A HERO RAGING AGAINST THE DYING OF HIS LIGHT
Some people get quite upset when the word heroic is used in connection with athletic performance. But what can you do? Some people are idiots.
This was an absolutely heroic display from Andy murray. If it was his last game of professional tennis, it was imbued with heroism. If he retires tomorrow, he leaves a hero.
There, said it. murray is as near as a man can get to inspiring hero-worship, without donning a cape, or bending tracks to divert a runaway train from striking an orphanage.
At one stage it appeared we were about to witness one of the most remarkable comebacks in tennis history but instead had to settle for heroic defeat, as murray’s body chased him down the way he had chased down Roberto Bautista Agut, across a match that went into a fifth hour.
Bautista Agut is one of the world’s form players right now — Novak Djokovic was a recent scalp, in Doha — and when he went two sets up it looked as if murray was to bow out with dignity, but pretty much as expected. The Australian hosts had prepared a tribute montage to be shown on the big screens around margaret Court Arena, and many of murray’s rivals and colleagues had contributed. The tournament director was no doubt getting ready to roll it. But murray had other ideas.
From there, he won two tiebreak sets to return the match to 2-2, then held serve to lead the fifth set 1-0. He was ahead for the first time since the seventh game. The player who had talked about this as potentially his farewell was closing in on an outcome as baffling as it would be brilliant.
By now, the crowd were spending as much time on their feet as in their seats, including the various members of family and team murray who were gathered in the players’ box.
Impassive no more, they were willing him on. They would have known he was in pain, but also that this was his choice.
The hip that had seemed as insurmountable an obstacle as Rafa Nadal on clay seemed to have been dispatched like a poor second serve. This was happening. This was really happening. And then it wasn’t.
From a euphoric rolling back of the years, reality came barging through the door like a gang of drunken gatecrashers at a nerdy teenager’s birthday party.
The set began to slip from murray — 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 4-1 — and as it did no doubt his thoughts turned to the end.
Not just the end of his career and the pain that was precipitating it, because that is an anguish he lives with daily, but the end of this match.
How would he handle that? How could he keep his emotions in check? There would be an interview, and the same questions that he has been fielding for months, except this time they would need answering in a way that gave closure. And murray, plainly, was not ready for closure. Not just yet.
So, as the match moved into hour five, at 5-1 down, he held his racket up to the crowd, who were cheering now, in anticipation of seeing the last game of tennis of his professional career.
He looked a little moist around the eyes, as did his mother, Judy. He puffed out his cheeks and fought to keep it all together. And then he held serve.
He does that, murray. He has a way of making each fresh round an ordeal, often an emotional one. You strap yourself in for the long haul when you watch him.
It was no different yesterday. Those who tuned in shortly after 7am UK time and were envisaging getting on with their day soonest, would have found themselves somewhat exasperated to still be sitting on the sofa at close to noon. It was ever thus. matches that appear won turn into epic encounters, lost causes are unexpectedly salvaged. Nothing is easy.
everything takes time, demands investment. even this. even a foregone conclusion.
Here was a man with a decaying hip, who was supposed to be adapting his game to make the rallies as short as possible. And yet, hour five and we are still engaged. Hour five and he is challenging a call at 5-2 and 15-0 down, when every pain receptor in his body must have his brain on speed dial and is hitting the call button on repeat.
Credit to Bautista Agut, who by this stage might have felt inclined to just hop over the net and reason with him, make him see sense.
Instead, the Spaniard closed out the game, then spoke generously of his opponent, showing no impatience that his own victory was largely sidelined.
His impassiveness throughout was its own tribute, too, always treating murray as an opponent who needed to be beaten, not one who should be. Indeed, a player with less mental strength may even have succumbed when murray fought back. When a player whose body is no longer fit for purpose suddenly finds the athletic resolve to engage in a 23- shot rally and win the point, it can mess with the head.
In 2016, when murray ascended to world No 1 by beating Novak Djokovic in London, the event
He ached like a man giving up but didn’t play like one
began, mysteriously, with a reading of a poem by dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night Old age should burn and rave at close of day Rage, rage against the dying of the light…
And here was Murray, little more than two years later, doing just that. raging against the dying of his light, his incredible talent, burning and raving, despite the disadvantages, the injustice of it all, his body giving up in a way his spirit never did.
