Don Bradman's farewell bow from Test cricket was incongruously abrupt. Still wanting for the most famous four he never hit, he was quickly lost in the shadows of The Oval pavilion. Now he, too, has rapidly disappeared from the public eye and mind again.
As a cricketer, the Don at least faded brightly. As an immortal, there has been some sort of eclipse. It is just on 10 years since he died. But he is already gone from the country's vernacular. The term ''Bradmanesque'' is rarely heard, and it is an age since the last ''next Bradman'' was anointed. Peter FitzSimons never did write a book on him. It is as if he has slipped the country's mind.
This is Don Bradman, no less, one of two Australians selected in International Who's Who's top 100 shapers of the 20th century (the other was Rupert Murdoch) and one of only three athletes on that list, alongside Muhammad Ali and Pele. This is a man hailed by one not-so-long-ago prime minister, John Howard, as the ''greatest living Australian''. Already, he has become like one of the many statues of him: larger than life, but fixed in the past.
This was observable even on the day Bradman died. In Bowral, that day was like any other. The one Australian flag in the main street, above a real estate agent's office, still flew at full mast. Howard cried, but few others did. In one way, this indifference towards the man was understandable. It was more than 50 years since Bradman had last played, more than 10 since he'd retired from public life. He was an old man, already a decade dead to public consciousness.
Invincible ... Bradman in 1948.
Bradman was a man of his time, but it was another time. He was a Protestant, mason, Anglophile, monarchist and knight. He loved classical music, was an adept pianist and became a champion at squash. For most of his playing days he was a teetotaller and a non-smoker. In a highly social sport he was almost a hermit. Bill O'Reilly first met him in their early teens, played with and against him, jousted with him, studied him, wrote about him, but said near the end of his own life that he hardly knew him.
R.C. Robertson-Glasgow wrote a fond and famous tribute to Bradman at the beginning of that valedictory 1948 tour. But in it, was this: ''Stripped to the truth, he was a solitary man with a solitary aim.'' Humorous stories abound in cricket but ''there are no funny stories about the Don. No one ever laughed about Bradman. He was no laughing matter''.
It is impossible to say now whether he was solitary by nature or whether the public crush on him started to weigh before he could deal with it, forcing him to withdraw into a protective shell from which he never fully re-emerged. He was an unworldly 21 when he hit 334 at Leeds in 1930 and fame first began to burden him.
''His natural reticence and Puritan instincts irritated his own team and the English public after his record Test innings,'' wrote Richard Holt in a Wisden essay. ''Twenty years later, he was still wondering if he was expected to parade through the streets of Leeds. It took time for him to realise that he needed, and lacked, the common touch.''
'Bradman was man of his time, but it was another time.'
Bradman's refusal to act a part became the cross he bore all his life. It put a distance between him and the team from a young age. It exacerbated a bitter sectarian divide between him and a Catholic coterie led by O'Reilly and Jack Fingleton, at a time when religion still mattered deeply in Australia. It put him at arm's length from his public. Most of what is known about him beyond his cricket exploits emerged much later, in the memoirs of others, muted by passing years. O'Reilly never publicly dissed Bradman, explaining himself pithily: ''You don't piss on statues.''
Bradman himself thought cricket the most ennobling pursuit of all. Infamously, that most un-cricket-like ethic, Bodyline, was designed and enacted specifically against him. Only in that torrid summer of 1932-33 did cricket seem like war, and Bradman a likely martyr. Australia's heroes are generally working class, with a bit of renegade about them: Breaker Morant, Albert Jacka, Mary MacKillop, even Phar Lap; they have rubbed up against the grain of life a little, known its texture, felt the splinters. To the extent that Bradman ever rebelled, it was on his own account rather than his team's - when considering an offer to play professionally at Accrington, for instance, or fighting for his right to have his own newspaper column. Bradman was never anti-authoritarian, and later in life became the epitome of authority. He gave the game unbroken service until 1981, as a selector, a committeeman on the South Australian and national boards, and as chairman, twice, of the Australian board.
He was a stickler for formality. The late Age cricket writer Peter McFarline once phoned and left a message for Bradman, who was out. Duly, Bradman returned the call, but only to rebuke McFarline for addressing his wife as ''Jessie'' rather than ''Lady Bradman'', and then to bid him a brusque ''good day''.
He disliked being wrong, and rarely believed he was. Historian David Frith, reflecting on a 30-year friendship, wrote: ''He was content only when he had had the last word in a debate. I suppose it was some sort of substitute for 20 competitive years of habitually carving up bowlers of all descriptions.''
As an administrator Bradman was, well, miserly. He was, wrote Christian Ryan, ''a money-alert player but a penny-pinching administrator - the young visionary who stood up for his economic worth becoming an old reactionary''. Thus he helped trigger World Series Cricket.
Bradman saw the game as a paragon of purity. But that scarcely rings true any more. Corruption's tarnish is inescapable. Media, massed as it never was in Bradman's time, glamorises, but also lays bare. Cricket somehow is less important in the national psyche than it was in Bradman's day. Across the world, Test cricket - Bradman's cricket - is dying, and with it his legend. The unmaking began the day Bradman died. The nation - its prime minister excepted - did not so much grieve as pay its respects, as if to a departed head of state.
Bradman was a hero for crises, wedged between wars and surmounting the Depression. This is a less oppressed age, but perhaps because of it, shallower. Bradman's feats are immutable but the angle of the prism through which we see them is different. Not for the first time, immortality is proving to be a fleeting affair.
So it is that in death, Don Bradman unexpectedly has his dearest wish: he rests in peace.