HIP HIP HOORAY
Murray keeps amazing us with his bravery but this golden generation is fading away
IT felt like there was magic in the air in the wee small hours of last Friday morning in Melbourne. In the Rod Laver Arena, Andy Murray was doing what Andy Murray does. Refusing to give in. Raging against the dying of the light. And what the 35-year Scot with a metal hip ended up accomplishing veered into the realm of superhero.
We have watched enough of Murray over the years to be astounded by his courage and internal fortitude.
But what we saw on Eurosport on Thursday afternoon (in this part of the world) was probably the most remarkable performance of his career.
Having lost the first two sets to Thanassi Kokkinakis, the best mate and doubles partner of Nick Kyrgios, Murray lost the first two games of the third set and the curtain looked to be falling on his wonderful career.
Instead, he broke his opponent in the third game with one of the greatest points in tennis history
“Mmoh has the sort of back story we love to get behind”
and the rest, you know about. For almost six hours, the pair were locked in a gladiatorial battle on court.
As the clock ticked past four in the morning in Melbourne, it felt like a fitting end to another peculiar day in the first Grand Slam of the year when seeds tumbled out of the event one after the other.
As we watched Alexander Zverev get dumped out by unheralded American Michael Mmoh, who only got into the Australian Open through the ‘lucky loser’ system, the thought did occur if Roland Garros or Wimbledon are ready to be invaded by the Farney Army.
Turns out that Mmoh, ranked 107th in the world, has Monaghan blood in him. His mother, Geraldine O’Reilly hails from Castleblaney and met Mmoh’s father, a tennis coach and former professional player, when she was working as a nurse in Saudi Arabia. It’s just the sort of back story that we love to get behind here.
And the thing is that this Australian Open was about tennis finding new leading figures around which they can spin narratives. The sport’s in a very odd place. For two decades, it was dominated by a handful of household names, the greatest players to ever grace the court. Serena Williams in the women’s game, Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic and the courageous Murray on the men’s side.
Williams bowed out after defeat to Ajla Tomljanovic in last year’s US Open while the graceful Federer, the most adored player in history, also stepped off the stage. Nadal’s body is now held together by Sellotape, as evidenced by his injury woes in Melbourne, but the sense is that the great Spaniard will want to kiss goodbye to the game on the clay of Roland Garros, where he was once pretty much unbeatable.
Djokovic was always the most disliked of the fab four in the men’s game. It was mostly for his robotic style until last year when he turned full Bond villain with his anti-vaccination stance and the subterfuge in his efforts to get into Australia.
Like any good wrestling heel, the Serb is still able to create plenty of heat from over-excited fans as he discovered last week.
Djokovic feels that there are more Grand Slam titles in his future although his hamstring issues suggest even he’s starting to struggle against his body.
And Murray, well he is still Murray, as we saw last Thursday on Eurosport. He was always more of an honorary member of the game’s Fab Four, as he only has three Grand Slam titles to his name, a paltry amount compared to his rivals.
But, as he reminded everyone last week, there are few players able to conjure up as much drama or intrigue on the court. However, Murray, with his metal hip and a lot of miles in his 35-year-old legs, can’t go on for much longer. Neither, it is clear, can Nadal.
Even Djokovic must be contemplating a life where he is not always the bad guy.
So, tennis has to adjust to a reality where its two greatest-ever players, Federer and Williams, have retired and three more of its most dominant personalities are shuffling off the stage.
No wonder its future feels a tad uncertain. This Australian Open was supposed to be the first glimpse into this brave new world, but it didn’t exactly get off to the best start when Kyrgios, the flamboyant bad boy of Aussie tennis, withdrew because of a knee injury.
The temperamental 27-year-old showed the depth of his talent when he got to the Wimbledon final last summer, and Melbourne was supposed to be the springboard to launch him as the sport’s biggest star.
In Break Point, the slickly-produced new Netflix series, which is hoping to fill the void left by
Federer, Williams et al, Kyrgios is almost the sole focus of the first episode. And with good reason as his story is compelling.
In the first episode, we see Kyrgios make an unexpected early exit in last year’s Australian Open before he goes on to win the doubles competition with
“There are 127 losers at the end of every tournament”
his childhood friend Kokkinakis.
Even if Kyrgios is a more than willing participant in Break Point, others opted out of being followed around by the cameras, including the world number one, Carlos Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage phenomenon who claimed his first Grand Slam title at the US
Open in Flushing Meadows. Alcaraz was another of the highprofile withdrawals before the Australian Open began, along with Kyrgios, Ashleigh Barty and Naomi Osaka – who both recently announced pregnancies – as well as another local hope in Tomljanovic.
Osaka, the four-time Grand Slam winner, remains the most marketable female athlete in the world, even if she will be sidelined now until at least next year’s Australian Open.
But she did her sport some service last year when she pulled out of pre-match press conferences, citing mental health concerns.
One of the more interesting aspects of Break Point is the mental toll that the relentless turning of the hamster wheel on the circuit can have on the players.
‘At every tournament, you have 128 players and there are 127 losers at the end of every one of them,’ American player Taylor Fritz, another of those top seeds who tumbled out in Melbourne last Thursday, points out in one of the early episodes.
And that is why there is much drama inherent in every match played at a Grand Slam. That drama just seems to intensify when Murray is on the court.
But it is hard to escape that tennis is a sport at a crossroads that desperately needs Break Point to engender the same fascination in the next generation that we had in those who carried the torch for the past two decades.
Netflix managed it with Formula 1, but they might find the even more cosseted world of tennis harder to penetrate.
The sport can’t keep depending on Murray’s hip to hold up long enough for him to conjure more drama.
Maybe, there’s a void there for Michael Mmoh to step into, especially if he can harness that famous Farney spirit that defines Monaghan football. That would be a story that we will get behind in this country, at least.