I nailed my colours as a tennis nut a long time ago. I was an impressionable, sport-obsessed child and have a clear recollection when, as a 9 year old, the drive home from my Cub Scout camp coincided with listening to the drama of the famous Borg v McEnroe Wimbledon Final of 1980. Arriving home, the contest was still unfolding – the American forcing a fifth set decider in the greatest tie-break of all time before the emotionless Swede finally prevailed. I was entranced by the talented and fiery McEnroe, always playing on the edge, always giving the impression that his biggest opponent was himself.
The more tennis I watched, the more hooked I became on the physical and psychological ebb and flow of this most gladiatorial of sports. Even the boxer speaks with the sage head in his corner in the breaks between rounds. The tennis player is left alone in the arena with his preparation and game plan, then must author every required change of strategy without assistance, summon energy at his lowest moments, fight his own demons, overcome the injustice of incorrect decisions to retain focus. Sometimes this torment can last for over five hours.
My fascination with these gladiators continued throughout my formative years and my admiration grew. There was the showman Connors, who everyone but the crowd hated. I watched Becker change the game with his power. There was the elegance and precision of Edberg, the belligerent and never-beaten commitment of Lendl and the man-for-all-seasons Agassi, whose immense talent was paradoxically only matched by his hatred of the sport he played.
In all that time, British interest in tennis was a two-week fad involving Pimms, strawberries and rain. Home-grown talent in the men’s game was as fleeting as a sunny day in SW19, with an occasional spirited foray to the fourth round by the likes of Jeremy Bates or Andrew Foster being the best anyone could hope for. For a while “Nice but Tim” Henman gave the British public false hope with a quartet of semi-final appearances best summed up by his loss to Goran Ivanisevic after an inevitable rain interruption that ruined his momentum and cost him his best shot at the Championship.
I first heard of Andy Murray as Henman’s career was on the wane, a young lad from Dunblane in Scotland (of all places), who had just captured the 2004 US Open Boys’ title. This was promising news as plenty of good players had also done so – Andy Roddick and Marcelo Rios for two. However, much like the fact that the world of non-league football is littered with ex-Premier League academy players who never made the grade, the roll call of boys’ title winners is also one of unfulfilled potential.
Looking into Murray’s junior pedigree further revealed a young man of ferocious competitive spirit and will for self-improvement. He had begged his tennis coach mother Judy to send him to the Sanchez-Casal Academy in Spain when he discovered, in a chance conversation with Rafael Nadal on the junior tour, that the Spaniard was hitting with Carlos Moya and practising for four hours a day. Murray was said to have been frustrated at watching his older brother Jamie struggling to turn his undoubted potential into success and was determined not to suffer the same fate. On arriving at the academy, Emilio Sanchez-Vicario questioned Murray’s physique and fitness, promptly finding himself on the receiving end of a straight sets hammering by his new young charge.
There was reason to feel positive when, during Wimbledon 2005, an 18-year-old Murray overcame the 14th seed to progress to the third round. While criticising Radek Stepanek was hardly a case of kicking over statues, I found something to admire in Murray’s after-match rant that Stepanek had unsuccessfully tried to put him off and made himself look stupid. Asked at the time what the Czech had said to him at the net after he had won, Murray replied that he wasn’t listening and in any event, didn’t like the bloke. Game, set and match, brutal honesty.
Spurred on by this frankness, I took time out to watch Murray play David Nalbandian in the third round on a Saturday afternoon in front of a full house on Centre Court. It is worth remembering that Nalbandian reached a career high of third in the world the following year and was a fine player at the peak of his powers. Murray then proceeded to set about taking the Argentine apart, including a second set won with a double break. This caused me to turn to the friend I was watching the match with and say, somewhat prophetically, “this kid looks like he could be the real deal”. Of course, experience and physical conditioning told as Nalbandian put in a professional performance to dispatch the cheeky Murray in five sets.
