The ball lifts off a length, and Bill Woodfull (1897-1965) turns his shoulder into it because there is nowhere else to put his body. It strikes him over the heart. He drops his bat and bends across the crease, one glove on his chest, and for a moment the Adelaide Oval goes quiet. Then thirty thousand people stand at once and the sound rolls down over the fence toward the men in white. It is January 14, 1933, the third Test of the tour, and the country is two years into a depression that has put nearly a third of its men out of work and onto sustenance, the susso, the dole that no man wants his neighbour to see him collect.
Woodfull straightens. He waves away the offer of help. While he stands there rubbing his chest, the England captain, Douglas Jardine (1900-1958), turns to his fast bowler and says, loud enough for the batsman to hear, “Well bowled, Harold.” Then he raises a hand and moves his fielders across to the leg side, five and six of them now in a tight ring, and Harold Larwood (1904-1995) walks back to his mark to bowl the next ball at the body of a man who has just been hit over the heart.
The crowd understands what it has seen. It does not have the word for it yet, but it knows the thing is wrong, and the knowledge comes up through the body before it reaches the tongue. That gap, between the certainty that a sacred thing has been broken and the search for the word to name the breaking, is where this whole quarrel lives.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that men cannot bear their own smallness and their own death, so they build schemes of meaning that let them feel they count, that some part of them will outlast the grave. A culture is one of these schemes made large. It tells a man how to be of worth and what he must do to earn a place that death cannot cancel. Becker called these hero systems. Cricket, in 1933, is such a system for two nations at once, and the trouble is that the two nations are reading the same scorebook in two different scripts.
Donald Bradman (1908-2001) is the figure each script needs and neither quite owns. He comes off the dry country at Bowral, a boy who taught himself to bat by hitting a golf ball against a water tank with a stump. By 1930 he has gone to England and scored 974 runs in the Test series at an average of 139.14, a figure that reads less like a cricket statistic than a rebuke to the laws of probability. In a country where the banks are calling in loans and the wharves stand half idle, his runs are the one account in the nation’s name that keeps growing. Men who cannot pay the rent read the close-of-play score in the paper and feel, for an evening, that Australia is winning at something.
Bradman’s own scheme is narrower than the nation’s, and colder. He does not drink with the team. He keeps to his room and answers his mail and counts his runs. His teammates find him distant, and some of them, Jack Fingleton (1908-1981) among them, never forgive the distance. Bradman treats batting as a problem to be solved and treats his own worth as a thing measured in figures that can be checked against the record of every man who came before him. His path to the only immortality he trusts runs through the book. Score enough, and average enough, and outlast enough bowlers, and the page will hold your name when the flesh is gone. This is a hero system built for one man, and it works, and it sets him a little apart from the crowd that loves him.
The crowd’s scheme is different. For the man on the Adelaide hill, the value at the centre of the game is the upright body that will not be moved. A batsman stands, takes the fast ball on the ribs if he must, and does not give ground. Courage there means the refusal to flinch, and a nation that feels itself the junior partner of an empire reads that refusal as its own. To stand against the fastest bowling in the world and not step back is to stand against London and not step back. So when Stan McCabe (1910-1968) hooks Larwood for hours at Sydney in the first Test and finishes with 187 not out, the hill does not love him for the runs alone. It loves him for the stance, the body offered and not withdrawn.
This is why Bradman, of all men, gives the home crowd its one private grief. Against bodyline he does not stand and offer the body. He steps away toward the leg side and frees his arms and cuts and pulls the short ball into the gaps the packed leg field has left open behind him. By the ledger he carries in his own head, the method works: he makes a hundred at Melbourne in the second Test, and Australia wins the only match it will win all summer. By the ledger the crowd carries, the stepping away looks like a flinch, and a few voices say the word that no Australian batsman wants said of him. Here the strange thing shows itself. Inside one nation, sharing one game, two men read the same value two ways. McCabe is brave because he stands. Bradman is suspect because he moves. Yet Bradman moves because his scheme rewards the run and not the posture, and the crowd doubts him because its scheme rewards the posture even at the cost of the run. The word is courage. It does not mean one thing.
It never does. Take the word out of cricket and watch it scatter. For the Carthusian in his cell, courage is to stay, to refuse the door, to let the silence kill the small self for the love of God, and a man who measured bravery by motion would call this a wasted life. For the test pilot, courage is the cold count through the dive, fear traded for a number, his name on a sheet that almost no one will read. For the village midwife with no doctor within forty miles, courage is the steady hand at three in the morning and the willingness to be the one who decides who lives. For the prisoner on hunger strike, courage runs the other way, a slow surrender of the body offered so the word will carry past the jailer. The pilot would find the monk’s stillness incomprehensible. The monk would find the surgeon’s knife a kind of violence. Each of these men buys the same thing with his courage, a place in a story longer than his own life, and each pays in a coin the others cannot spend. Bradman and the man on the hill are no different. They are two of these men, standing twenty-two yards apart, using one word and meaning two things by it.
