Don Bradman Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
48 free Don Bradman trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Don Bradman trivia quiz covers the boy from Bowral who became, by common consent, the greatest batsman who ever lived. The easy questions cover the famous average, the country he played for, the nickname, the golf ball and stump, the knighthood and the four runs he needed in his last innings. From there the quiz moves through the career: the first century at 12, the debut at Brisbane and the drop to twelfth man, 452 not out at the SCG, 974 runs in a series, 334 at Headingley, the innings at Lord's he called his best, the appendicitis that nearly killed him in 1934 and the move to Adelaide as a stockbroker. The hard end covers Bodyline and beyond: Jardine, Larwood and Voce, the Woodfull remark that leaked, the captaincy fights with O'Reilly and Fingleton, the army medical that found poor eyesight, the fibrositis, the Invincibles of 1948, Eric Hollies' googly, the ABC's post office box, the Mandela bat, Nick Bradman's 99.95 and the coins, stamps and songs. Every answer was checked against Don Bradman's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our cricket, The Ashes and Australian sport quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which modern batsman did Bradman say batted most like he himself had?
Sachin Tendulkar
Sachin Tendulkar: struck by his compact technique, Bradman asked his wife to take a look and she agreed they batted alike; on his 90th birthday he had Tendulkar and Shane Warne to his home.
Q 02How many runs did Bradman need in his final Test innings to finish with an average of exactly 100?
Four
Four: he made a duck instead and finished on 99.94, and because England then lost by an innings he never got a second chance to bat.
Q 03Which England bowler dismissed Bradman for a duck in his final Test innings, at The Oval in 1948?
Eric Hollies
Eric Hollies bowled him second ball with a googly, moments after the crowd had stood to applaud him all the way to the crease and England's players had gathered to cheer him.
Q 04Bradman is known as the Boy from Bowral, but in which New South Wales town was he actually born?
Cootamundra
Cootamundra: his family left the district for Bowral when he was two, so the town where he learned the game, not the one where he was born, gave him his nickname.
Q 05What did the young Bradman practise with against a water tank?
A golf ball and a cricket stump
A golf ball and a cricket stump: the ball flew back off the tank's brick stand fast and at odd angles, and hitting it with so thin a bat is credited with sharpening his eye and footwork.
Q 06In 1926 Bradman's boss allowed him one week off, forcing him to choose between cricket and which other sport?
Tennis
Tennis: he had all but dropped cricket for it for two years and was picked for Country Week in both sports; with leave for only one he chose cricket, and a Sydney club invited him soon after.
Q 07For which Sydney grade club did Bradman play from 1926-27, travelling 130 km each Saturday?
St George
St George: in his first game for the club he made 110, the first century he had ever scored on a turf pitch, and he kept up the weekly train trip from Bowral until he moved to Sydney.
Q 08What happened to Bradman after making 18 and 1 on Test debut in 1928?
He was dropped to twelfth man
He was dropped to twelfth man for the second Test after Australia's heavy defeat; recalled at Melbourne for the third, he answered with 79 and 112, his first Test century.
Q 09Whose first-class world record of 437 did Bradman break with 452 not out against Queensland in 1930?
Bill Ponsford
Bill Ponsford's 437 had stood for two years when Bradman set out to beat it; he got there in only 415 minutes, and his 452 not out remained the record until 1959.
Q 10Which England batsman's record of 905 runs in a Test series did Bradman beat with 974 in 1930?
Wally Hammond
Wally Hammond had piled up his 905 in Australia in 1928-29, the series of Bradman's debut; Bradman took the record from him on English soil at an average of 139.14, and no one has passed 974 since.
Q 11At which ground did Bradman score his world-record 334 in 1930?
Headingley
Headingley: he reached his century before lunch on the first day, and four years later he went back to the Leeds ground and made 304, his second Test triple century.
Q 12Which innings did Bradman call technically the best of his life?
254 at Lord's in 1930
254 at Lord's in 1930: he rated it above the 334 he made in the very next Test, saying almost every ball went where he meant it to, and it set up the win that levelled the series.
Q 13On a 1932 tour of North America, which baseball legend did Bradman watch a Yankees game with?
Babe Ruth
Q 21What happened in 1945 to the firm of Bradman's employer, Harry Hodgetts?
It collapsed through fraud and embezzlement
It collapsed through fraud and embezzlement and Hodgetts went to prison; Bradman opened his own firm in the same building, and though the investigation cleared him, some in the city long suspected he had known.
