The best batsman to ever play cricket deserves better than to be canceled for having also been a fiscal conservative.
The late Donald Bradman was the best batsman to ever play cricket. He deserves better than to be canceled for having also been a fiscal conservative.
D onald Bradman is not a household name in America, but he certainly is in every country that plays cricket. “The Don,” as he was widely known, died 21 years ago, yet he is still regarded as the greatest cricketer of all time today. In 1986, when former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser visited Nelson Mandela, a cricket fanatic, in the South African prison where Mandela was being held, Mandela’s first question to Fraser was: “Tell me Mr. Fraser, is Donald Bradman still alive?”
In more than one person’s estimation, the Australian batsman also has claim to being not just the greatest cricketer but the greatest athlete the world has ever seen. In cricket, a Test batting average of 50 is considered outstanding; Bradman’s Test batting average was 99.94, a record no other batsman has even come close to matching.
Beyond cricket, Bradman came to be regarded as symbolic of the Australian character. While he played first-class cricket from 1927 until 1949 (an incredible record of longevity in itself), some of his greatest sporting feats occurred during the Great Depression. Bradman’s batting prowess and contributions to the Australian cricket team’s victories over all comers provided Australians of all social backgrounds with hope as the country was decimated by the world economic downturn. It’s fair to say that many Australians in the 1930s lived vicariously through Bradman. In 1997, another Australian prime minister, John Howard, described him as the “greatest living Australian.”
No one, however, is safe from the woke these days, and now the woke have come for Donald Bradman. Let me explain.
When Bradman was in his prime, it was normal for even top cricketers to have a second job, because playing the game didn’t pay enough on its own, even in sports-obsessed Australia. Bradman was a stockbroker on the side and eventually established his own highly successful stockbroking business.
Bradman thus knew a thing or two about money and the making of it. After he retired from cricket, he served on the boards of a number of publicly listed companies. For a time, he was chairman of Argo Investments Limited, which at different points in its history has been one of the most prominent companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Despite his prominence as a successful businessman and his status as Australia’s greatest-ever sportsman, Bradman rarely commented on public issues. Unlike some contemporary professional athletes, he kept his views to himself and was on the record as saying that politics and sports should be kept as far apart as possible. That said, it is generally acknowledged that Bradman’s political opinions were of the conservative variety, especially on economic questions.
This is where today’s woke types come into the picture. Toward the end of 2022, a private letter written by Bradman to Malcolm Fraser, two days after the tumultuous 1975 federal election that had propelled Fraser to the prime minister’s office following the even-more-tumultuous dismissal of the Whitlam government, came to light.
In the letter, Bradman described himself as “a passionate advocate of freedom from socialism (or worse).” Like millions of other Australians, Bradman was appalled at the Whitlam government’s gross economic incompetence. He urged Fraser to address what he regarded as the excessive power of trade unions, to focus on dealing with the inflation that was ravaging the economy, and to free up the controls on capital that were the norm in what was then a highly regulated Australian economy.
Bradman also asked Fraser to help the Australian public recognize the importance of private enterprise and the benefits of a clear and simple regulatory framework that ordinary Australians could comprehend. “What the people need,” he wrote, “are clearly defined rules which they can read and understand so that they can get on with their affairs.” More generally, he argued, Australians needed to grasp that “private enterprise is entitled to rewards as long as it obeys fair and reasonable rules laid down by government.”
These words, written in a private letter 47 years ago, shouldn’t strike even those who favor extensive government regulation as particularly controversial. They were enough, however, to elicit nasty comments about Bradman from prominent Australian left-wingers on Twitter and other social-media sites. “Sad,” tweeted one such commentator. “Lost letter from Bradman to Fraser after Whitlam’s dismissal reveals ‘the Don’ to be a RWNJ [right-wing nutjob].”
Since when, I ask, is it a mark of extremist politics to desire a simplified regulatory framework for business? Is it now beyond the pale to suggest that reducing inflation is a worthwhile endeavor? Are over-mighty unions beyond criticism? What precisely is problematic about private enterprise’s making money within clearly defined legal and regulatory limits?
The irony is that Malcolm Fraser turned out to be an old-fashioned Keynesian in office. For all his tough talk of austerity and reducing the size of government, Fraser did little to liberalize the Australian economy, despite having majorities in both houses of parliament between 1975 and 1980. Nor did he do anything about trade-union power. Margaret Thatcher accurately dismissed him as just another economic “wet.”
The good news is that the woke assault on Bradman’s reputation has been met with some fairly forceful rebuttals — and not just from conservatives. Many have pointed out that Bradman’s views on racial issues, while commonplace today, were considered progressive in a country in which the White Australia policy had prevailed up until the 1970s. One reason that Nelson Mandela so admired Bradman (apart from Mandela’s love of great cricket) was that, in one of his rare public interventions, Bradman spoke forcibly against racial discrimination in the selection of sporting teams in the early 1970s, when such discrimination was still the norm in apartheid South Africa.
Still, it’s telling that woke types now think that they can attack national icons such as Bradman simply because they held fiscally conservative opinions. It indicates that we are way beyond debates about particular historical figures’ association with slavery or whose ancestors may have done what to whose ancestors half a millennium ago.
When the mob sets its sights on the reputation of someone who was the greatest of athletes — someone who inspired his country to believe in itself during the 20th century’s worst economic decade — we have every right to fear that there’s worse yet to come.