1848-1915
Cricket Player

National Sports Star. William Gilbert Grace, a country doctor from Gloucestershire, England, dominated the game of cricket from 1862 until his retirement in 1899 at the age of fifty-one. He was the first English national sports star.

Early Years. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Grace did not come out of the elite British "public" school system, where the ideal of the gentleman sportsman was nurtured. Born in 1848, Grace began playing cricket with his brothers under the tutelage of his father and a cricket-playing uncle. Grace's father, a rural physician, had connections to the Duke of Beaufort that secured the young prodigy entry into the country-house matches of the rural squierarchy. Grace played his first county match against first-rate adult competition at the age of fourteen. His reputation was made when at fifteen he scored his first of many "centuries...