The shrewd mum behind Murray’s rise to fame
A WEEK after she had screamed and cried and pumped her fists over her son’s US Open victory, Judy Murray began to appreciate what had happened.
Not simply what had occurred on the centre court at Flushing Meadows, but what had happened over much of the previous 25 years.
Andy Murray’s US Open win, the first slam for a British man since 1936, provided as much relief as it did pride to him, his country and the mother who had given most of what she had to help both her sons become the best they could be.
‘‘When Andy did the homecoming in Dunblane and 25,000 people came from all over Scotland, all over Britain, to see him, it really hit me,’’ Judy Murray said. ‘‘He walked up the High St, past the post box and we ended up at the tennis courts. We’d ended up where it all started. Suddenly we’re back there and he’s a Grand Slam champion.
‘‘ That was when it got me. He’d come a long way.’’ For the second- most identifiable mother in world tennis – behind only Oracene Price (mother of the Williams sisters) – a woman who has received hate mail and endured taunts for a courtside manner the British tend to regard as unseemly, the journey is one she instigated, nurtured and promoted.
And she makes no excuses for her abiding presence. Judy Murray is not one of the whacky parents in professional tennis. In fact, she must be close to being one of the most knowledgeable and most sane in the game. Before she became Britain’s Fed Cup captain last year, Murray had been Scottish national coach for 20 years and quite a handy player.
Without the merest whiff of martyrdom, she says the coaching all began with her desire to give her sons Andy and Jamie a good grounding in the game.
‘‘ There were no coaches in Scotland in my day,’’ she said.‘‘I learned to play at the local tennis club by playing anyone I could. It was never about eastern and western grips. I had to learn how to coach because my kids wanted to play tennis.’’
Murray encouraged her sons to play anything at all in order
When Andy did the homecoming in Dunblane and 25,000 people came from all over Scotland, all over Britain, to see him, it really hit me. Judy Murray
to develop hand- eye coordination and invented games to play indoors during Scottish winters. ‘‘Andy and Jamie were very well co-ordinated, mainly because they had sporting parents and grandparents who encouraged them to play everything,’’ she said.
Her father Roy Erskine had been a professional footballer for Hibernian in Scotland and his contribution to the gene pool clearly played a part. At the age of 14, Andy was offered a trial by Glasgow Rangers. At 15, his brother Jamie, a Grand Slam semifinalist in doubles, played golf off a handicap of three.
Tennis, and a mother who insists she guided rather than pushed, won them over.
‘‘In the early days we would drive all over the country in a minibus, me driving and all these kids in the back,’’ she said. ‘‘We’d have a Scottish flag flying at the back and we’d be off to conquer England.
‘‘For the kids it was a great adventure. How it should be.’’
Andy’s first important junior success came when he was 12 at the Orange Bowl junior tournament in the US, an event whose winners include Roger Federer, John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Stefan Edberg, Mats Wilander and Murray’s coach Ivan Lendl.
A couple of years later, Andy, somewhat reluctantly, went to Barcelona to train, a move that led him to meet another promising junior, Rafael Nadal, and make it a certainty he would become a tennis professional.
‘‘Andy didn’t want to go to Spain at first, but after he got there he met Rafa,’’ she said.
‘‘ He rang me up one night after he’d played racket ball with Rafa and he’d changed.
‘‘Rafa had told him how he practised with Carlos Moya and other Spanish tour players and how he didn’t have to go to school. He told me that in Scotland he only had me and his brother to practise with. From that moment he was going to be a pro.’’
A year later, Andy won the junior US Open, and eight years on he won the senior US title.
She insists she isn’t one of those parents who behaves as if every opponent her boy faces is a son of the devil. Unfortunately, the television cameras have a knack of catching her out.
‘‘You never know when the cameras are on you but they always tend to find me at the crucial moment of something being very good or very bad.’’