Top-ranked Lydia Ko shot a 70 to tie for 20th at 3 under. | Forum

Charles Bannerman is known today by a feat and an image. Wholesale NCAA Jerseys . The feat, of course, is that of having faced Test crickets first ball and scored its first run and peeling off its maiden century, a match-winning 165 from an Australian all-out score of 245 at the MCG in March 1877. The image is a widely published photograph taken nearly 53 years later of an elderly Bannerman, in hat and coat, laying a gently approving hand on the shoulder of Donald Bradman at the SCG, when the 21-year-old was about to commence his near-vertical ascent through crickets hierarchy of records.The time lapse between feat and image is perhaps just as evocative. Bannermans cricket peak was brief and lonely: you can almost argue that it was confined to that innings, when he took toll of an English bowling attack still queasy from a stormy crossing of the Tasman, for it was almost exactly twice his next best first-class score, and he played only two further Test matches. But a record is one thing, a first another. A record can be broken; a first can never be busted to second. Bannermans feat afforded him such imperishable status that he could, as it were, induct Bradman in an Australian batting lineage, with the additional prophecy: This boy will clip all the records.The big gap is also an enigma, both enticing and off-putting to a potential biographer. Bannerman has probably waited as long as any cricketer for a historian to go searching for him, and Alf James, a studious classicist, reveals the pressure of the years in Australias Premier Batsman.The traces are scant, limited and ambiguous. There are no photographs of Bannerman in action. The written accounts of his batting are disappointingly short of detail. James deems him a pioneer of forward play, but a mental image of his batting is hard to summon. Likewise a personal image. When James quotes a fond 1923 memoir of Bannerman from the journalist Jack Worrall - May he long remain with us, with his big blue eyes and his lisp - the intimacy of the observation is powerful because it is so exceptional. Otherwise James has been left to recite a lot of scores, including some lengthy threadbare sequences, which seem a little redundant seeing that they are recapitulated in statistical appendices.Yet there is something here, and if the writing is mainly serviceable, with the occasional Latinate flourish, an intriguing story is at least hinted at.Born in Woolwich, Bannerman was two years old when his family arrived in Sydney, his mother heavily pregnant with his brother Alick, himself destined to play 28 Tests. Their father worked at Sydneys mint, whose deputy master was an accomplished round-arm bowler. The boys walked in, then, on an evolving game.It was also the unruly game of an unruly people, and Charles Bannerman was no exception. James reveals that 19-year-old Bannerman lost his own mint job for insolence to his superior officer and general insubordination, and went through a period in his early twenties when he alienated many contemporaries by his cocky club- and colony-hopping. The colt was considered a bright particular star while he lasted, said a censorious columnist in the Sydney Mail in March 1874, but a good many people have come to the conclusion that for some time he has been on the wane, and that if common sense does not come to his aid he will be snuffed out forever.David Warner, then, has a distinguished antecedent. Although not even Warner had three children with his first wife and two children with a mistress ten years his junior.Bannermans crowded hour of glorious batting life came when he was 25. After the subsequent Australian tour of England, he dropped away precipitously, in a way strangely foretold. And although James has been unable to establish any satisfactory explanation, writers seemed uncannily aware that the process was irreversible. By 1879, the Sydney Morning Herald was calling him only the ghost of himself, Australian Town and Country Journal only the ghost of the player we used to know, and the Sydney Mail was asserting that there was no prospect of improvement.Whatever they meant, they were right. For the next five years, Bannerman averaged less than 15 in first-class cricket. Drink and gambling, it is reputed, was his downfall, wrote a contemporary many years later, although James shies from this far-fetched conclusion on the slight evidence available. James being a reluctant interpreter, the reader is left in a way to build their own story. My own was this. Bannerman was unusual in his Australian era in playing openly as a professional. After losing his mint job, he seems to have had only fragmentary employment outside the game. Instead he relied on playing, touring, coaching and umpiring. His only other fallback, bookmaking, was a constraint. Not only did it eat into his Saturdays, but the England team of 1882-83 refused to accept him as an umpire - not surprising, really, given the betting-related cricket riot at the SCG four years earlier.Bannerman was a professional, in other words, long before there was anything like a