Steve Waugh

Like most professional sports men and women, Steve Waugh and his brother Mark were supported enthusiastically from the start by their parents. To begin with, enthusiasm was about all that Bev and Roger Waugh brought to the cricketing aspirations of their twin sons, with the result that their ‘very first official game of cricket [for Panania-East Hills Under 10s] was in many ways a disaster’. Mark and Stephen having made first and second ball ducks respectively, ‘wearing our only pad on the wrong leg and the placement (by our parents) of our protectors on our kneecaps’, was an embarrassment that was much harder to disown than zeros in the scorebook.

‘Did you hear about the old man who turned 100?’ asked Sir Donald Bradman in a cheerful note to the journalist Johan Rivett in October 1968. ‘They asked him what it felt like. He said wonderful – I haven’t an enemy in the world. The buggers are all dead.’ That’s our Don: twenty years retired and still thinking in hundreds, eh? This century, it turned out, was one he could not overhaul: he was ninety-two when he died on 25 February 2001. But the job was done; the buggers were all dead. Bradman remains, to use Christine Wallace’s words from her new book The Private Don, ‘the best-ever player in the best-loved sport in the most sports-loving nation in the world’. Wallace’s book attests another quality: he remains a sporting media property without compeer.