The match set a tone though, at a time when top players were coming through with a rapid charge and at a young age. Nadal had earlier in the year won his first Roland Garros title shortly after turning 19, Roger Federer had won Wimbledon two years previously at the age of 21 and Novak Djokovic would soon go on to win his maiden Australian Open aged 20. They would dominate the sport for the next 12 years and counting. My expectations for Murray may have been high – but they didn’t seem unrealistic.
Murray had his own chance to join these emerging superstars as early as 2008, when he was eventually trounced by Federer in the first of a record-equalling run of four Grand Slam final appearance defeats. Murray’s 2010 and 2011 Australian Open finals were both one sided affairs, as Federer and Djokovic sought successfully to assert their superiority over him.
Andy found himself cast in the role of “Andy Henman,” a nearly man, perhaps destined to be left behind in history like Tim before him, a plucky home talent who was left wanting in the crucial moments, and against the best of opposition. However, whereas the urbane Tim endeared himself to the middle class tennis-watching public who identified with him, there seemed little sympathy for a dour, surly, monotone-voiced, Scottish loser. Murray’s stock as a player was good, but public regard was not. The throwaway “anyone but England” comment, made to Henman in response to his goading that the Scotland football team had not qualified for the World Cup, kept coming back to haunt. “He’s British if he wins,” became the standard insult of Murray, with the inference that the wins didn’t come when they needed to.
I kept the faith with Andy at this time because I felt the facts deserved it. The comparisons with Tim Henman didn’t bear up to any kind of scrutiny for a player who had as many career titles by age 21 as Henman won in his entire career (11, in case you were wondering). It also belied his excellent performance in Masters Series events where Murray recorded a number of victories in tournaments also contested by the triumvirate of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. The conundrum remained: Why can’t Andy do it in the Slams? When it really matters? He responded by appointing as coach the other guy who couldn’t do it in his first four Grand Slam finals: Ivan Lendl.
Understandably, much is made of Murray’s breakthrough year in 2012, including as it does his first Olympic title and first Grand Slam victory at Flushing Meadows. Less however is made of the semi-final he contested into the early hours of the Melbourne morning with Novak Djokovic at that year’s Australian Open. By sheer good fortune, I was able to watch the action unfold on television on the morning of a day off work. Murray went on to lose the five hour marathon in five sets, having had break points at 5-5 in the decider.
Djokovic knew, as did any spectator, that the match could have gone either way. Murray had gone toe-to-toe with a Grand Slam champion at the top of his game (as evidenced by Djokovic’s superhuman powers to come back and win the final against Nadal in just under six hours). Everyone remembers Murray’s tears at Wimbledon later in the year, after the roof came on and a weather break ruined his momentum against Federer just as it had done for Henman all those years ago against Ivanisevic. The tears were from frustration that he should have won, rather than at his own inadequacy. “I can cry like Roger but I can’t play like him” had become “I’m getting closer…” The truth was that the majority of the Centre Court crowd had been behind Federer. It was the last time that would happen.
Murray’s revenge in the Olympics was sweet. Federer could only take 7 games in a straight sets annihilation that put a marker down for the future. Tennis is a sport where the Olympics are taken seriously. Don’t let anyone tell you that Federer, aiming to match the achievements of Nadal and Agassi in holding the “Golden Slam”, wasn’t trying. Novak, too, left the court in tears at Rio, aware that his final chance of a gold medal had probably gone.
So it was that on 10th September 2012, I sat up into the early hours with nothing but an internet feed and a few other online tennis devotees for company, to watch Andy Murray claim his maiden Grand Slam victory. Fittingly for him, it was at the scene of his Boys’ Singles title eight years previously, the US Open, and on a cold, blowy day more in keeping with the courts of his childhood in Scotland than New York. There was almost pathos in watching the exhausted Djokovic send that final groundstroke over Murray’s baseline. No fist-pumping celebration from Andy, who just sank to his haunches in a combination of fatigue and relief, finally a Major Champion. It was vindication for him, for me, for all his followers.
