The epitome of grit

IF this was the end – and it had all the hallmarks of it – there was a certain poetry to it. Others have bowed out on top, others have bowed out at a time of their own choosing, others in glory, others in shame, but few have done so in a way as true to themselves as he has done.

This was a struggle, a battle of wills, not between him and Roberto Bautista Agut, but between mind and body, between the soaring spirit and the cruel, mundane reality of existence governed as it is by our physical limitations. Our bodies betray us all in the end.

Between games and between sets you could see his body betraying him in real time. The limp he carried the result of a decade at the top of his game, the result of a hip injury requiring surgery, the result of an injury that would all but certainly end his career.

Even so, even knowing all this he battled on as he always had done. Bautista Agut shouldn’t have had much difficulty seeing off the old warrior. The odds favoured a straight-sets victory for the younger man.

Andy Murray, though, was having none of it. Drawing on every last reserve of strength the Scotsman made a fight of it. 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-7 (4), 6-2. A five set contest that had no right to be.

Not after Bautista Agut won the opening two sets. Certainly he had no right to win a tie-break. Let alone two. And, yet, and, yet, and, yet. Andy Murray was, as another Scotsman famously said of somebody else, indefatigable.

Murray was grit and he was determination. To do what he did he had to be. To overcome the obstacles that faced him – he was a student at Dunblane the day of the massacre – he had to be.

Has there ever been an athlete as hard on himself in public as Murray has been? The sometimes foul-mouthed asides to himself were all about one thing and one thing only – the expectations he had for himself, the almost pathological need to improve to get to where he needed to be.

A ferocious desire to be the best drove Andy Murray and for some people that was almost off-putting. The rawness of it contrasted somewhat with the silken smooth and almost aristocratic mien of a Roger Federer. Murray’s ambition was right on the surface and if that made him a somewhat unusual presence in staid world of the tennis tour it also made him one of the most genuine and open of sportsmen.

While he may not have gone out of his way to talk about certain parts of his hinterland (only speaking on occasion about Dunblane, a sign of his class and dignity), he never hid from himself and who he was and how he was feeling.

In any other era he probably would have won more than he did – not that three Grand Slam titles, two Olympic gold medals and world number one status is anything to sniff it – but coming of age in the era of Federer, Djokovic and Nadal to win anything at all is an achievement. His greatest achievement wasn’t so much crashing the big three’s party as making it the big four. Murray at his best was that good. The tour will be a poorer place without him, as will the world of sport itself.