Late in his life, Sir Donald Bradman identified the batsman who played most like him. “I was very, very struck by his technique,” Bradman said in 1996. “I asked my wife to come and have a look at him.

Sports icons are rarely good interviews. They’re usually too conscious about their public image to be truly candid, and tend to speak in bland bromides. So when TIME correspondent Nilanjana Bhowmick ...