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Andy Murray Wimbledon Champion
The Full Extraordinary Story
By Mark Hodgkinson New Chapter Press
Copyright © 2013 Mark Hodgkinson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-937559-47-2
CHAPTER 1
The Worst Tennis Nation on Earth
Jane Henman, as far as anyone has ever established, never received hate mail. Judy Murray's greatest crime, it is sometimes said, is that she is not Tim Henman's mother – prim, still, silent, and in the background. That she is not a Home Counties tennis mum, cloaked in Laura Ashley and upper-middle-class discretion. That she doesn't follow dress codes.
You occasionally still hear people talking about the incident, during the 2006 Wimbledon Championships, when Mrs. Murray had difficulty gaining access to the Members' Enclosure at the All England Club because she was wearing jeans. Andy Murray had just won a third-round match against Andy Roddick, for what was then the biggest win of his career at the grand slams, but this, alas, was a breach of the no-denim rule. A couple of days later, Judy wrote a newspaper column about how Wimbledon was 'a bit too formal for me – I am not the floral dress type.'
When Jane Henman gave rare interviews to promote the range of ladies' tennis wear she had designed, she would decline to discuss her son's career – for the journalist getting her to acknowledge that Tim was actually her child, it must have felt like a significant victory. As much as she could, Jane Henman withdrew from Tim's story. However, there is no doubt that tennis parents are more visible than any other athletes' mothers and fathers; the television director knows where to find them, in their offspring's guest box beside the court, going through what Judy Murray has called a cross between seasickness and heart attack.
And Judy has never been one to sit on her hands or on her voice. There have been times when Murray has been playing in front of 15,000 spectators on Wimbledon's Centre Court and it has been possible for someone sitting on the other side of the grass to have heard his mother above the rest of the crowd. Ivan Lendl pleaded with her once: 'If you're going to sit behind me again, you're going to have to bring me ear-plugs.'
Judy Murray has been called the Tiger Mum of British tennis. She has also been called far worse. Opening the morning post is sometimes to wonder what vitriol the Royal Mail has delivered today, whether there will be another letter telling her what a bad mother she is. How awful she is. That they find her cries of 'C'monnnnn', or how she bares her teeth, shakes her fist or otherwise encourages her younger son when he is playing tennis matches, nothing less than repellent. This being tennis, the poison had often been typed up and printed out from the home computer (presumably after being spell-checked), or written carefully by hand; somehow the idea of hate mail on Smythson stationery seems more calculated and more offensive.
'I used to dread the letters. A lot of my self-image, like most mothers, is bound up in being a good parent. It was incredibly hurtful to get letters from people I didn't know – and who didn't know me – telling me that I was harming my kids,' Judy said in an interview with The Times during the Wimbledon fortnight. 'It shook my confidence. For a while, I tried to change. People seemed to be offended by my fist pumping when I watched Andy from the stands. So I became more demure, but it didn't feel natural. A friend said to me, "Why are you being so quiet?" So I went back to the way I was. It feels much better. I just hope people can accept me for who I am.'
It is not as if tennis had never seen a strong mother before. Gloria Connors would urge little Jimmy 'to play like a crazed animal', and 'to knock the ball down my throat, and he learned to do this because he found out that if I had the chance I would knock it down his'. Ivan Lendl's mother, Olga, was fierce. When Ivan was a boy, the story goes that Olga would strike him with her left hand if he talked back, until she broke her wristwatch with one of the blows, and she then had to remember to hit him with her right. An old issue of Sports Illustrated magazine tells the tale of Ivan's initial refusal to eat his carrots and peas; Olga set a timer for ten minutes and left the room – he knew then to clear his plate.
Those two were truly tennis matriarchs. And yet it can sometimes feel as though Judy Murray, who never tried to turn Murray into a street-hustler of a tennis player, and who certainly never struck her son, has become the most controversial mother in the sport's history. Perhaps that is because Connors and Lendl were playing in a gentler age, before the invention of 'trolls' and the internet message-board. To scroll through the comments beneath an article about Judy is to be shocked by the anger. 'I know I'm not hugely popular,' she has said. You would think, from the reaction she gets, that she was in the same nightmare parenting premier league as Jelena Dokic's father, Damir, who once threatened to assassinate the Australian ambassador to Serbia with a grenade-launcher. Or Jim Pierce, Mary's father, whose rap-sheet included calling out during one of her matches, 'Go on, Mary, kill the bitch,' and punching her bodyguard. Ever since ladies started flashing their ankles at Victorian garden parties, British tennis has had its scandals and its controversies, but Andy Murray is surely the first player on the main tour to have found himself defending his mother from an opponent's verbal attack.