Q 22What surprising finding did a routine army medical make about Bradman during World War II?
He had poor eyesight
He had poor eyesight, the army check found, to general surprise given his batting; worse, fibrositis grew so acute that he could not shave or comb his own hair, and he was invalided out.
Q 23What nickname was given to the Australian team Bradman captained on the 1948 tour of England?
Babe Ruth sat with him at a Yankees game in New York; the private tour of Canada and the United States, 51 matches in 75 days, doubled as a honeymoon for Bradman and his new wife.
Q 14Which England captain devised the Bodyline tactics to curb Bradman in 1932-33?
Douglas Jardine
Douglas Jardine had noticed Bradman's unease against short balls at The Oval in 1930, so he married leg theory to fast bowling aimed at the body; it cut Bradman's series average to 56.
Q 15Which two Nottinghamshire fast bowlers were the spearheads of Bodyline?
Harold Larwood and Bill Voce
Harold Larwood and Bill Voce: asked afterwards to apologise for his bowling, Larwood refused, saying he had done what his captain told him; he never played for England again and later emigrated to Australia.
Q 16How was Bradman out first ball in his first innings of the 1932-33 Bodyline series?
Dragged a hook onto his stumps
Dragged a hook onto his stumps: expecting a bouncer from Bill Bowes he stepped across, but the ball stayed low and the huge Melbourne crowd fell silent; he made 103 not out in the second innings.
Q 17Which Australian captain's leaked Bodyline remark said only one of the two teams was playing cricket?
Bill Woodfull
Bill Woodfull had been struck over the heart that day when he rebuked England's tour manager in the Adelaide dressing room; the team-mate blamed for the leak spent years insisting the culprit was Bradman.
Q 18Whom did Bradman marry at Burwood, Sydney, in April 1932?
Jessie Menzies
Jessie Menzies had boarded with the Bradmans as a schoolgirl, so the pair had known each other since childhood; the marriage lasted 65 years, until her death in 1997.
Q 19What nearly killed Bradman at the end of the 1934 tour of England?
Appendicitis and peritonitis
Appendicitis and peritonitis left him close to death in a London hospital; his wife set off at once on the month-long journey from Australia and learned on the way that the crisis had passed.
Q 20What job offer in 1934 lured Bradman from Sydney to Adelaide?
Stockbroker
Stockbroker: Harry Hodgetts, an Adelaide broker who sat on cricket's Board of Control, signed him to a six-year contract that guaranteed him time off to play.
The Invincibles
The Invincibles: on his farewell tour, in the summer he turned 40, Bradman had made it known he wanted to go through England unbeaten, and his side became the first Australian team ever to do it.
Q 24Who in 1983 first passed Bradman's record of 29 Test centuries?
Sunil Gavaskar
Sunil Gavaskar drew level with a hundred off 94 balls against the West Indies fast bowlers at Delhi, then went past the Don with an unbeaten 236 at Madras two months later.
Q 25Bradman is the only Australian cricketer ever to receive which honour?
A knighthood
A knighthood: it came in the New Year Honours of 1949, weeks before he bowed out, so he played his last two first-class matches as a knight of the realm.
Q 26Which future Test bowler played for Wingello when Bradman made 234 against them as a bush cricketer?
Bill O'Reilly
Bill O'Reilly had the last word: when the match resumed the following Saturday he bowled Bradman first ball, and the two, Test team-mates for years, never did get along.
Q 27Which South African leader is said to have first asked an Australian visitor whether Bradman was still alive?
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela put the question to former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, by most accounts on a 1986 prison visit; Fraser later gave him a bat Bradman had signed 'in recognition of a great unfinished innings'.
Q 28The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's postal address in every capital city is GPO Box what?
9994
9994 mirrors his Test batting average of 99.94; the ABC says its national GPO Box number was taken from the figure.
Q 29Bradman's grandson Nick made the front page of The Advertiser in 2017 for what?
A university entrance score of 99.95
A university entrance score of 99.95 is the highest rank a South Australian school leaver can get, and it put him one hundredth of a point above the batting average his grandfather made famous.
Q 30What gift awaited Bradman after his 1930 homecoming parade?
A Chevrolet
A Chevrolet, custom-built, from a General Motors pageant that carried him home city by city apart from his team-mates; the fuss embarrassed him and soured his standing in the dressing room.