Do we like Don Bradman?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record and no harmful words found, but the record is thin on modern questions, and his politics and the family fight over his name are contested.
Bradman was born on 27 August 1908 in Cootamundra, New South Wales. He started first-class cricket for NSW at Adelaide Oval in 1927 and finished on the same ground in 1949. His Test average of 99.94 is still the number everyone quotes, and it's why he's the bloke every other batter gets measured against.
The defining stoush of his career was Bodyline. England's tactics in 1932-33 were aimed squarely at him, and the Wakefield Companion says they strained cricket's ethics and even the unity of the Empire. He came out of it as the face of the game, not just its best player.
After playing he stayed on as an administrator for decades. He was an Australian Cricket Board selector from 1936 to 1971, board chairman in 1960-63 and 1969-72, and South Australian Cricket Association president from 1965 to 1973. He was knighted in 1949, the only Australian cricketer to get that honour.
The best story on the harm check is South Africa in 1971. As the story goes, he first wanted sport and politics kept apart, flew over to meet Prime Minister Vorster, then came home and cancelled the tour, saying Australia “will not play them until they choose a team on a non-racist basis”. That account is told as anecdote, not verified on the page, and historians credit other pressure too, but it's the record on race we found.
The part critics seize on is a 1975 letter to new Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, dug up in late 2022. In it he called himself non-political but “a passionate advocate of freedom from socialism (or worse)” and urged Fraser to curb inflation and back private enterprise. Critic Binoy Kampmark calls him a reactionary; the Spectator's writers call it mainstream economics and say the pile-on was unfair. Where you land depends on your politics, and it's contested politics, not harm to a group of people.
That's honestly about the whole list. Nothing on LGBTQ+ people, trans people, women, climate or vaccines turned up in what we could open, and he died in 2001, so he never faced today's culture-war questions. We also couldn't find charity work of his own in the pages that opened, so the good stuff is mostly a lifetime of public service to the game.