In glimpses we still saw the younger, fitter man. The ball coming back when it should not, the anticipation, the early takes. And the strategies, of course. That hasn’t deserted him: arguably the sharpest mind in tennis. The player who overcame more naturally gifted players because he made plans and set traps.
Bautista Agut had never taken a set off him before yesterday and, one imagines, had Murray remained fit that record would have remained intact.
until the final set, the biggest winning margin between the players was a single break. Murray was still finding ways to overcome his limitations, right until the end.
If it is, after all, the end. no doubt buoyed by the unexpected closeness of this encounter, Murray spoke as if he may take one final swing at saving his career with a major hip operation.
The tournament organiser went ahead and showed the montage of his best moments anyway. There is no guarantee extensive surgery will preserve anything more than his quality of life, and Murray’s doctor has done little to encourage optimism in recent days.
But we believe in Murray, the way we still believe in heroes, and because he so often delivers the amazing. He may have ached like a man who was giving up, but he didn’t play like one.
He burned and raved and raged in a way that made us miss him more than ever, if this is his last.
And even in defeat, he went out a hero: because in Andy Murray, we most certainly have one.
ANDY MURRAY will get a statue at Wimbledon when he retires. Nice for a selfie, but why stop at souvenirs? True, Murray has certainly earned time off, having completed his stint as saviour of British tennis. The strain of it has left him on the brink of physical collapse at the age of 31.
He says he has no firm plans, beyond the next round of surgery. That done, if he cannot play, he hopes to achieve the balance that often eludes athletes driven by such ferocious ambition.
Time for family, for a round of golf, for five-a- side football. Obviously, he will be in demand as a commercial entity, too. But then what?
Murray says, for now, he is in no mood to coach. If this really is the end, he may well miss playing too much to be constantly reminded of it. But one day that will change.
Nobody who gave as much to a sport as Murray can ever be truly free of it. Meaning, this isn’t over.
At least it shouldn’t be. Is there anyone better to lead from the front at the Lawn Tennis Association than the man who carried British tennis on his shoulders?
Is there anyone who knows more about the development of young talent, the pathways, the pressures of competition, than Murray, who came from nowhere to be No 1 in the world?
After Great Britain won the Davis Cup in 2015, it was Murray who set the agenda at an excoriating press conference, in which the failings of the LTA were laid bare. He certainly seemed to know what was wrong then, he has certainly sounded, in many conversations across many years, as if he had clear ideas for reform.
‘Do you know that in spain, at 18, your funding stops?’ he told me in 2011, before he won the first of three Grand slams.
‘From there, you get nothing that you cannot earn for yourself. We’re funding guys to 27, 28 — while in the most successful tennis nation in the world you’re basically on your own.
‘When I went to spain, from the best players to the worst players, we were all taught the same way, all given the same drills. They had a structure and stuck to it.
‘Go to our national centre and you’ve got 10 different nationalities all coaching in different ways. If we don’t get results straight away, we panic and change direction.
‘There is no confidence in our technique, no sense of sticking to an idea, no identity, no consistency in the way we teach tennis, so naturally there is no British style.
‘We’ll get lucky every now and then and one might come through, but there is no form to our teaching, which is why we have no depth. To be among the best tennis playing nations in the world you must have identity.’
This was when the National Tennis Centre was still operating as a base for elite sport. The LTA abandoned it in 2014 and there have been many more changes of strategy since. It underlines Murray’s point. No consistency.
Performance directors come and go. Plans are rolled out, then abandoned.
MurrAy’s rise to the summit should have promoted an explosion in participation and interest, as happened in sweden after Bjorn Borg, but the opposite was true.
Tennis participation numbers fell during the time Murray was at his peak. Between 2007 and 2016, sport England say tennis lost 59,000 players.
It is, however, not too late. There is a man, maybe a family, who know a thing or two about producing world- class tennis players, or just engaging young people to play.
Murray needs to get the golf, and the rest of it, out of his system first. Then he might once again be Britain’s No 1.