Now cross the boundary rope to the other side and the ground shifts under the same word again, this time the word “cricket” itself.
Jardine is an amateur, which in 1933 is a station and not a description of skill. He went to Winchester College and to New College, Oxford, and he wears the Harlequin cap of Oxford on the field, a small flag of caste that every professional in his own side can read at a glance. In English cricket the amateurs are Gentlemen and the professionals are Players, and they come onto the field through separate gates and change in separate rooms and appear on the scorecard under different rules, the Gentleman’s initials before his surname, the Player’s surname standing alone. Jardine commands; Larwood and Bill Voce (1909-1984) bowl what they are told. Jardine disliked Australians on his first tour and the dislike hardened into a plan. He had watched Bradman shy from the lifting ball on a wet pitch at The Oval in 1930, filed the flinch away, and over a winter worked out a method to make a batsman choose between his wicket and his ribs.
For Jardine, this is cricket. The laws permit a captain to place his field where he likes and permit a fast bowler to bowl short. Bodyline breaks no written rule. The contest is a contest of will and intelligence inside the laws, and a man who masters the laws to win the Ashes has done the thing the game exists to reward. So when the Australian Board of Control cables London on January 18, 1933, and uses the word “unsportsmanlike,” the word lands in England not as a description but as an insult, and the Marylebone Cricket Club threatens to bring the team home unless it is withdrawn. To the English establishment the foul is not the bowling. The foul is the accusation. In the Gentleman’s scheme you do not charge a man with cheating when he has kept the rules, because the charge says he is no gentleman, and that is the one wound the system cannot dress. Pelham Warner (1873-1963), the England manager, had built a public life on cricket as the school of fair play. When Woodfull says to him in the Adelaide dressing room that there are two teams out there and only one of them is playing cricket, the sentence does not strike a bowling tactic. It strikes Warner’s own hero system at the root, and he goes away shaken, because a man has told him to his face that the thing he has called sacred all his life is being used as a weapon.
The two camps are not disagreeing about facts. They agree on the facts. Larwood bowls fast and short at the body to a packed leg field, and men get hit. Two days after Woodfull, the wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield (1894-1976) top-edges a hook and the ball strikes his temple and fractures his skull, and the crowd surges toward the pickets while the police move in along the fence. Oldfield says afterward that the blow was his own fault, that he misjudged a ball that was not a bodyline ball at all, and he is telling the truth. It does not matter. The crowd’s reading does not turn on whose fault the blow was. The sacred has been broken in its sight, and the question of fault belongs to a smaller court than the one now in session. Each side looks at one set of facts and reads from it a different verdict, because each is reading by the light of a different scheme of worth.
What happens to Larwood tells the rest. He takes thirty-three wickets in the series, the finest fast bowling of his life, and he does it on orders from a captain he will defend to the end. When the diplomatic wound has to be closed, the establishment that sent him in asks him to sign an apology. He refuses. He had bowled what he was told, and he will not say it was wrong, and for that refusal he never plays for England again. The Gentlemen keep their standing. The Player is spent and put down. Years later Larwood takes his family to Australia and lives out his life among the very people his bowling once frightened, and they take him in, because the crowd’s quarrel was never with the miner’s son who did the work. The hero system used him and discarded him, and the men he had hurt gave him the home his own side withdrew.
Bradman comes out of bodyline with an average of around fifty-seven, the highest on either side bar one, a figure that would crown most careers and that for him counts as a fall, half his usual height. The crowd’s scheme had a hard summer. The nation’s one growing account took body blows, and the men on the hill felt the blows as their own, because Bradman standing tall had been their proof that the junior country could beat the senior at the senior’s own game. The empire found a method to lower that proof, inside the laws, and the lowering felt to a watching nation like a hand laid on the only thing it had left to be proud of.
Becker would say none of these men was fighting about cricket. They were fighting about how to be of worth in a universe that grants no worth on its own and ends every man the same way. Jardine reaches for mastery and the Ashes and the cold proof that the better will wins within the rules. The crowd reaches for the upright body that an empire cannot move. Larwood reaches for the craft and the loyalty of the working man who does the hard thing well and stands by it. And Bradman reaches past all of them for the page in the book, the column of figures that will keep his name when Adelaide and its grief and the whole quarrel over a word have gone under the grass. They use one vocabulary, sport and fairness and courage and the game, and each man hears in those words the terms of his own deliverance. The words are the same. The men are not. That is the whole of it, and it is enough to break the peace between two nations who thought they shared a religion and found, on a hot afternoon in Adelaide, that they had only ever shared its language.
