Bradman will always be the Don..by Nirmal Sekhar

IMAGINE a Top Ten list of all-time great composers that does not include the name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Imagine a Top Ten list of all-time great painters from which Vincent Van Gogh is missing?

Well, when gimmicky, infantile exercises are undertaken, such things do happen. It did a few months ago when the International Cricket Council came up with its all-time best World XI. But what is worse came three days ago, when Dr. Nicholas Rohde from Australia's Griffith University got his No.1 wrong in a list of batting greats in cricket. That is unpardonable and doesn't say much for the researcher's analytical acuity.

To think that any human being who ever picked up a cricket bat was greater than Don Bradman — no matter who that person may be, no matter how many hundreds of millions of fans happen to worship him — is nothing but puerile phantasm.

You think this is laughable and unthinkable and preposterous? It is none of these, actually. You just do not employ simplistic research methods to rank sporting greats. Or ask lay fans to vote, as did ICC, if you are serious about conducting what might be an interesting — if ultimately pointless — exercise.

Instead, you appoint a panel of experts — former cricketers, journalists and officials — to debate the issue and come up with names.

This is especially so in a sport played with any kind of seriousness in less than a dozen countries and one whose fan base is dominated by citizens of a single nation — India.

It is obvious that a vast majority of voters who chose the ICC all-time best World XI were Indians, for four of their countrymen found themselves in the list. This is not to take anything away from the merits of Sachin Tendulkar, Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar and Virender Sehwag.

But how can Kapil Dev get in ahead of Gary Sobers, or Virender Sehwag ahead of Jack Hobbs? Of course, the cruel joke was, Viv Richards, arguably the most destructive of post-war batsmen, did not find a place in this list.

Defying all logic

While all lists, including those put together by the best of experts, are bound to have an element of subjectivity involved, online polls make a mockery of common sense. And the latest dished out by Dr. Rohde defies all logic. Even Sachin would laugh at it.

What is more, the Australian researcher's Top Ten does not feature the names of Viv Richards, George Headley, Jack Hobbs and Barry Richards. But, somehow, Allan Border, Steve Waugh and Javed Miandad are in it.

But the point of this column is this: how can a batsman who played in an era of uncovered wickets and without modern protective gear — most of all, one who missed playing international cricket during his peak years because of the Second World War — and ended up with a batting average of 99.94 in 52 Tests with 29 hundreds, be ranked below anyone else who ever played the game?

A school-kid couldn't have got that wrong. For, in no other sport has one player stood so far above the rest. The word ‘incomparable' is often used carelessly in sports journalism. But if there is one batsman who is beyond comparison, it is most certainly Bradman.

For cricket's sake, and sanity's sake, dear researchers, please leave the Don alone!

When he did what he did — which is, bat like no man ever did, before or after — the Don didn't appear to be human. Could a mortal, a mere mortal, do all this, people wondered in the 1930s and 1940s as the greatest batsman in history rewrote record after record.

And the passing of time has done nothing to diminish Bradman's greatness, or take the sheen off his image as a superman. He was a freak of nature who functioned consistently at an altitude no other batsman could dream of rising to.

In an ephemeral world where everything has a limited appeal, where every sports accomplishment has a limited shelf life when it comes to popular appeal, the Bradman legend outgrew itself with each passing era. And the arrival of a Viv Richards or a Brian Lara or a Sachin Tendulkar did nothing to take anything away from the Don, or displace him from his pedestal.

Nobody ever had the aura of invincibility that Bradman did. Had the Second World War not intervened, the greatest cricketer of all time would have perhaps scored over 12,000 runs and averaged over 100.

In an era of helmets and protective gear and batsmen-friendly pitches, at a time when 50-plus is still a true yardstick of greatness, one can surely get an idea of where the Don stands — alone and apart.

Mona Lisa Is Stolen..1911

Mona Lisa

Italian: La Gioconda, French: La Joconde
Artist	Leonardo da Vinci
Year	c. 1503–1519
Type	Oil on poplar
Dimensions	77 cm × 53 cm (30 in × 21 in)
Location	Musée du Louvre, Paris

July 30, 2011

If you were standing outside the Louvre in Paris on the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, you might have noticed three men hurrying out of the museum.

