"No name will be greater than his"

He was the top player in an AUSTRALIAN CRICKET TEAM so dominant the English press nicknamed them "THE INVINCIBLES."
SIR DON BRADMAN had already announced his upcoming retirement from Test cricket, and as he entered the batting crease against ENGLAND at The Oval in August 1948, "The Don" only required four runs to conclude his career with an average of 100 runs per game in Test cricket.
In a momentous surprise, England's Eric Hollies bowled Bradman out for a "duck" -- 0 runs scored -- and Bradman's Test average finished at 99.94 runs per game.
It's the only blemish on a career that many people in the world consider the greatest of any athlete in any sport.
I just read about Australia's 1948 tour of England in "STORY OF THE ASHES," a great book on the cricket rivalry I recently acquired in the U.K.
Statistician Charles Davis once analysed the careers of several prominent athletes, comparing the number of standard deviations -- how much variation there is from the average -- that they stood above the mean for their sport.
The analysis judged Bradman as the top performer of any athlete, above Pele in soccer, Ty Cobb in baseball, Jack Nicklaus in golf and Michael Jordan.
Like Wayne Gretzky in hockey, Bradman was a statistical freak.
That 99.94 run average of Bradman's is nearly 40 runs higher than anyone else in cricket history who has played more than 20 Test matches. Bradman scored centuries (100 runs in an innings) at a rate better than one every three innings. He scored his 29 centuries in only 80 Test innings. The next greatest run scorer, Sachin Tendulkar of India, required 159 innings to reach 29 centuries.
Other cricket legends struggle to describe Bradman's momentous standing in the sport.
"The word 'great' is used far too often," said Sir Garfield Sobers, the West Indies cricketer considered the sport's greatest all-rounder (combining bowling, batting and fielding skills). "You can't call Don Bradman great, and Brian Lara great, or even David Gower great as well. If Lara and Gower were great, then you simply have to invent a different word for Bradman."
I like how THE CRICKETER magazine described Bradman, in reporting on that final Test at The Oval in 1948:
"It would be superfluous to praise his greatness as a batsman. Clearly his name will live in cricket history. No name will be greater than his."