include ten, for Pele. The figure 147 haunts snooker, to the extent that players will chase the maximum break at
the expense of mere victory. Four, as in minutes and a mile, was a compelling number in athletics; similarly another type of ten, as in seconds and 100 metres. One is a magic number in golf, just
as 100 is in cricket. Baseball has .400, for the batting average that has become extinct. These days, even the finest hitters average in the .300s (you get a baseball average by adding up the
number of times the player hits the ball and safely reaches first base, then dividing by the number of at-bats).

The lost .400 average demonstrates one of sport’s eternal truths: that while the great players are always great, overall standards tend to rise. Dare we suggest that duffers were more
common when Bradman batted? After all, of his 6,996 Test runs, 1,968 came at home against modest attacks from India, South Africa and West Indies, and at an average of 140. And though it’s
true Tendulkar has made five hundreds in nine Test innings against Bangladesh, he has faced a wider variety of attacks and conditions. It may be no surprise that his average is
merely
in
the mid-50s. Bradman got more bad balls to hit, just as the batters from baseball’s golden age got more sluggable pitches. The same principle holds true in English football: in 1927-28, Dixie
Dean scored 60 league goals; in the Premier League season of 2011-12, the top scorer was Robin van Persie, with 30.

Perhaps Tendulkar’s century of centuries will become another of those lost standards: something that says important things not just about the person who achieved them, but about the times
in which the record was achieved. It’s not precisely that no one could ever be as good as Bradman – just that no one will have the same opportunity to collect such an average. And
perhaps that will be the same with Tendulkar’s century. For what international career in this intense age will ever last as long as his?

Other sports throw up records that seem unbeatable. When Mark Spitz won seven swimming gold medals at the Munich Olympic Games of 1972, it seemed like a record for all time. But Michael Phelps
managed eight at Beijing in 2008. He now has 18 golds over three Games, and 22 medals all told. Multiple medal-winning is more possible in swimming than in any other Olympic sport, but those
figures – 18 and 22 – will take a great deal of beating. Phelps and Spitz stand out over the narrative of swimming like Tendulkar and Bradman in cricket. The numbers tell the story.

There are those who believe Sir Steve Redgrave’s five golds in five successive Olympics is an even finer achievement. Rowing is an endurance event and it is hugely demanding: doubling up
– and Redgrave tried that in 1988, when he won gold and a much-forgotten bronze – is considered next to impossible. Five is a number that fizzes and burns across Olympic history.

Oddly, cricket’s big numbers are more readily compared with the numbers amassed by athletes in individual sports. That’s because cricket, not quite uniquely, is a team game based on
individual duels. It has always tended to celebrate the individual above the team. Every cricket follower knows that the highest individual Test innings is Brian Lara’s 400 not out against
England in 2003-04 (a few can tell you, without pausing for breath, that the highest team score is 952 for six declared, by Sri Lanka against India in 1997-98).

There are two categories of statistical measures in sport: the first for one-off, or season-long, performances; the other for career-long achievements. We are obsessed by the notion of greatness
in sport, and we traditionally measure this in terms of career. Tendulkar and Bradman stand out by whatever stats you care to call up, but it is their career-defining figures, the 99.94 and the
100, that really count.

I once conducted an argument in the pages of
The Times
with the cricket correspondent, Mike Atherton. I suggested Andrew Flintoff was a great cricketer, because he was great for a
single summer that changed English cricket. Atherton said that wasn’t good enough for greatness. I’m prepared to argue my point to this day, but I have to concede that the popular
measure of sporting greatness must span an entire career. (What about Bob Beamon, then?)

So, as we look for career-long stats relating to individuals, we must look first to golf. Golf is not a sport in the manner of cricket, since it requires no running about and no physical risk.
Still, it is a pleasant pastime for people who are too old for sport or who lack the taste for it. The number we use to measure a golfer is 18: the major tournaments won by Jack Nicklaus.

Everyone in golf expected that number to be overhauled with insolent ease by Tiger Woods, who collected 14 while dominating that sport as no individual had ever done (as Bradman had dominated
cricket, in fact). But then came the incident in November 2009 – unforgettably summed up in the headline “crouching tiger, hidden hydrant” – that precipitated Woods’s
personal crisis. At the end of 2012, he remained stuck on 14. His lifetime achievement will be measured by how close he gets to, or by how far he surpasses, the figure of 18.

In tennis, the measure of greatness is the number of singles victories in the grand slam tournaments. The open-era champion here is Steffi Graf on 22, with Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert on
18 each. In the men’s game, Roger Federer is the leading all-time player with 17. Of the top four currently playing, Rafael Nadal has 11 and Novak Djokovic six. Andy Murray has one: in
another era, one less stuffed like a Strasbourg goose with talent, he would surely have collected more. Yet we measure him not by his ability, but by his number.

When Federer was at the top, he was considered to be the finest player to have lifted a racket – tennis’s Bradman, nothing less. Before him came Pete Sampras. Sampras was no artist,
like Federer. He had a game of brutal, pared-down simplicity: the last great serve-and-volleyer. People said that he was boring. I used to reply: well, if you find excellence boring, find something
more your size. I believe wrestling is rather amusing.

I loved watching Sampras, especially at Wimbledon, as he made his inevitable march on the previous highest total of slams. He eventually passed Roy Emerson’s 12, winning 14 before he
retired. Perhaps the finest tennis match I have seen was the Wimbledon final of 1999, when Andre Agassi, at the very peak of his game, played a perfect match against Sampras. But Sampras simply
moved beyond perfection and beat him – impossibly, unforgettably – in straight sets.

