BABY STEPS
Murray reveals the secret to his rise to No1 — and proves all those warnings about fatherhood wrong
THERE was a time, a few weeks after his daughter Sophia was born in February, when people wondered aloud whether becoming a parent would be the beginning of the end for Andy Murray as a tennis player.
When he lost a match in Miami soon afterwards, television analyst Annabel Croft said pointedly that Murray looked exhausted. The inference was clear. Murray didn’t see her comments but his wife Kim told him about an article that blamed Sophia for the loss of a tennis match.
Not surprisingly, that made Murray indignant. He said it was fine by him if his tennis suffered. He hoped it didn’t but he had other priorities now. He wanted to work hard and train hard like he had always done but, more than anything, he wanted to be a good parent.
‘I’d rather be getting up in the middle of the night and helping her,’ he said when I spoke to him at Roehampton in April, ‘than winning every tennis match and her thinking when she grows up, “Actually, you know what, he was a s****y dad but he won a lot of tennis matches so, you know, well done”.’
On Friday afternoon, the world’s No 1 tennis player stood in a quiet corridor at London’s O2 Arena and was reminded of those predictions of imminent doom. They seem amusing now because they could not have been more wrong.
The birth of Sophia heralded not just the best year of his life off the court but the best year of his life on it, too. He reached three of the four Grand Slam finals, he won his second Wimbledon title and his second Olympic men’s singles gold at the Rio Games with a titanic victory over Juan Martin del Potro.
A remarkably consistent run of form saw him steadily reel in Novak Djokovic at the top of the world rankings, a feat which had seemed improbable in February. Fatherhood and tennis is a combination that worked like a dream for him.
It is good to see a man as dedicated and as genuine as Murray so happy and so fulfilled. He is still making sacrifices. Sophia started crawling for the first time on Thursday, he said, but he missed it because he was practising for his opening match in the ATP World Tour finals against Marin Cilic tomorrow night. Kim showed him footage of the big moment when he got home and Sophia performed for him live on Friday morning.
Murray smiled slowly when he recalled the suggestions back in the spring that, now he was a father, his focus would slip, he would become distracted and he would tumble down the rankings.
‘The thing is,’ said Murray, ‘it has distracted me, but in a good way. All of my focus isn’t on tennis now, which is a positive. Maybe before, tennis was like my life and now it isn’t. I still want to do well but it’s true that when I finished in Paris last weekend, I was really happy that I won but I wanted to go home and see my family.
‘Maybe my focus is a little bit different. I’m not dwelling on wins and losses as much. I feel a lot more level-headed through the year emotionally. I’m not as up and down. My mood isn’t based on “OK, I won a tournament, that’s amazing”. And then when I’ve lost, I’m not way down here, either. I just feel a lot more stable throughout the year.
‘Sophia just started crawling. It’s nice. Anyone that’s a parent will say that. Even though it’s baby steps, small steps, it’s nice to be around when that’s happening and that’s why this period of the year is great.
‘I will get to see her every day for the next four-and-a-half weeks before I go off to Miami. I will get to spend time with her over Christmas and she is coming at the beginning of the year to some of the tourna- ments in the Middle East so, yeah, I’ll get to spend a lot of time with her.’
If Murray looked supremely relaxed at the O2, Djokovic seemed edgy and fitful again. He jumped on an innocuous question about his recent struggles and knows he may need to win each of his pool matches in London and the tournament to reclaim that prized No 1 spot from Murray before the end of the year.
The form of Djokovic, the absence here of both Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal and Stan Wawrinka’s victory at the US Open in the summer have raised more questions about whether the era of the Big Four is now past. Many believe Murray is now well placed to dominate the game for the next year at least. He is more cautious.
‘I think injuries have played a
pretty big part in the fact that Roger and Rafa aren’t here,’ he said. ‘When somebody is not playing for six months, like Roger, they can’t maintain their ranking and they are not competing for the biggest events.
‘Rafa, when he was starting to play better, he had this problem with a wrist issue and that has set him back a bit. I think next year will be interesting. That will be the time to sort of tell whether that era is past.’
As Murray practised with coach Ivan Lendl at the O2 on Friday on a court open to the public on one side, a gaggle of star-struck children from a Greenwich school stopped to cheer him on. They had been to watch Alice Through the Looking Glass so they had plenty in common with the tennis No 1: they all know what it’s like to be in Wonderland.