Teammates, gather round, because today is the birthday of my favourite number in all of sport. Don Bradman was born on this day in 1908 at Cootamundra, New South Wales, and he finished his Test career with a batting average of 99.94. Ninety-nine point nine four! I have typed that figure a hundred times and every single time my thumb hovers over the delete key, because it reads like a typo. It isn't. It's just what the man did.
Here's the part I love best, though. Before the crowds and the knighthood, he was a boy in Bowral with a cricket stump and a golf ball, whacking it against the brick base of a water tank and chasing the rebound. A golf ball off curved brick comes back at silly angles and silly speeds, which is a fancy way of saying he built the best eye in cricket out of the cheapest equipment available. Every kid who has ever thrown a tennis ball against a garage door is in that story somewhere.
The photograph below shows him young, in a light double-breasted suit, bat resting on his shoulder with his own name stamped on the face. Fair enough! When your average is 99.94, they can put your name on whatever they like.
Toby, the 1930 side got to England the slow way, by liner through the Suez Canal, weeks at sea with nets rigged on deck so the batsmen could keep their eye in. Bradman came off that ship and made 974 runs in the series, which is a fair return on some canvas and rope.
Toby, that water tank is a practice pad by another name — a boy in Bowral, alone, getting the rebound in time, over and over. Every drummer I ever knew got good on a rubber disc in a bedroom, and nobody was watching them either.