Murray’s victory over Djokovic at the following year’s Wimbledon Final was as different from his Olympic win as any straight sets victory could be. For a fleeting moment, having squandered 0-40 to take the title and conceded break point, it looked like all those mental frailties from years gone would return to deny Andy again. But instead Novak netted, Andy prevailed, celebrated in front of the press box, climbed through the crowd to celebrate with his team, forgot his Mum. In a rare moment of weakness in the face of sporting greatness, I might just have cried a little bit. Murray put himself in the same sentence as the great Fred Perry forever and, as if it had always been planned, on the seventh day of the seventh month, a 77 year wait for a British Wimbledon winner was over.
It took a couple of years for the wait for a Davis Cup to be over, but that also came to pass in November 2015 when Murray took a spotless 8-0 singles record through the season to bring home the old trophy and put himself in the company of Mats Wilander and my old hero, John McEnroe. If the title also owed a lot to his brother Jamie and an afternoon of inspiration from James Ward in defeating John Isner in the first round, it was nonetheless fitting that it was Andy who slumped to the ground in victory as that final lob landed tantalisingly behind Belgium’s David Goffin. The question of whether Murray is British or Scottish has always been an odd one. He has always been both. His Olympic and Davis Cup records should dispel any suggestion otherwise for all time. Murray hates England so much that he married an English woman and moved to Surrey.
The golfer David Duval once said that when he hadn’t won a Major people called him a choker, then after he had won one, everyone admired his consistency. It is that consistency, another straight forward Wimbledon victory over Milos Raonic and phenomenal end of season form that has take Murray to the summit of his sport for the first time. That he should reach the top courtesy of a walkover, also against Raonic, is in many ways fitting of Murray’s slow-burn ascent. The rueful smiles in defeat in Melbourne and Paris this year came from a multiple Grand Slam winner with no need to prove himself and the benefit of the perspective which fatherhood has provided. A second Olympic title was thrown in for good measure, the first man to retain the gold medal.
Andy has lightened up, undoubtedly helped by the impassive Lendl in his corner. Whether it is pelting Lendl with tennis balls at Queens or lampooning him for not sticking around for a championship presentation, Murray has found a release for his self-destructive tension, a stooge for his own under-appreciated sense of humour. He has also found a bedrock on which to build a game of self belief, to put into practice lessons learned, to redefine failure as a step towards success, to rebalance the attacking instincts of the boy who used to cream winners past adults on the windy courts of Dunblane with the patience and point construction he learned on the clay of Sanchez-Casal. Almost imperceptibly, Murray crept up and arrived. I have been overjoyed to witness it.
This year, I finally made my own pilgrimage to the tiny cathedral town of Dunblane, just off the motorway between Stirling and Perth. I passed the signpost to Cromlix, the hotel in which Murray invested a portion of his fortune. It is good to see a man who has not lost sight of his roots and who wants to give something back to the community which has supported him. Murray understands as much as anyone how Dunblane struggles to escape the shadows of the school massacre, during which he hid in a classroom. It is important for him to give Dunblane a positive connotation after long associations with tragedy.
Walking down the quiet street from the enormous cathedral, it is striking how such a small place created two Grand Slam winners, two World Number Ones, two architects of a Davis Cup triumph. Love or loathe Judy Murray, she must have been doing something right. As I reached the golden post box which was painted by the Royal Mail in recognition of Andy’s London 2012 achievement, my eye was caught by the adjacent lamp post advertising Judy’s latest mini-tennis tournament for the Under 10s. So it goes on, the legacy and the inspiration. I smiled in the early evening sunshine for a photograph taken by my daughter by the post box, then smiled again as I watch another two people do the same.
It has been a right old journey. We’ve had our ups and downs and you’ve put me through it once or twice, but you’re a beautiful man, Andy Murray. It has been a privilege to watch the forging of my favourite sportsman, one of this country’s greatest ever sportsmen, a fighter who has reached the top of a truly global sport in arguably its most competitive era.
Enjoy the view, Champ. You deserve it.
Iain Dalgleish
