I knew it was serious when a friend e-mailed at about five in the afternoon. “How are you dealing with BLACK WEDNESDAY? I am dealing with it BADLY,” she confessed. She was referring to Roger Federer being knocked out of Wimbledon. I know how she felt.
According to his admirers — even British ones, a tension we will come to in a moment — Federer has elevated sport to new levels of beauty and grace. We can talk for hours about his balletic movement and joyous self-expression, miraculous points and impossible shots. The late novelist David Foster Wallace described them as “Federer moments ... when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re OK”.
But Wallace was American, and both my friend and I are British. How can we be so disloyal as to divert our good will towards the 16-time-grand-slam- winning Swiss when a Brit is desperate to capture his first? Are we being ungrateful, or worse, unpatriotic?
Tennis isn’t like other sports. It taps into less tribal strands of British sporting DNA. Football brings out our secret Germanophobia — those cold Teutons with their icily clinical penalty shoot-outs. Cricket turns even respectable Englishmen into blindly anti-Australian bigots, a mutual hatred that goes back two centuries. And even Brits who drink superior Pinotage and take holidays in Cape Town morph into anti-Boer fanatics when the British Lions play South Africa.
One underlying draw of team sport is its subliminal tribalism. Even the most civilised fans, if you scratch them deeply enough, will confess that part of the pleasure is willing our gang, our mob, our people on to victory.
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But in individual sports that tribal belonging is weaker, if it exists at all. British fans thrilled to Rory McIlroy’s victory in the US Open golf. But his provenance was a relatively small part of the pleasure. His talent and resilience after his collapse at the Masters were far bigger elements of the story.
A victory for Andy Murray would also be a triumph for a young man who has already experienced an unusual degree of pressure. It is not his fault that Britain has not produced a men’s champion since 1936. It is not his fault that fickle fans used up their stock of patience on Tim Henman (another unfairly underrated sportsman). It is not his fault that he is a Scot playing a predominantly Home Counties sport. And it is not his fault that he plays an individual sport that’s not well suited to raising the patriotic pulse.
Instead of blindly pretending to love Murray simply because he is British, the discerning fan understands these complexities. That is the Murray paradox. That he has never been a natural national treasure will make it all the more moving if he does win Wimbledon on Sunday.
The slight disconnection between British hopes and the Scot on whom they are pinned is a central part of this story. From the outset, this relationship was an arranged marriage, not a love match. But it is holding well enough, a deepening companionship rather than a passing infatuation.
The argument about Murray is often framed as a battle between people who like him and those who dislike him. But that leaves out those who have come to admire him, gradually overcoming their initial doubts.
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It is unfair to judge Murray against the standards of Federer and Rafael Nadal, one of sport’s greatest rivalries. He will never have Nadal’s pugilistic glamour or Federer’s effortless ease. Where Federer glides with the joy of man who can’t quite believe his own talent, Murray is driven by a sense that the world is slightly against him. No media training will iron that out.
But if Murray does win on Sunday, two dramas, one historical, the other psychological, will converge. The first is Britain’s neurotic 75-year wait for a grand slam champion. The second is Murray’s personal voyage to win the real affection of the British public.
Ironically, he might one day consider himself lucky not to have been the recipient of unquestioning adoration. Sometimes it’s easier to earn people’s respect before you win their hearts.
It’s not unpatriotic if you don’t want Murray to win. But I suspect that even diehard Federer fans, once they regain their composure, are finally learning how to transfer their allegiance.