‘I want to make sure Andy’s success is not going to waste’
Judy Murray is determined that her son’s career fires up the next generation,
I she tells Simon Briggs t is hard to miss Judy Murray’s sponsored minibus, with its bright pink murals and “Tennis On The Road” branding. But, as it skims around Falkirk, dispensing free tennis lessons and uplifting advice, it forms a neat counterpoint to the hired 14-seaters that she used to drive across the border in the late-1990s.
Then, Murray was ferrying her young sons and a bunch of other Scottish tennis hopefuls (Elena Baltacha, Jamie Baker, Colin Fleming) to feast on unwary Sassenachs. Now, she wants to convert their success back into real engagement on the ground: more courts, more coaches, more players. If it does not happen in the next couple of years, she says, the chance will be lost.
“It just disappoints me so much that we’ve given so much from Scotland to tennis,” says Murray. “And yet we’re still scratching away, not punching above our weight any more. I want to make sure that this incredible period of excitement and success is not going to waste. I am 56 now and I want to share everything I have learned. I don’t want to take it with me.”
We meet at the Mariner Leisure Centre in Falkirk. It is Murray’s second session of the day, and third day on the trot, and she looks visibly weary beforehand. But, as soon as the children arrive, she smiles and switches into broadcast mode. “Mums and dads, breaking news: you are our assistant coaches.”
Then, she and her sidekick, Kris Soutar, start leading the kids in the sort of daft-yet-demanding drills that made the Murray boys into protoathletes. “Nothing you can’t find in a PE cupboard,” she says, as she dispenses balloons, beanbags and hula hoops. “That’s the rule.”
For a woman so often portrayed as the tiger mom of tennis, Murray is deceptively slight and softly spoken. Yet her drive is unmistakable. As a young woman, she was Scottish national champion at tennis (her summer sport), British universities champion at badminton (her winter sport), and a county-level squash player (the odd knock-up in between).
Then, when she became Scotland’s national tennis coach in 1995, she assembled an international taskforce. On a budget of £90,000 she could afford only a couple of days each of Belgian technical director Ivo Van Aken, American sports psychologist Daniel Gould and Hungarian training expert Dr Istvan Balyi. But the effect was to create a self-sustaining workforce in Scotland, built of people such as Euan McGinn – who still runs the indoor centre at Stirling University – and Davis Cup captain Leon Smith.
“We didn’t have very many players and we didn’t have much resource,” she says, “so we became very good at maxing out what we did have. We travelled in packs, so the kids never got caught up in that parent-and-child third degree in the car on the way home. If any of them lost, they were off and playing cards or football, and I think that really helped them. It also
‘For me, the most emotional moments have always been when I watch them competing together’
probably helped me, too. I might have got too caught up in Andy and Jamie’s successes and failures, but I had too many to look after for that.” How, then, did it feel to watch her sons lead the capture of the Davis Cup last November? “It’s hard to compare one event to another. But, for me, the most emotional moments have always been when I watch them competing together, whether that’s in the Davis Cup or Olympics.
“When Jamie won the mixed doubles at Wimbledon [in 2007], it was such an enormous surprise. He was very young, he hadn’t even planned to enter the mixed, and every match [with Jelena Jankovic] was just fun – they were having a great time together. And so that was a different feeling to Andy winning the singles several years later, which was just total and utter relief, it was, ‘Thank God he has done it, and now at least he doesn’t keep having to answer that same old question’.
“It was lovely to see Jamie become the top-ranked doubles player [in March] because he has been so much in the shadow of Andy for all of his career. The key was to invest in himself, which is what he did after the Lawn Tennis Association cut all the doubles funding and he had to bring in his own coach, a guy called Alan MacDonald he has known for years.
“Jamie has always had a lot of skill without having quite the belief and confidence in himself that Andy has, but now it has been wonderful to see him getting the recognition for how good he is.”
Now Murray’s fondest hope is to push through her proposed tennis centre at the Park of Keir, which she describes as a roundabout slap-bang in the middle of Scotland. The scheme, which she wants to set up as a charitable trust rather than a commercial centre, has already been knocked back because of planning objections (it involves building 17 homes on greenbelt land).
“We have appealed to the Scottish government to consider it as a matter of national importance,” she said, “because, in the last eight years, we haven’t had any new indoor courts in Scotland. A few weeks ago, I was working in Ayrshire and we had to come off the court because we were in a snow blizzard on 27 April. We were so fortunate that the Stirling University centre opened, which was five miles away from us. If it hadn’t, I don’t think Andy would have played tennis; I think he would have gone down a footballing route.
“It is amazing to think that they have made it right up to the top of the world and managed to win the Davis Cup when you consider where we live. Tennis is such a minority sport up here and there’s no track record of success and, suddenly, we have this huge profile because we have these two role models.
“And that’s really my drive to try to build on that, and get more people playing and more people delivering it. Because the boys won’t play for ever.”