professional cricket structure. And for it he, and others, paid a price. Probably the most moving passages in James book are from a news story in Sydneys Evening News, May 27, 1891, headlined A Cricketer in Low Circumstances: Bannerman had been arraigned to answer charges of desertion of his wife, and failure to provide for her. An exchange is recorded:Judge: Your family is in destitute circumstances. How do you get your living? Bannerman: By cricketing, your Worship. Judge: But its the off season now, and theres not much doing in that line. Bannerman: Ive nothing to say against my wife, your worship, at all. If you will give me a week to try and get the money, I might get some of it. By cricketing, your Worship: four desperate words to encapsulate the precariousness of the professional cricket life, for the player and for their financial dependents. Blessedly it was not to be the end. Cricket biography reserves a special place for the tragic figure. Bannerman ends up being a rarer figure in biography - a subject who flirted with tragedy and survived. When his wife died in 1895, he was able to marry his mistress, and he benefited by testimonial matches in 1899 and 1922; his prudent brother, meanwhile, grew wealthy.In that 1930 photograph with bashful Bradman, Bannerman strikes a pose of solemn dignity befitting the prestige of his achievement - with maybe just a hint of the character he had been in his playing days. For is that a cigarette in his hand?Charles Bannerman: Australias Premier Batsman By Alf James The Cricket Publishing Company 146pages, $41.80 Cheap College Jerseys . LUCIE, Fla. College Basketball Jerseys Store . I cant pinpoint a date, but I do remember a player from my youth. Brian Downing was with the Chicago White Sox at a time when I listened to every game I possibly could on the radio. That particular season the late great Harry Caray was calling the White Sox games. http://www.cheapncaabasketballjerseys.com/ . -- Three close looks at the bucket, three misses. TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Ha Na Jang held off Shanshan Feng by a stroke in wind and rain Sunday in the Fubon LPGA Taiwan Championship for her third victory of the year.Eight strokes ahead of Feng after a birdie on the sixth hole, the 24-year-old South Korean player bogeyed two of the next three holes and scrambled to par the final nine for a 1-under 71.Feng finished with a 66. The Chinese star chipped in for birdie from 35 feet on the par-4 15th to pull within two strokes, and nearly holed a bunker shot for eagle on the par-5 18th.Jang then lagged her 15-foot birdie putt to inches, and briefly danced on the green after tapping in.I was like nervous every hole, Jang said. Shanshan really good play today. Thats why I got very nervous. And then Im just simple every hole because weather is just so bad. And then just keep going the fairway and the green.She kept the celebration short after drawing criticism in South Korea for her flamboyant victory celebrations -- a Samurai Lasso routine in Florida in February and a Beyonce Single Ladies dance in Singapore in March. Also, before the Singapore event, Jangs father dropped a hard-case suitcase that tumbled down an airport escalator and injured rival player In Gee Chun.After Singapores not really good happening. Thats why little, small dancing, Jang said. Yesterday my agent and all the people text me say just try small celebration. Please just you try it. Thats why I got try a little more small one. But I think its really good. Celebration is a little small, but looks like a little bigger. Its like dancing like, `I like it. I llike it. NCAA Basketball Jerseys Authentic. Like that. So happy.Jang finished at 17-under 271. She set up some key par saves with sharp play around the greens, hitting to inches on 14, to a foot on 15 after Feng holed out, and to 2 feet on 16 and 17.Really solid chipping, Jang said. My chipping is pretty good first time my life. Thats why every par is good score, because raining so bad. So thats these why every hole is par. ... My first win weather is rainy, exactly same. I like it raining on the golf course.Canadas Brooke Henderson birdied the last two holes for a 70 to tie for third with South Koreas Hyo Joo Kim (69) at 10 under. Taiwans Candie Kung (69), South Africas Lee-Anne Pace (71) and South Koreas Hee Young Park (72) were another stroke back.Jang shot a 62 on Saturday to take a six-stroke lead over Feng into the final round. The 62 was the lowest score in her LPGA Tour career and matched the best round in the three years at Miramar.The South Korean player earned $300,000 to jump from 12th to seventh in the money list with $1,199,719. Shes projected to go from 12th to eighth in the world ranking.Feng had her third straight top-four finish. The Olympic bronze medalist was fourth in the Evian Championship and tied for fourth last week in China in the Asian Swing opener.Top-ranked Lydia Ko shot a 70 to tie for 20th at 3 under. She won by nine strokes last year at Miramar.The tour will be in South Korea next week, then visit China, Malaysia and Japan. 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