Former India captain Sachin Tendulkar recalled his first meeting with Don Bradman and how nervous Shane Warne was on the way to the legend’s house in Adelaide in 1998.
“It was a big moment because I still remember from the hotel, Warnie was with me. Warnie was driving and he said ‘I am tensed, I am worried, what to talk to him about batting? You’re a batter, so you need to talk to him.’
Sachin on meeting Don Bradman
Tendulkar and Warne met the former Australia captain after getting an invitation from Bradman himself on his 90th birthday on August 27. Tendulkar revealed how Warne was driving the car they were in and was really nervous about what to talk to Bradman about.
“I said, ‘no, Aussie first’. I told him to start the conversation and I would follow up. So Shane Warne went inside and started talking a little bit.
“Obviously, the natural question was ‘Sir Don, if you were batting in today’s era, what would you have averaged?’. He took about 10 seconds to think and said ‘maybe around 70’. The obvious reaction was ‘why only 70? Why not 99?’.
“He said ‘common kid, it’s not bad for a 90-year-old man’. That was his response. He enjoyed watching cricket. He was up with the game. Those were special moments,” Tendulkar told Boria Majumdar on India Today.
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Bradman was special and nobody has ever been able to accumulate as many runs in such a consistent basis over his or her playing career. But, Tendulkar, often pitted against Bradman for the tag of ‘greatest-ever’, comes the closest to him, according to the great man himself.
“I saw him playing on television and was struck by his technique, so I asked my wife to come look at him. Now I never saw myself play, but I felt that this player is playing with a style similar to mine, and she looked at the TV and said yes, there is a similarity between the two…his compactness, technique, stroke production – it all seemed to gel,” Bradman once famously said about Tendulkar.
Don Bradman’s test carrier
Bradman called time on his international career in 1948 and earned knighthood the very next year in March. He finished with 52 Tests for Australia and amassed 6996 runs with the highest score of 334 runs at an average of 99.94 — which has remained out of reach of any batsman till date, who has retired.