On one of the rare occasions that Murray spent a 90-second change of ends trash-talking with an opponent, it was because Juan Martin Del Potro, who was a year and a bit off winning the US Open, had brought Judy into the argument. Murray and the Argentine were playing a night match at the clay-court Rome Masters in 2008, and Murray was unhappy with Del Potro for not apologising after appearing to deliberately aim the ball at his head. Del Potro's response was to say that Murray and his mother had not changed from the junior days, 'were always the same'; the South American seemed to be implying that he was still hearing too much of Judy.
Tennis does seated arguments better than any other sport, and the two young men sat there on their chairs, raging for a minute and a half. No one could recall Murray previously looking so angry on a tennis court, and the umpire asked him to calm down. 'I've had a lot of bad things said about me before, and that didn't really bother me. But I think when people start talking about your family, you're naturally not going to take that well. Someone saying something about your mother who is one of the nicest ladies you're ever going to meet? I don't think that's cool.'
Once Scotland's national coach, and now Britain's Fed Cup captain (the women's team competition), Judy has wondered whether there is sexism at play across the international tennis world. Richard Williams started plotting Venus and Serena's tennis lives before they were born – his wife was not sure whether she wanted any more children, but he, hoping to raise tennis champions, hid her birth-control pills. He taught them how to play the game, and he is still on the scene. People don't tell him to back off. Rafa Nadal has had only one coach, his uncle Toni, and the family is celebrated for its closeness ('Sicilian, just without the malice or guns,' said the writer who collaborated with him on his memoirs). Novak Djokovic's father, Srdjan, turned up at the US Open one year wearing a T-shirt with a large image of his son's face on the front, and he just about got away with it; had Judy tried the same trick, there would have been letters. Lots of neatly written, poisonous letters.
Does modern tennis have one rule for the males in players' families and another for the females? 'I think a lot of the problems were to do with my gender,' she has said. 'People seemed to have a problem with a mother pushing her sons. If I was a man, nobody would have batted an eyelid.'
It has never been properly explained how Judy is supposed to have pulled off this 'control freakery', what with her living in Scotland, her other commitments, and travelling to only a small number of tournaments a year. And with Murray living in England and spending most of the year out on the tennis road, either playing events or killing his lungs during training blocks in Miami. While Judy and Murray naturally still talk to each other about tennis, much of the time they have the conversations you would expect any mother and son to have. There are paparazzi shots on file of Judy shopping with Murray, with the pair carrying loo roll and a new ironing board; you can bet that they didn't fill the silences by breaking down Roger Federer's backhand.
Throughout the 2013 Championships, Judy stayed in one of the guest-rooms in her son's home in Oxshott in Surrey commuter-land; she had done the same during previous Wimbledons, believing that she could offer him some extra emotional support. That is not to say that Judy was in control-freak mode. 'The apron-strings stuff was always overdone. I was very involved in his tennis when he was young, but the idea that I spend my time ordering him around today is ridiculous. He is his own man. But he likes to have emotional support when the pressure is intense. He has a big team, but they are all employed by him,' she told The Times. 'It is sometimes easier to talk about your feelings and fears to your girlfriend or family than your coaching team, who are much older, and all male.'
Still, it would be wrong to imagine that their conversations were dominated by tennis; they were just as likely, if not more likely, to have been discussing The Apprentice as analysing firstserve percentages. Judy was also lending her support as a dog-walker; every morning after she, Murray and his girlfriend Kim Sears had had breakfast together, she would take the two Border Terriers, Maggie May and Rusty, out for a stroll. That allowed Murray to 'get his head together'.
The criticism has been wounding, no doubt, even though Judy, as a former tennis columnist for Scottish broadsheet the Herald, knows how the media game works. She was understandably unhappy when, during Wimbledon one summer, she picked up the newspaper she was writing for at the time, and saw that the front page was puffing a debate on the features pages about whether she was too pushy for her son's own good, how her tennis elbows were sharpened to a point that could take his opponents' eyes out. She didn't contribute many more columns for the paper after that.
When the former Wimbledon champion Boris Becker accused Judy of smothering Murray to the extent that she was potentially harming his chances of winning a grand slam title – in some quarters, this was reported as Becker calling him 'a mummy's boy' – she retorted that the German knew nothing about her family.
There is only one person who has divided opinion more sharply in British tennis than Andy Murray and that's his mother. For years, her critics have shouted so loudly that it has been tricky to hear much recognition and praise for the positive role she has played in British tennis. Of how she raised two boys from Dunblane in Stirlingshire – a part of the world where the climate is not conducive to playing tennis – who have gone on to play the sport at the highest level. You have Judy's permission to call her a pushy tennis mother, she once said, but only if you mean that she pushed for Andy and Jamie to have the best opportunities to further their tennis. Not if you mean that she forced them into playing a sport they did not love. Because she didn't.
