‘Kim’s been brilliant. I’ve probably been quite selfish’
Andy Murray talks to Andrew Billen about learning not to bottle his emotions and the effect of his hip injury on his family – and his comeback.
THE great fights in Andy Murray’s life have been on court with his rivals: Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Stan Wawrinka, the last of whom Murray beat in the final of the European Open last month. It was a surprise victory, not only the comeback story of the year, but a fable that gave hope to everyone living with chronic pain.
The Murray battle that has most interested me, however, has been internal, the one between the clipped, dour Scotsman (after one gruelling Wimbledon match he told an interviewer that, no, he had no sympathy for the agony he had put his watching family through, for he was the one who had done all the work) and the blubberer within. Despite his stoutest efforts, sometimes emotions have overwhelmed Murray, silencing him midspeech. This conflict is not one I ever thought this presscautious athlete would want to discuss with me, but I am wrong, for he has changed.
Murray has returned from his near career-ending injury and innovative surgery a different person. The transformation is not just down to 2019 having turned out ‘‘for sure’’ to be the best year of his life: as well as his recovery and return to winning, he collected his knighthood from the Prince of Wales in May, and three weeks ago his wife, the pet artist Kim Sears, gave birth to their first son (Teddy, sleeping surprisingly well, his two older sisters cautiously enthusiastic). The change has been wrought from the terrible year that preceded all this, a year that took its toll not only on him, but on his team and his marriage.
It’s the subject of an Amazon documentary on his surgery and comeback released at the end of this month, Andy Murray: Resurfacing, which has been directed by a virtual unknown, Olivia Cappuccini. I wonder if he seeks outsiders, whether he is one, but he says it is more about establishing trusting relationships. Cappuccini is ‘‘a lady I felt comfortable with’’. As his frequent shuffling of coaches testifies, it is clearly all about the quality of relationships.
Resurfacing will show him at his lowest, he says; in constant pain after an initial operation in January 2018 failed to undo the cumulative damage to his hip. ‘‘It was basically an overuse injury. The cartilage in my hip had just worn away and I was left with basically bone against bone.’’
A year after the surgery, at the Australian Open, the two-time Olympic and Wimbledon champion tearfully announced his likely retirement. The tributes poured in. The career of Andy Murray, RIP. Was he depressed? ‘‘I was pretty down, that’s for sure. It was a really tough period for me because it wasn’t so much the actual injury itself. Being injured can be frustrating, but the issue that I had was with me every single day, sleeping and walking. It wasn’t just I hit a serve and my arm hurt. This woke me up in the night. It was bad.’’
Were his family aware of just how much pain he was in? ‘‘I don’t know if the children noticed because when I’m with them I’m always trying to put on a brave face, but my wife definitely. It put a lot of strain on our relationship, just because I was down all the time.’’
In his 2009 memoir Murray wrote that his relationship with Sears, whom he met in 2005, had thrived on his absences. During his illness he spent seven consecutive months at home with her. ‘‘She has been brilliant and I would probably be quite selfish, just in terms of thinking about myself and how I’m feeling all the time and not actually realising the impact that has on all the people around me. When everyone was trying to encourage me to keep going and keep trying and keep playing, I was, like, ‘You don’t know what it is that I’m feeling.’
‘‘I probably didn’t take into consideration what that was doing to everyone around me. I see a little of this in the documentary. Some bits of it are quite hard for me to watch. It had an impact on the team, and my physio’s family as well. He’ll be disappointed and sad each time he goes home that he’s not been able to fix my hip, that I’m still in pain or I’ve had a rough day.’’
In January, however, he resolved to take a chance on the so-called Birmingham hip procedure, having been encouraged by long phone calls with two athletes who had successfully undergone it. He remained wary. ‘‘I’d had a back operation and a previous hip operation that were still considered major surgeries, but this was different; much longer, much more brutal. I watched a video of the surgery before I went in to have it done myself and that was when I realised, ‘OK, this could be it. This could be the end. This might not go well.’ I had to get past that in my head.’’
The video lasted 45 minutes; his operation was twice that. He came round to be told that it had gone well. ‘‘The day I woke up I was in so much pain. I was in horrific pain. It was probably only about six to eight weeks after, when the swelling had started to settle down and the scar started to heal up, that I started to feel no pain when I was walking, and that would be the first time in probably three years.’’
It was weird. He had forgotten what walking without pain was actually like. ‘‘People say it all the time, but for me this was genuinely life-changing for all sorts of reasons, not just to play tennis, but when I’m crawling through a tunnel in soft play with my children, or just getting down on the floor to play and roll around with them. I couldn’t do that before. I couldn’t get the same enjoyment out of doing that with my children as I can now. So the lady that operated on me, I’m unbelievably thankful to her.’’ Sarah Muirhead-Allwood is on his Christmas card list? ‘‘For the rest of my life, yes.’’
But what if it had not worked out, or not well enough for him to extend his career? Had he considered what he might do with the rest of his life? ‘‘Do you know what? Outside of the [business] things that I was already involved in, I did not know, but I wasn’t worried. If you’d asked me 12 months ago, and I was replying honestly, I would have been, like, ‘I’m actually quite worried. I don’t know what I’m going to do and I don’t know what my life will be like without tennis.’ But I actually got a sense of what that was like for the first four months of my rehab from this operation and I realised: I’m happy.
‘‘Now I know that if I have to stop tomorrow, I’m fine. As long as I have my family and my health and stuff, I’m not in pain, then I’m fine.
‘‘I learnt a lot about life. For most of my life, family has always been important, but tennis... What do I do without tennis? What do I do without it? And now I realise life’s great without tennis as well, providing you have your health and, you know, obviously I’ve got a brilliant family at home. It’s been a real journey for me. I’ve just learnt a bit about life that without this injury I probably wouldn’t have.’’
The Amazon documentary will show him in tears again. As transmission approaches, he feels a little apprehensive about showing that to the world. I tell him my theory about the two Murrays: the Murray who fights to contain his emotions and the Murray who is his emotions. One might even want to trace this conflict back to him being at school in Dunblane in 1996 when a madman shot a teacher and 16 of his schoolmates. He, however, has always maintained he has few memories of the day, but he was nearly nine. I’d say that takes some repressing.
‘‘I think I have always been very emotional, but probably since my early 20s I’ve been quite guarded and a bit apprehensive with showing that, especially publicly. In sport from a young age you’re taught that showing emotions is a bad thing because you’re showing your opponent how you feel, and someone who shows a lot of emotions is considered to be weak mentally.
‘‘It’s drilled into you. What happens is that you end up not wanting to tell your coach that you’re nervous about something, a bit scared about something, or hurt about something. It’s not something that’s really encouraged, whereas I think if coaches and athletes’ teams were a little bit more sensitive to that, it would actually help the athletes a lot more. ‘‘And it’s not a good thing. It’s not particularly helpful. I’m not saying that every time you have a setback or every time something goes wrong you have to break down in floods of tears, but when you come off the court and into the locker room people will judge you for that if you do.’’
I say people love him for being human. He is not sure. ‘‘I’ve been playing in a time where you’ve got people like Federer and Nadal who are brilliant at showing only positive emotions when they’re on the court. Sometimes people watch me and they go, ‘Oh, why can’t you be like them?’ And not everyone is the same. I’m different to those guys.’’
THE TIMES