The baggy green cap Sir Donald Bradman wore on Test debut has sold for $450,000. An Australian businessman has purchased Donald Bradman’s first baggy green Test cap for 450,000 Australian dollars ($340,000) at auction, the second-highest price paid for a piece of cricket memorabilia.
Peter Freedman, the founder of Rode Microphones who earlier this year paid 9 million Australian dollars ($6.8 million) at an auction for a guitar used by Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, plans to tour Bradman’s test debut cap around Australia. The price for Bradman’s 1928 Australia cap sits behind the $1,007,500 ($760,000) paid at auction for Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne’s Test cap earlier this year — the world-record price for an item of cricket memorabilia, auction officials said.
Bradman represented Australia for 20 years, playing 52 Test matches from 1928 to 1948, and is often regarded as the world’s best-ever cricketer. Knighted for his services to cricket in 1949, he retired from Test cricket with a batting average of 99.94, making his batting achievements nearly twice of that of the nearest batsman in the longer version of the game. The cap was presented to Bradman before his Test debut against England in November 1928 in Brisbane. Bradman, later, gave the cap to a family friend, Peter Dunham, as a gift in 1959.
