Andy took us on a scarcely believable journey, but his legacy will go beyond that
by playing. Obviously, it will get worse but there are operations that will fix that. If I stopped playing tennis today, I would seriously be considering having an operation because day-today life is not fun. I can’t do stuff I would want to do, even if I wasn’t a professional athlete.
“I would want to go and play football with my friends, or go and play 18 holes of golf and enjoy doing that — whereas I can’t think of anything worse than going and playing five-aside football with my friends, because I can’t kick a football.”
Murray said he was considering having a “resurfacing” operation rather than a hip replacement. “Hip resurfacing is something that has been around for 15 years and has been successful for a younger generation of people that have had issues with hips,” he said.
“It allows them to live a very active lifestyle. That is why, I think, and understand from speaking to experts, that it’s a better option for somebody of my age.
“If I was to stop playing today, that is something I would look at and consider doing because it would allow me to go and play football with my friends and play golf. It would allow me to run around a little bit more freely than with a hip replacement.
“I’m sure there are some doctors and surgeons out there who would dispute that and say a hip replacement is better, but there are quite a few athletes out there who have gone back to competing after having it done. As somebody who wants to live an active lifestyle, it’s a better option for me.
“It was not something I was thinking about until a week ago. I was planning on playing through until Wimbledon and that was what I wanted to do. I said, ‘I think I can manage this because I have been playing through pain for a long time and there’s no reason I can’t do it for another five months, knowing there’s an end point. I can be smart with scheduling’.
“But when I got here I thought, ‘I am tired of it and don’t really want to have another five months of that pain’. That’s when I started discussing having something like that done.”
Murray said he was aware how much he would miss playing tennis.
“I think it would be a lot easier for me if it was a decision that I wanted to take, and if my performance wasn’t how I wanted it and I just wasn’t as good as I was before and the young guys are better,” he said. “In that case challenging for big tournaments and stuff would not be possible any more.
“But because this is not something that I want to do — I don’t want to stop playing tennis just now, I don’t feel ready, the rest of my body feels perfect — that’s the hard thing about it. It’s not like I wake up and my whole body’s sore. It’s just one problem that can’t be fixed. That’s why it’s difficult.”
Although Murray said that “at the end of the day it’s only tennis” and that “there is more to life than that”, he added: “For many reasons, it’s been more than that for me.
“Obviously stopping the way it’s happened doesn’t sit particularly well with me. It’s not how I would want to finish playing. I don’t think any athlete wants that. They want to go out when they decide, not have their body telling them that that is the case. That’s the hardest part of it.”
Murray (below) said that winning Wimbledon for the second time in 2016 and carrying the national flag at the Olympics had been the best two moments of his career. He said he did not expect to be able to recreate such highs away from tennis. “Maybe you can by taking certain substances,” he said with a smile. “But you cannot recreate the high of winning Wimbledon or winning a Davis Cup. You cannot do that. As much as the lows of losing here for a fifth time hurt, I always had that as a motivation.
“Even in the low points it was something that gave me drive and motivation to get up and work hard and do stuff. I don’t anticipate being able to replace that. Again that’s something that maybe when I finish I will be happy, living a more stable life. But I don’t think I will ever be able to replace the highs and lows that tennis has given me over the years.”
THE volley is superb: low, hard and right in the backhand corner. You couldn’t have placed it any more awkwardly with your two hands. And so Andy Murray doubles back in retreat. Without so much as a glance, he lashes a backhand down the line, past his startled opponent, onto the line for a clean winner.
“Oh, yes,” Andrew Castle purrs on the BBC commentary. Centre Court whoops and gasps. The year is 2017, the skies over Wimbledon are blue, and the top seed Andy Murray is about to go a set and a break up against Sam Querrey in the quarter-final. It’s also the beginning of the end.
Murray’s the World No.1. The defending Wimbledon champion. The Olympic champion. The pre-eminent figure in British sport, and certainly its most loved. He’s 30-years-old, and after a career spent labouring in the shadow of his three mountainous contemporaries, this feels like his ascent, even his era.
And as you watch it back now, the knowledge that what you’re actually seeing is perhaps Murray’s last ever match at Wimbledon feels like a cruel joke.
