Sir Donald Bradman, rated the greatest player in the history of cricket, died at the age 92, sending his native Australia and the sport's followers around the world into mourning.
He had not played for 50 years, but his fame endured among millions of fans who have seen him only in flickering film clips from black-and-white newsreels. Among them is the former South African President Nelson Mandela, whose first question to an Australian visitor on his release from 27 years of imprisonment in 1990 was, ''Is Sir Donald Bradman still alive?''
In a career from 1928 to 1948, playing against British Commonwealth national teams, Bradman's winning scores, and rare failures, interrupted news broadcasts in Australia, made banner headlines, delayed business and government meetings and set spectators and experts searching for words of praise worthy of his skills. So it was for his death, especially in other cricket strongholds like India, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and the Caribbean.
The Australian Parliament suspended debate yesterday to hear eulogies. Arrangements for state memorial ceremonies began, and flags were lowered in hamlets and suburbs across the Australian continent.
Call-in radio programs were flooded with anecdotes from admirers, including high school students who received some of the thousands of autographs Bradman mailed each year to well-wishers.
Australia idolized Bradman as a hero. In the 1930's, with the country in deep economic depression and still grieving for 60,000 killed in World War I, Bradman's achievements were a cause for national pride.
On Monday, Prime Minister John Howard, a cricket lover who visited Sir Donald a few days before he died of pneumonia in Adelaide, South Australia, said: ''He had a great impact on Australian life, especially during the desperate years of the Depression. His prowess on the cricket field lifted the hopes and spirits of the people, who at times felt they had little else.''
Bradman, who at 5 feet 7 inches was a wiry man with powerful forearms and a dancer's light, swift footwork, was self-taught. He was a batting champion in high school at 12 and on the national team at 20, subsequently recording scores and averages in 52 international games not previously achieved in almost a century of world cricket or in the half-century since his last innings, in London in 1948. King George VI knighted him in 1949 for services to cricket.
Mathematical analysis of Bradman's achievements against other major sports stars support his singularity: he dominated his sport by margins greater than those achieved by other champions.
Among world cricketers, Bradman had a career average of 99.94 runs per innings, a level 30 runs higher than that of his nearest rival even today.
In a recent book, ''The Best of the Best,'' Charles Davis, a Melbourne sports statistician, rated stars from different sports by measuring champions who were so far ahead of their rivals that they were in a class of their own, then comparing these margins.
By Mr. Davis's calculations, Bradman led the order of career-long achievement with a 4.4 rating, followed by soccer's Pelé (3.7), baseball's Ty Cobb (3.6), golf's Jack Nicklaus (3.5), basketball's Michael Jordan (3.4) and football's Joe Montana (3.1).
Mr. Davis calculated that for Cobb to have matched Bradman in dominance, he would have required a career batting average of .392. Cobb's career average was .366.
He says that to achieve the superiority level of Bradman, Nicklaus would have needed 25 major golf titles (he won 18), and Jordan would have needed to average 43 points a game (he averaged 32).
Donald George Bradman was born Aug. 27, 1908, in Cootamundra, 250 miles southwest of Sydney, and grew up at Bowral, another rural settlement. In 1989 he allowed a small museum to be established there alongside the cricket field to record his career.
An intensely private man who declined all endorsement offers and worked as a stockbroker in retirement, Sir Donald approved the exhibition, now a tourist favorite, in order to raise money for disabled children and junior cricket teams.
He married Jessie Menzies, a childhood sweetheart, in 1932. She died in 1997. Their children, John and Shirley, survive him, as do three grandchildren.
Bradman's prowess was obvious even to Americans. In 1932, when Bradman was in his prime, John Kieran wrote in The New York Times: ''Babe Ruth once knocked 60 home runs in a season. What's that to Daring Don Bradman, the ring-tailed wallaby of the cricket crease! He scored 452 runs (not out) in an afternoon.''
The article continued, ''He simply keeps hitting and running until some sensible person in the stands suggests a spot of tea.''