They would have been pretty conspicuous on a quiet Monday morning, writer and historian James Zug tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "Sunday night was a big social night in Paris," he says, "so a lot of people were hung over on Monday morning."

The men, three Italian handymen, were not hungover. But they might have been a little tired. They'd just spent the night in an art-supply closet.

And on that morning, with the Louvre still closed, they slipped out of the closet and lifted 200 pounds of painting, frame and protective glass case off the wall. Stripped of its frame and case, the wooden canvas was covered with a blanket and hustled off to the Quai d'Orsay station, where the trio boarded a 7:47 a.m. express train out of the city.

They'd stolen the "Mona Lisa."

Famous, Overnight 

Before its theft, the "Mona Lisa" was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn't until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn't filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia.

"The 'Mona Lisa' wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre," Zug says.

Dorothy and Tom Hoobler wrote about the painting's heist in their book, The Crimes of Paris. It was 28 hours, they say, until anyone even noticed the four bare hooks.

The guy who noticed was a pushy still-life artist who set up his easel to paint that gallery in the Louvre.

"He felt he couldn't work as long as the 'Mona Lisa' wasn't there," Tom Hoobler says.

But the artist wasn't alarmed. At that time, there was a project under way to photograph the Louvre's many works. Each piece had to be taken to the roof, since cameras of the day did not work well inside.

"So finally he persuaded a guard to go see how long the photographers were going to have the painting," Tom Hoobler says. "He went off and came back, and said, 'You know what, the photographers say they don't have it!' "

All of a sudden, James Zug says, "the 'Mona Lisa' becomes this incredibly famous painting — literally overnight."

After the Louvre announced the theft, newspapers all over the world ran headlines about the missing masterpiece.Mark of Shame 

"60 Detectives Seek Stolen 'Mona Lisa,' French Public Indignant," the New York Times declared. The heist had become something of a national scandal.

"In France, there was a great deal of concern that American millionaires were buying up the legacy of France — the best paintings," Dorothy Hoobler says. At one point, American tycoon and art lover J.P. Morgan was suspected of commissioning the theft. Pablo Picasso was also considered a suspect, and was questioned.

And as tensions were escalating between France and Germany ahead of World War I, "there were people who thought the Kaiser was behind it," Hoobler says.

After a weeklong shutdown, the Louvre re-opened to mobs of people, Franz Kafka among them, all rushing to see the empty spot that had become a "mark of shame" for Parisians.

Meanwhile, the thieves had made a clean getaway. They were three Italians: two brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, and the ringleader, Vincenzo Perugia. He was a handyman who had worked for the Louvre to install the very same protective glass cases he had ripped from the "Mona Lisa."

Perugia hoped to sell the painting. But the heist had received so much attention that the "Mona Lisa" became too hot to hock, Zug says.

"Within days, newspapers were offering rewards. [Perugia] could have brought it in, but I think the main reason he didn't do that is he was worried about being arrested — and that the story was so big that he probably didn't think he could get away with it."

So Perugia stashed it in the false bottom of a trunk in his Paris boardinghouse.

EnlargeKIKE CALVO/AP

Of the more than 35,000 works of art in the Louvre, perhaps none is more popular than the Mona Lisa.

A Masterpiece Returned

Twenty-eight months after he snatched it from the Louvre, Perugia finally made a pass at selling the "Mona Lisa" to an art dealer in Florence.

But the dealer was suspicious. He had the head of an Italian art gallery come take a look at the painting.

A stamp on the back confirmed its authenticity.

"They said, 'OK, leave it with us, and we'll see that you get a reward,'" Tom Hoobler says. Perugia went back home. But half an hour later, to his surprise, the police were at his door.

"He said later that he was trying to return it to Italy — that he was a patriot and it was stolen by Napoleon — and he was trying to return it to the land of his birth," James Zug says.

And so, with much fanfare, the painting was returned to the Louvre. Perugia pleaded guilty to stealing it, and was sentenced to just eight months in prison.

But a few days after his trial, Dorothy Hoobler says, World War I broke out. Suddenly, the drama of an art heist was off the front pages.

"This seemed like a very small story," she says.