He won the match on a second-serve ace. Afterwards, an American journo asked: “What was going through your mind at the time, Pete?” There was a baffled pause, before Sampras said:
“There was absolutely nothing going through my mind at the time.”

And I was enlightened. I was enlightened in the sudden manner of a Zen follower. It was in that Zen doctrine of no-mind – the notion that too much thought gets in the way of truth –
that Sampras had his being. He is, or was, the Zen master of sport. I wrote this, and later received a letter of agreement: “And I am a Zen master myself…”

There is something of the same quality in Tendulkar’s batting. It is by no means complete, and against England before Christmas every run was a struggle. But Tendulkar at his peak had,
more than any other batsman I have watched, the ability to play the ball rather than the situation, to immerse himself in the moment rather than the myriad distractions. There was always that touch
of serenity about him: each shot not forced, but the inevitable consequence of the question set by the bowler.

Which is why the final, slightly sordid, journey to the 100th hundred was so painful to watch. It was as if Tendulkar had set aside his strongest asset – his indifference, his serenity,
his no-mindedness – and was, at the end of it all, hamstrung by numbers. Tendulkar and Bradman have each left a single unforgettable, and perhaps unbeatable, magic number. I’d still
have preferred it had they both been 99.

Simon Barnes is chief sports writer of
The Times.

THE FASTEST SPELL OF ALL?

C
HRISTIAN
R
YAN

Jeff Thomson, running late, rolls over, sits upright, thinks of the many annoyances and injustices in his life, remembers how he hates liars and cheats, gets out of bed. He
often drinks Scotch instead of beer because beer hangovers wake him up feeling bloated and lethargic. This morning he is in a lousy mood, cranky, but loose, which for Thomson is the optimum state
of being for a day’s fast bowling. Without a glance in a mirror, he stuffs his white clothes under an arm and leaves the house on the last day of 1973.

The first inkling that this day’s cricket may not be like other days comes when opening batsman Rob Jeffery shapes to play a hook shot. Jeffery is young, 20, and in the space where his two
front teeth should be are two false teeth, the real ones having been knocked clean out when, aged 16, he hooked and top-edged fast bowler Dave Gibson of the Waverley club. “Please pick up my
teeth,” said Jeffery, seeing the teeth sitting pitchside, as he was helped off. Today he has a mouthguard on, no helmet; the cricket helmet’s invention is four years away. He, a
left-hander, notices that when Thomson bowls, the ball gives the impression it is following him. Jeffery’s plan, same as Jeffery’s plan always is, is to step back in his crease and hook
behind square. He goes to do exactly this, thinking “I’m in position but this ball’s on to me quicker than what a ball’s ever been” – except the thought is
barely half hatched, some kind of skating premonition, because this ball actually is on him, on his right shoulder, bulleting into it, a blast of agony, then Jeffery feels his legs crumpling from
beneath and his body toppling backwards on to the stumps.

Until this instant, the nine batsmen yet to bat have sat at ease, on the grass, sort of watching, sort of not bothering. Now, heads lift. Some players hop to their feet. The captain Barry
Knight, who played 29 times for England, feels his mind coil back to a day it hasn’t alighted on in years – Ilford, 1957, Essex against West Indies, quiet morning, the kid Roy Gilchrist
bowling. Next ball whipped clear of batsman, stumps, wicketkeeper and rebounded, with an echoey pock, off the sightscreen.

Jeffery, safely on the sidelines, does not take his pads off, just sits, pads on; minutes later he sees, with a surprise, he’s shaking.

John Pym got the best view – 22 yards away, non-striker’s end – of the Jeffery ball. Pym, unlike Jeffery, is no step-back-and-attacker. If an hour and a half’s batting is
up and the ball a bit bruised, Pym’s job is done. He has faced Thomson many times. Since the last time, he has read something batsman-turned-classy-journo John Benaud wrote: something about
23-year-old Jeff Thomson having turned himself into the world’s fastest bowler. So that week Pym asked Barry Knight to lug the bowling machine into the practice nets and switch the setting to
a click under 100 miles an hour.
One–oh–oh
.

Straight away, even before Jeffery’s been hit and gone, Pym realises, “Unbelievable. This ball’s coming down at least ten per cent faster than the machine.” Pym concocts
a strategy: he’ll hover on tiptoes, weightless, poised to duck or weave or block, and he will not swing his bat back at all because there is simply no time. Then the Jeffery ball explodes
before his eyes. Pym’s thinking now, “I’ve got to do something, otherwise I’m gunna be target practice here.” He re-schemes things: he’ll afford himself a wafer
backswing, six inches, enough to deflect the screaming ball behind square leg or through the slip cordon and no glorious-uncertainty-of-cricket way known will a fielder risk laying a hand on it.
The first time he tries this the bat jabs back five of the preconceived six inches when – how is this happening? – the ball’s too fast for his swing, it has clipped the
bat’s inside edge, leg stump’s cartwheeling. Pym is walking off, disbelieving. “Not fair” – the feeling punches him in the guts, then, “Oh well, at least
I’m alive.”

Thomson has been annoyed all season. This is round ten, at Bankstown Oval, of the Sydney first-grade competition of 1973-74. It is Mosman against Bankstown, two suburbs separated by Sydney
Harbour Bridge and 20-odd miles of motorway. Every cricketer in this city hears it said that the state selectors won’t cross the bridge to see Bankstown’s players. Thomson, the fourth
of Don and Doreen Thomson’s five sons, grew up on Market Street, Bankstown. Two-thirds of Bankstown houses are fibro-cement constructions. In Mosman, the verandah posts are sculpted timber,
and the roofs terracotta-tiled, “red-tiled roofs of comfort” the poet Henry Lawson called them, and jacaranda-lined avenues wind up hills and in semi-circles.