MY FAVOURITE: DON BRADMAN

PIERS MORGAN FELL IN LOVE WITH DON BRADMAN WHEN THE GREATEST BATSMAN OF ALL FOUND TIME TO REPLY TO A TEENAGER'S LETTERS

When I was a kid I was obsessed by cricket. My parents took me to Lord’s for the first day of the 1975 Ashes Test. We saw Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson bowling to David Steele and Tony Greig. It all seemed impossibly fantastic and glamorous. I used to open the bowling for my prep school with my collar turned up like Greig and with an action like Lillee. So being at an Ashes Test was cricket utopia.

What became immediately clear was there was Sir Donald Bradman, and then there was everyone else. If you look at his average of 99.94 it was about 40 runs ahead of his nearest rival. Bradman is the greatest sportsman, by stats, of anyone who walked the planet. That fascinated me and I began obsessing about him and bought every book about him and collected newspaper cuttings. Then I thought, “why not write to him”. I must have been about 12 or 13. I didn’t expect a reply, of course. Amazingly he replied to me with a handwritten letter, beginning ‘Dear Piers’. It was incredible. My sporting hero had actually written back to me.

So being a persistent little git, I wrote back, and he kept replying. I later found out that he always replied to kids. He had a terrible relationship with journalists and lots of people he played with, but he was incredible with young fans.

Later, I became secretary of Newick CC in Sussex. Then it got really interesting. Newick is close to Sheffield Park, where the Australian touring teams used to play their first game of their Ashes tours. Sheffield Park stopped staging games in 1896, but when Newick celebrated its centenary in 1984 and I was a teenager, I used its proximity to Sheffield Park to try to persuade Bradman to write a foreword to the centenary brochure. I told him we had made him an honorary life member. Incredibly, about a month later this huge parcel arrives from Adelaide. Inside was a 1,000-word typed foreword celebrating our achievement and containing detailed research about the Langridge brothers, John and James, who both played for Newick and England, and talking about the joys of village cricket.

Bradman also included memorabilia about the Sheffield Shield, and pictures of himself at Sheffield Park.

I continued to correspond with him for many years. I tried to get him to write for the News of the World when I was editor, but he said that his journalism days were over and he’d “leave it to younger men like Richie Benaud”. He was very particular in how he replied. If he was replying to me, Piers Morgan, he’d write “Dear Piers”, and sign off, “Yours, Don”. But if I was writing to him on behalf of the club, he was much more formal, writing “Dear Mr P. Morgan” and signing it, “Yours sincerely, Sir Donald Bradman”. I guess over the years I must have had 30 to 35 letters from him. I didn’t only like Bradman for his statistical greatness. I also liked him because he wasn’t the easiest of men. Whenever I have the KP debate with people, the one thing I often say was that Bradman would not have survived the whole Strauss/Cook order of behaviour either, because he was difficult himself and quite a loner in the dressing room.  Notoriously selfish about money and contracts. He wasn’t that popular. But they never thought about dropping him, because he scored so many runs. For me, the fact that he was a rebellious personality and didn’t court popularity made him more intriguing. Bradman was often at loggerheads with authority and he stood up for what he believed in. He was a trailblazer.

One line I found in one of his letters says: “I still struggle around the golf course, and break my age occasionally. I get very frustrated when I can’t do the things I used to find so simple.” He wrote that when he was 86 and he was still breaking his age on the golf course. The letters were warm and informative about what he was up to and who he had seen playing. I never met him. To my mother’s horror I did invite him to stay during the Centenary Test in 1980, but he said the flight to England was too long.

Cricket has always been my greatest passion, even more than my beloved Arsenal. I would have swapped everything to have played for England against Australia at Lord’s. 

I had the experience of facing Brett Lee in the nets. It came about because I had spent a fortune taking my sons and my brother out to Australia to watch the 2013/14 Ashes. All I asked of KP before they left was, “please don’t lose the Ashes before we get there”. England lost the Ashes on December 16 and we got there on the 19th. So I was pretty unhappy. And I chirped on Twitter that some of the guts of the England batsmen had been lacking. Lee replied, “Think you could do any better?” and I said, “Yeah, I do actually.”

Word got around and there were about 10,000 people all around the nets. And there was Brett at the end of his run looking like a big snorting dragon. He came steaming in and must have bowled a two-yard no ball. I’d had dinner with Viv Richards the night before and he said, “man, you gotta get down the wicket to him, close the gap”. It was only when I was halfway down the wicket and Lee had speared it in at my wrist that I realised that to do that you have to be Viv Richards. The first one nearly broke my wrist, the second sent me flying on my arse, the third broke my rib, the fourth hit the broken rib, the fifth yorked me and the sixth was another vicious bouncer which smashed into my back. I am happy I didn’t throw the towel in. Once I realised I was still alive it was a fantastic experience facing someone like him trying to kill me.

People tell me the dust has now settled on the KP thing. I don’t think it has. Misbah is 42 and has just made a century. Sachin Tendulkar, Kumar Sangakkara and Jacques Kallis retired four or five years older than Pietersen, and the bottom line is, if you’re going to ban a guy for life, then tell him why. KP has never been given any reason. It is inexcusable cowardice. Added to that I have not seen anybody in England’s middle order, apart from Joe Root, who is better than KP. If and when his ability is surpassed by one of his many replacements, I will give up my campaign. In January he could be eligible for South Africa. And where’s their first tour next year? England!