With Andy Murray, it was always going to end this way. A sporting reconstruction of the Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ. So much pain, so much suffering. Really, did we need to go through all that? Did he need to go through all that? We know Murray’s story, just as we knew the likely ending. Agony, always agony. And yet, somehow triumphant, even in defeat.
Murray lost on Tuesday, because he finally had to admit his race was run. He will not play one last, faux-glorious, Wimbledon singles farewell. A spinal cyst, and the operation to address it, did for him, peculiarly in a way far bigger surgical ordeals never could.
He will play doubles later this week, he may play in the Olympics, too, but the nation will be spared another nerve-shredding night on the sofa, wondering how a man who always looks so tired somehow finds the energy to go two, three, good God is that the time, four hours on Centre Court.
In many ways, he never really lost a match, because every time Murray stepped onto that turf — certainly in those last, impossible, injury-ravaged years of his career — it was a triumph against the odds. Tennis champions are not meant to come from Dunblane, on the banks of Allan Water in Stirling. A warm day is 16C. It rains more than a third of the time, even in summer. There is 54 per cent cloud cover in August.
The Murrays were this insular little Scottish family, on a circuit dominated by teenagers from England’s wealthy south. “Every competition seemed to take place about six hours from where we lived,” Murray told me, in 2011. “We were outsiders all the time, so we became our own little team. There was nothing in Scotland. No tournaments and no players. That is very unusual in tennis, to have someone come through from a country without pedigree. I had Tim Henman to look up to, and that definitely helped, but nobody with my background. I think that was what made me an individual.”
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It is not normal to come through with Murray’s athletic disadvantages, either. He was born with bipartite patella, a condition in which the kneecap remains as two separate bones instead of fusing together. It was only discovered when he was 16, the first physical burden he had to overcome.
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There have been many others since, too numerous to detail here. They would have crushed a lesser spirit, though, sapped the strength, killed the desire. Murray’s path has never been less than exhausting. At any time since winning his first Wimbledon in 2013, he could have settled for a comfortable life as Britain’s greatest post-war tennis player. He could have sunk into the studio sofa, and the corporate circuit, made his money in a sports jacket or a collar and tie, lifting nothing heavier than microphones. Not once did he think that way.
Many times he has read his own sporting obituary. This is certainly not the first one I have written. And yet while those constructing the eulogies thought on several occasions this was journey’s end, the subject of them never stopped imagining: but maybe . . .
Until now. This time, we think, we’re done. Well, maybe just the Paris Olympics. And those doubles. And now we’re the ones that cannot be certain because we’ve seen Lazarus rise so many times it is hard to believe it’s over.
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Yet what an incredible man. We can argue other names in other sports, athletes who were at the absolute pinnacle of achievement but, for me, the very best of British was Sir Andy Murray. I debated this with Daley Thompson once. He argued — and, hell, he’s among the greatest British sportsmen himself, so is never less than compelling — that Murray wasn’t ever truly the best at tennis, so how could he be the best overall?
And that’s a fair point. Many will agree. Yet I’d say that’s what makes him the greatest. Was Murray better than his contemporaries Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal? No, no and no? Then how many grand slams should he have won? That would be zero, too. Yet he won three, and two Olympic singles medals, a unique achievement. He won when he shouldn’t have, and under pressure like no other.
When Thompson took decathlon gold in Moscow in 1980, he too was ending a long period of hurt. It was 76 years since that podium place had been claimed by a Briton. Yet the name Tom Kiely, Thompson’s predecessor as champion in what was known in 1904 as the men’s all-around, was barely known.
There were 77 years between British men’s Wimbledon titles, yet the same cannot be said of Fred Perry. He was on everybody’s lips, every year, the hope that this barren run would at last be broken, the focus of a nation, pushing down on one man’s shoulders. If not now, when? If not him, who?
Yet Thompson is right, Murray never was the best player. Never should have been the subject of such a demand. He won’t have gone into a single major tournament comfortable in the knowledge that there was nothing out there better than him.
