Murray: Daughter put me top
US Open winner’s honesty reveals the suffering elite athletes must endure, writes Simon Briggs
As he prepares to defend his No1 ranking at the World Tour Finals, Andy Murray says he has reached a new level of personal serenity since the birth of daughter Sophia in February.
Where Murray’s dedication to tennis once verged on the excessive, the experience of parenthood has brought a sense of perspective and prevented him from suffering emotional crashes after defeats. “It has distracted me in a good way,” said Murray. “All of my focus isn’t on tennis now, which is a positive. Maybe before, tennis was like my life and now it isn’t. When I finished in Paris, I was really happy that I won but I wanted to go home and see my family and that’s more important now.
“Maybe my focus is a little bit different, but I’m not dwelling on wins and losses as much. I feel a lot more levelheaded. I’m not as up and down. My mood isn’t based on ‘OK, I won a tournament, that’s amazing’. And then when I’ve lost, I’m not way down, either.”
Tennis. Outsiders see it as the garden-party sport, a gentle ballet with rackets and balls. But for professionals who grind their way through the 46-week season, the reality can feel more like hand-to-hand combat, with the prizes often claimed by the last man standing.
Writing last month in the Swiss newspaper Le Matin Dimanche, Stan Wawrinka challenged the strawberries-and-cream perception. In a column about the US Open final, he opened with a description of his panic attack in the locker room beforehand, which left him weeping and hoping that no one would notice his reddened eyes when he walked into the arena.
He then moved on to the aches that seized his legs in the opening set, to the point where he considered quitting on his chair.
Finally, we learned of the exhaustion that gripped him during the latter stages — and may even have worked in his favour when it muffled “those little voices in my head”. The piece opened a window into the suffering these athletes go through every day.
“I had a lot of comments [about the column],” Wawrinka told The Sunday Telegraph this week. “I think most of the time people don’t see and don’t know what’s happening before. We are professional athletes so they see us as playing good in general, giving the fight. But we also are normal people. Physically it was tough, probably the toughest [tournament] I ever played.
“And emotionally, we get nervous before a big match. I was not feeling great and it was important that during the match [against Novak Djokovic] I stay there, I fight, because you don’t want to give any sign to the opponent.
“And also to know that even if I wasn’t always feeling the best, he was struggling also.”
Arriving in London this week for the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals, Wawrinka is still carrying strapping around his knee for an injury that dates back to New York. But this is unlikely to encourage Kei Nishikori – his opening opponent tomorrow – or the rest of the field. Already this year, Wawrinka has proved himself to be tennis’s king of pain.
The sport once played with wooden rackets on lush lawns has evolved into something more akin to squash. Slow surfaces and polyester strings have turned many events into attritional slug-fests – battles of endurance as much as racket-work. And no one slugs better than Wawrinka.
Affable and approachable, he grew up near Lausanne, on a family farm staffed by workers with disabilities. Such a background would seem to promote groundedness, and Wawrinka – in contrast to his supersmooth compatriot Roger Federer – feels like the sort of bloke you might share a pint with.
With his broad-shouldered, deepchested frame, he looks more like a wrestler than the skinny marathonrunner types who dominate the tour. His movement can seem ungainly at times – until he picks up a scent of weakness and goes after the ball like a Labrador chasing a rabbit.
Then the world’s most photogenic groundstroke – the Wawrinka backhand – starts to be unfurled. Few players with double-fisted backhands can match the pace he generates with one mighty arm. And this quirk delivers a tactical advantage. As ATP analyst Craig O’Shannessy notes (see panel), opponents find it almost impossible to predict which angle he is going to choose.
Unreadability, in general, is an asset for this poker-faced pugilist.
“Staying calm, not showing emotion, that is part of the things I am trying to push and improve with my coach,” says Wawrinka, whose trademark gesture is the finger he places to his temple after moments of intense competition.
“Magnus [Norman] has really helped me with that. I was so happy when he won the coach of the year on Thursday, because my consistency since he started [in 2013] has been completely different: qualifying for the O2 the last four years, being top-five since 2014, winning grand slams each year. It’s amazing compared to what I did before.”
Wawrinka was a fringe presence, floating around the world’s top 20, until Norman reminded him that Switzerland is big enough for two tennis heroes. Now he has graduated into the Rocky of the tour, never winning as consistently as the “Big Four”, but producing at least one spectacular takedown every year.
New York was the latest example. Coming into the US Open, Djokovic had been the iron man of tennis – a player who can win quickly, with a salvo of surgical strikes, or drop back and play the waiting game. But when the two rivals met on Arthur Ashe Stadium it was Wawrinka who kept his guard up until the 15th round. He describes it as the most physical of his three grand-slam victories, leaving him “completely exhausted”. Five days later, though, he dragged himself away from friends and family in Switzerland to rejoin the tour in St Petersburg, where he lost in the final to hotly tipped 19-year-old Alexander Zverev. “It was important not to be out for too long,” he says. Where Wawrinka was once prone to patchy commitment across the season, he has learned to keep up the pressure from first to last, and to back himself against any opponent – a shift that will take Murray’s No 1 ranking out of the equation when they play their group match on Wednesday or Friday. “I am really motivated,” said Wawrinka, who ejected Murray from last year’s World Tour Finals with a straight-sets win. “I am strong from the both sides. I can keep that power for hours and hours. The US Open gave me a lot of confidence that when I start to play well I can keep playing well.” In an increasingly gruelling sport, no one comes up against the bearlike Wawrinka without apprehension. By the end of the week, he could have the World Tour Finals in an armlock.