How to raise a champ — feed him Big Macs!
KNOWING THE SCORE By Judy Murray (Chatto £18.99)
LET’S admit it: when we first set eyes on Judy Murray watching Andy at Wimbledon in 2005, most of us thought: ‘Poor him, having that woman as a mother! she looks pushy and terrifying.’
the lesson we’ve learned since is: never judge a woman by her frown or specs. that was not the frown of a tiger mother — it was, as she reveals in this inspiring memoir, ‘trying to keep my expression as neutral as possible, as I know how much every gasp or wince impacts on them’.
she is ‘surprised I’m still alive’ after the strain of watching Andy and his brother Jamie fall at so many final hurdles before becoming world champions. she cares passionately about them winning, but knows the essence of the drive to win must come from the player, not a parent.
Just as Andy and Jamie worked their way up to become World No 1s in singles and doubles, so Judy has worked her way up the rankings of national esteem.
Her appearance on strictly Come Dancing in 2014 was the clincher. she couldn’t believe it when she kept not being voted off, week after week.
‘I could sense people’s response to me changing, even on the street, when I was buying a coffee, or petrol. People love to watch a transformation.’
What a long way she has come since her first appearance on stage in 2004 with the scottish tV presenter tam Cowan, wearing a denim skirt and a green corduroy jacket costing £29.99 from M&s.
tam: ‘When’s Andy going to win Wimbledon, then?’
Judy: ‘Well, I think he has more of a chance of winning Wimbledon than Motherwell do of winning the european Cup.’
tam (a Motherwell fan): ‘Could he not have bought you anything decent to wear tonight, then?’
It knocked Judy’s confidence so hard that, for a long time afterwards, she couldn’t bear to go to any public events.
Judy’s parents were tennis addicts (during Wimbledon fortnight in Judy’s childhood, ‘we barely got fed’), and her father (the local optician) was the kind who didn’t let his daughter win when he played against her.
JUDY read modern languages at edinburgh University, representing great Britain at the World student games, but her vocation was to be a coach: harnessing the enthusiasm of like-minded parents, she would transform Dunblane into a hub of young scottish tennis talent.
she met ‘ the boys’ dad’ while working for a confectionery firm; Will Murray was regional manager for a newsagents. Will gets scant mention in the book.
Judy gives us a fleeting glimpse of him playing football for hours with the boys in the muddy back garden and, the next thing we know, logistics were ‘ especially difficult’ as ‘ Will and I had separated around that time’.
One gets the impression Judy just hasn’t got time to be a wife.
the vignettes of Jamie (born 1986) and Andy (1987) as competitive but close little brothers are some of the best moments in the book. One day, inspired by the wrestling on tV, the little boys made their own glitter belts out of cornflake boxes and laid out ‘the arena’ in their bedroom with two single Manchester United duvets, before ‘attacking each other with a viciousness I could barely believe siblings could have for one another’.
they created their own ‘bell’ by rigging up a stepladder to reach the hanging lampshade.
Judy makes it clear her boys’ love of tennis came through an early love of play, and their fitness from hours running around ‘trashing the garden’, not from tailored fitness programmes from too young an age.
she depicts the trickiness of bringing up a boy of Andy’s fiery temper: aged three to four, he would ‘blow’, as she puts it, every evening between 6.30 and 7.30 and ‘there were times . . . that very nearly tipped me over the edge’.
Andy’s primary school class of eight-year-olds was the next one scheduled to go into the gym on the day of the Dunblane shootings. the teachers and dinner ladies managed to hustle the class into the headmaster’s study and kept them singing songs to disguise the sound of the shots.
the parents had to wait for hours in a nearby hotel to hear which class had been in the gym. there weren’t enough chairs, so Judy shared one with another mother. that other mother’s daughter turned out to have been one of the 17 killed. Judy writes that, for years afterwards, ‘every one of us in the town was swamped with grief’.
Her book also shows us how, as parents, we often learn from the mistakes we make with our first children, making life easier for subsequent children.
Wanting the best for budding tennis star Jamie, she sent him to board and receive special tennis coaching in Cambridge at the age of 12. He was miserable and lonely — as well as being badly coached — so she took him away a few months later.
HAVING been ‘ranked top 3 [ juniors] in europe along with Nadal’, Jamie ‘returned home with shattered confidence’. By the time Andy went to the sánchez- Casal Academy in Barcelona aged 14, he was ready and itching to go.
the cost was £35,000 per year. Judy went cap-in-hand to the LtA to ask for financial support; its final offer was £10,000.
‘to this day,’ Judy writes, ‘I’m not sure if either of the boys know the horrendous financial stress I was under.’
the most delicious moment in the book, is this: in a convoy of taxis travelling to the Champions’ Dinner at the guildhall after Andy’s victory in 2016, Judy noticed that the taxi in front of theirs was taking an odd detour — via a drive-thru McDonald’s.
When Andy, in full black tie, rolled down the window to order a Big Mac and fries, the guy in the order booth ‘freaked out’.
‘ We’re all a product of our environment and our past,’ Judy writes, ‘and in Andy’s case, that meant a McDonald’s, even after winning a Wimbledon final.’
take that, nutritionists!