There was the sense at the 2013 Wimbledon Championships, her son's eighth, that the British tennis public were starting to look at Judy a little differently, and that wasn't just because she had dyed her hair 'white-hot blonde'. Of course, there were still a few haters and letter-writers – you're never going to win everyone over – but her mail-bag was no longer as nasty as it had once been, and it felt as though most tennis-watchers had come to acknowledge that she had been a force for good in Andy and Jamie's lives.
One of the great pleasures Murray took from winning the Olympics and the 2012 US Open was that it gave him the opportunity to explain to his mother, and to every other important figure in his life, how grateful he was for everything they had done for him throughout his tennis life: 'A lot of my drive comes from wanting to repay those close to me.' Murray once said that his mother is the only person who 'gets' him. One Christmas, he gave Judy a card in which he thanked her for 'always believing in me, always supporting me, always letting me make my own decisions. But, most of all, I want to thank you for being the best Mum in the world.' There were tears. Murray affectionately scolded her: 'What are you crying for, stupid woman?'
Only two subjects were being discussed in the days leading into the Wimbledon fortnight. Firstly, and this was no small matter, where did you stand on the Great Serena–Maria Ding-Dong, Serena Williams having been quoted in Rolling Stone magazine as describing Grigor Dimitrov, Maria Sharapova's boyfriend and one of the American's exes, as 'the guy with a black heart'?
Had Sharapova relinquished the moral high ground – the Henman Hill of off-court ethics? – when, in her pre-tournament press conference, she had argued that Williams shouldn't be discussing other players' love lives when her own boyfriend 'was married and had kids, and is getting divorced'? That was debated at length; Wimbledon cares more for soap-opera than it does for the technical proficiencies of the competitors, and the bitching meant that Andy Murray had a slightly quieter build-up than he would otherwise have done.
The other parlour discussion, and this wasn't one you hear every summer, was chewing over all the possibilities before the draw was made; it was a long time since there had been such interest in who was going to land where on the draw-sheet. There was one reason for that, and that reason was Rafa Nadal – he was seeded fifth and so there was a chance, if the draw worked out that way, that he could be projected to play Murray as early as the quarter-finals. Less than a fortnight had passed since Nadal had scored yet another title at Roland Garros to become the first man in history to win the same grand slam eight times, and yet, as the Majorcan had missed seven of the previous 12 months because of his recurring knee problems, he was outside the top four. The All England Club's grass-court formula, which takes into account past performance on the surface, wasn't going to bump him up the seedings; David Ferrer would be the fourth seed, and Nadal fifth. So, if the draw-computer was rough on Murray, the Briton would have to beat all three of his biggest rivals to win Wimbledon – there was a scenario in which he would have to play Nadal in the quarter-finals, Roger Federer in the semi-finals, and then Novak Djokovic for the title.
Murray's absence from Roland Garros because of back pain – it was the first slam he had missed since withdrawing from the 2007 French Open and Wimbledon Championships after damaging his wrist – only heightened the interest in his potential route through the 128-player jungle.
Of the four big beasts of men's tennis – Ferrer, nicknamed The Little Beast, wasn't part of that herd – Murray had had the best preparation for Wimbledon. The hardest transition for professional tennis players is when they go from the clay to grass; after months of high, looping bounces, they are suddenly trying to deal with low, shooting balls, and the daisy-cutter slices. Your glutes are trying to remember that you need to be as low to the ground as possible. And, unless you have Djokovic's flexibility, sliding on a grass court, just as you would on clay, is not to be recommended; unless, of course, you fancy a couple of broken ankles. And there is so little time to adjust to this change from red to green, with just a fortnight between the French Open and Wimbledon.
Missing the French Open meant that Murray had had extra days on the grass; from almost the first point he played at the pre-Wimbledon tournament at Queen's Club, he looked to be at ease on the lawns, and he would win the title by beating Croatia's Marin Cilic, the defending champion, in the final. That same afternoon, Federer won a pre-Wimbledon title with victory in Halle, Germany, but it was Murray who had played the sweetest tennis of the week. Djokovic and Nadal had both decided against playing a tournament.
There are generally only two ways that Murray's draws are presented in the press; 'Lucky Murray has an easy ride through the tournament' or 'Murray has the draw from Hades', with no inbetween. But this was genuinely one of the inbetweeners. It could have been better and it could have been worse. Djokovic had had the best of it, with the top seed projected to encounter Ferrer in the semi-finals, while the bottom half was loaded with talent, containing all three of Murray, Nadal and Federer. But Murray wasn't projected to meet Nadal in the last eight; that was Federer's misfortune, and already racket-heads were fantasising about the possibility of the Swiss and Spaniard, who had played that near-mythical final in 2008, producing The Greatest Quarter-Final of All Time. If the draw went with the seedings, Murray would play the winner of Nadal and Federer's match.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Andy Murray Wimbledon Champion by Mark Hodgkinson. Copyright © 2013 Mark Hodgkinson. Excerpted by permission of New Chapter Press.
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