What happens next is this: Querrey will break back and win the second set. Then, as the injury in Murray’s hip swells, he’ll win 12 of the last 13 games, and the match with it. The following month, Rafa Nadal will take Murray’s cherished World No.1 ranking. And then about 18 months later — 18 months of invasive surgery, endless rehab and aborted comebacks — he’ll call it a day.
In a faltering voice, he’ll talk of making it through one more season, one more summer, one more Wimbledon. But the weariness and the torment in his face will tell their own story. The pain, we’ll realise, wasn’t just physical. Murray’s had enough. He’s done. It’s over.
The sudden disintegration of Murray’s career — at a relatively young age — shouldn’t obscure the fact that he still enjoyed a pretty decent run. Of course it feels premature, and is. But in a historical context, a 14-year career in the upper chambers of men’s tennis is actually fairly average. It’s one fewer than Boris Becker; one more than Stefan Edberg; the same as Pete Sampras. The trouble is that for virtu- ally his entire adult life, these are not the players Murray has been judged against.
Murray wasn’t a freak of technique like Roger Federer, nor a freak of endurance like Nadal, nor a freak of physics like Novak Djokovic. In many ways, he was all too human.
His three Grand Slams might have been worth twice that in another era. The counter-argument, of course, is that the murderous pursuit of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic is what hauled him to such otherworldly standards.
Injuries plagued Murray from childhood. At 17 he was diagnosed with a split patella and advised that he would probably never play at a high level. Five years later, he reluctantly bowed to pressure from coaches and team-mates and played a crucial Davis Cup tie against Poland, despite a serious wrist injury he ended up aggravating. It was both his gift and his ultimate curse that he was so adept at playing through pain.
His retirement will invite a litany of tributes. And if some of the adulation Murray received occasionally seemed a touch excessive — the three BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards, the mid-career knighthood — then it was partly the giddy thrill of the ride he was taking us all on.
The first British men’s Grand Slam champion for 76 years, the Davis Cup he won almost single-handed in 2015, not one but two Wimbledon singles titles, not one but two Olympic golds: for a generation reared on tennis ignominy, there was a scarcely credible quality to all this.
The day after Murray became the first Briton ever to win the US Open boys’ singles title in 2004, they discovered that the Lawn Tennis Association’s only media officer had already flown home, Tim Henman already having been eliminated.
Andy’s mother Judy remembers pleading for funding from an executive at the Scottish Institute of Sport with zero interest in tennis. “We’ve got a junior Grand Slam champion,” she urged him. “We’re not interested in junior Grand Slam champions,” came the reply. “We’re interested in Grand Slam champions.”
British tennis is in a marginally better state these days. But you can sense Murray’s enormous weight in the void he leaves behind. Kyle Edmund may yet have some big wins in him, and Cameron Norrie is carving out a handy career. But frankly, there’s no knowing when the next player of Murray’s gift will come along.
And yet, Murray’s real legacy has nothing to do with the above. If his greatest achievement as a child was simply to make it into the pro game, his greatest as an adult was to match his grace on the court with grace off it. As good as Andy Murray was as a tennis player, he may be even better as a person.
When he named Amelie Mauresmo as his coach in 2014, he was shocked by the hostility her appointment attracted behind closed doors. Fellow players on the tour would send him crude comments via text. Male coaches would openly disparage her in the locker room. The whole episode seemed to stir something in Murray, who over recent years has established a reputation as a strident advocate of the women’s game, of the right to equal pay.
Unlike many of his generation, Murray used the platform his ability granted him not to advance his own interests, but those of others. He slapped down reporters who failed to take women’s achievements into account. He seemed to give extra consideration to questions from female journalists. The summer before last, he pledged his prize money at Queens Club to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, the survivor of one tragedy (1996 Dunblane massacre) showing solidarity with those of another.
Perhaps he still won’t quite believe how quickly this has all happened. But you hope that in time, the dominant emotion will be not despair, but pride. That he’ll come to remember his own career as we’ll remember it: as a brilliant streak of sunlight, a freezing of time, a bold and bravura testament to the power of dreams.