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For a brief spell, Murray actually willed himself to the position of world No1, with a gruelling and intense sequence of victories. Yet he was always Ringo in tennis’s quartet of Beatles. And that’s what made him so great. Imagine if Rory McIlroy’s role model had been Henry Cotton, and each time he teed up in a major he was assuming responsibility for eight decades of national disappointment. Think McIlroy’s under pressure now? That’s a fragment of what Murray lived with, throughout his career, until 2013. Even his first grand slam, the 2012 US Open, did not entirely resolve it.
The following day after that groundbreaking win — 76 years of hurt since the previous British grand-slam winner, Perry again — he sat with a small group of journalists at the embassy in New York recounting how any victory over Djokovic is paid in toenails. They fall off, because of the constant movement left and right. And Djokovic is, most agree, quite possibly the sport’s supreme physical specimen.
Yet that night at Flushing Meadows, Murray went deeper than him. Their final set is tennis’s equivalent of Roberto Durán’s famous “no mas” against Sugar Ray Leonard. Djokovic had nothing left. Somehow, Murray had more.
A little detail, often forgotten, is that when Murray came out to serve for the match 5-2 up in the final set, he walked to the wrong end. That was how much was on him, the pressure to close that out. He, literally, got lost in the moment. “There was a sense of how big this was for British tennis,” Murray admitted the following day. “I’ve been asked if I could win a grand slam all my career. It really started to get to me. Not just in press conferences, but everywhere I went, people would ask it, or they would say, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the next one,’ which made it even worse. So I’m pleased I don’t have to answer that stupid question again.”
And that was Murray’s life, for so many years. Every hour, every day, the same goal. The mood in the dressing room before that final was not buoyant, or optimistic. It was death. Just Murray, and his coach Ivan Lendl. You know it’s bad when Lendl’s the cheery one.
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“I spoke to Ivan about how I was feeling and he said, ‘Just enjoy it,’” Murray recalled. “I said I couldn’t. He said, ‘Why not? It’s what you work all of your life for.’ I said, ‘That’s the problem. I’ve worked all my life. I’ve worked ten years. How can I enjoy it?’ We tried to take some attention from the match, but it wasn’t easy. The locker room was so quiet.”
And this was prime Murray, fit Murray, a player capable of out-strategising, outperforming and outlasting Djokovic on a tennis court. In many ways, the second act of his career has been almost as magnificent. The perseverance, the determination, the white-hot raging against the dying of the light. Murray, in tears in Melbourne in 2019, believing he had played his last game of professional tennis. Four gruelling sets, across five hours, against No22 seed Roberto Bautista Agut. At the end, he stood in the heart of Margaret Court Arena as his hosts played a series of video tributes from contemporaries, based on the assumption it was over. His life had become one long painful ordeal. He feared not even being able to play in the garden with his kids.
And then, three years later, hello again. New hips, hooray. Back he came. But it’s been a struggle. A brave, brilliant struggle. Yet the man who once overturned the odds to lift the trophy, now does the same to get to the end of the first week. And there can be only so much pleasure in the pain of that.
So this time, it seems, it’s for real. What a journey it has been, though. And what a man that has made it. On the day Murray’s career was thought done, Darren Cahill, the coach who helped Andre Agassi become the oldest player to reach No1, explained: “When you search for examples of ‘emptied the bucket to be as good as they could be’, there should be a picture of Andy Murray. Remarkable discipline for training, competition, sacrifice, perfection. A little crazy, but a legend of a bloke.”
And he was right on every count. Legend, yes. Emptied the bucket, definitely. Crazy, absolutely. This has been the career of a madman, which is why it ended madly, too. Nobody would have gone out like this, because nobody has ever approached his progress through the sport, or his body, quite like Murray.
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One day, no doubt, his achievements will be matched, even overtaken. But truly, honestly, for all he has given, there will never be another.
