A 1980s review of crowd figures in his era showed that in Sheffield Shield cricket, attendances were twice as large on days when Bradman was batting or likely to bat than on other days. The New South Wales Cricket Association made more than 3000 pounds in Bradman's last season in Sydney and lost the same amount the next season when he moved to Adelaide. He's Out'', an English newspaper poster once famously declaimed, and no one had to ask what it meant. In Test cricket, he made 6996 runs, with 26 centuries, at 99.94, yet failing to score in his final innings when merely a boundary would have given him a century average. Like his several illnesses, including one that sent him to hospital at the end of the 1938 tour of England and led the world briefly to believe that he was dying, and another that invalided him out of active service in World War II, this was perhaps fate's way of keeping him within the bounds of human comprehension - just.
Statistics have a pernicious reputation, but that one tells an incontrovertible truth.
Irving Rosenwater, perhaps the best of his myriad biographers, theorised that his gift was a unique alignment of talent, temperament, intelligence, ego, cunning, fleetness of foot and reflex, beady eye, dedication, opportunity, hardiness and ruthlessness. Greats in all sports embody many or most of these qualities, but they were comprehensively and inimitably combined in Bradman. At 21 years old, he determined in a Sheffield Shield match against Queensland to break the record for the highest first-class score, then Bill Ponsford's 437. In the first innings, he made 3, yet was unchastened, and in the second innings duly made 452 not out. He was as unorthodox as only genius can be.