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A hundred years from now, a tennis geek will ask a hologram floating next to his ear about the great male players of the early 21st century.
The hologram is a poetic tribute to the trio known as the Big Three: Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, who dominated the sport before nuclear-powered strings and 200-mile-per-hour serves, winning some 70 Grand Slam titles between them.
Then, as if to add insult to injury, I’ll mention a few others who won some of the most important tournaments on Earth before the tour expanded to include the exoplanet Alpha Centauri.
“Stan Waurinka and Andy Murray each won three Grand Slams and were the second-best players of the Big Three era.” The hologram will speak.
2124 Man: Don’t trust holograms, especially when it comes to the fact that he had to endure the 21-year-old’s last-minute decision to blow his mixed doubles match with him at Wimbledon, the penultimate tournament of his career. His compatriot Emma Raducanu, who is reviving her budding career as she enters the second week of Wimbledon, has withdrawn from the open draw singles opportunity over the chance to share the court with Murray in what is expected to be her last match on grass at Wimbledon.
Andy Murray has spent his career under pressure to live up to expectations and not live up to them. (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
So, aside from the planned doubles at the Olympics, Wimbledon is really the last, and the effort to secure his rightful place in the tennis lexicon can begin. No disrespect to Waurinka, who was a great player and had a great career, but Murray has been the ultimate thorn in many tennis assumptions over the past 30 years, defying convention and not letting the hologram and the tennis nerds who use it remember him in the same sentence.
Perhaps that’s why Murray has kept going for the past year and a half. Desperate to get to the business end of the most epic event in sports once more, long after almost everyone knew he wasn’t in the stars. Perhaps that’s why he limped onto the court to compete with the world’s best when the stairs were too hard to climb.
In March, Murray was standing late at 4 a.m. in a hotel gym in Indian Wells, California, with his former pro and longtime coach, Brad Gilbert. An early riser, insomniac, and jet-lagged Scot, Murray was rambling on about new racket techniques when he told Gilbert he might have found a new stick that would give him that little extra… something.
Something that could prove that he still had magic.
Murray may have stayed because he truly loved everything about his job: the feel of the racket in his hand, the life of a world-class superstar, the unparalleled thrill of competition. He was jealous of players like Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz as they began their journey. He would go back to the beginning if he could, not necessarily to change anything, but because he just wanted to do it all again.
“I want to play tennis, you know, I love tennis,” he said at Surbiton last year. He played the Challenger tournament instead of the French Open to gain extra time on grass ahead of Wimbledon.
“Okay. It’s not like this is a huge deal to me.”
Murray and his new Yonex racquet in Geneva in early 2024. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images)
In reality, it wasn’t, even though it seemed that way as he roared his way through his 1,000th game. But it was also the joy of playing the game he loved, proving all the assumptions about him and his sport wrong.
Initially, there was a perception that a Scot could be good at junior tennis. Golf was fine, but tennis was not. The tennis climate and the area had too many talented kids to compete with. There weren’t many indoor courts, not many professional coaches other than his mother Judy, and not enough top-level competitors other than his older brother Jamie to help him improve.
Murray didn’t let that get in his way, whether that meant training harder in his early years or taking radical steps that few of his peers would take.
“My mother did everything she could to create an environment for not just the two of us, but for players of similar ability, to get us together as much as possible because she understood how hard it was,” Jamie Murray said in an interview last year.
“Of course, Andy left when he was 15. He went to Spain and decided, ‘I really want to be a tennis player. I have to go to Spain and train.’ He was obviously very stubborn and went, and I stayed at home.”
Habits are formed early in tennis. In most cases, a 25-year-old’s forehand is not much different from a 15-year-old’s forehand. The same goes for attitudes and approaches, such as Murray’s tendency to go against conventional wisdom.
Andy, you had a good junior career, but you can’t beat Federer, Nadal, or even your junior friend Djokovic. You were born at the wrong time. You’re unlucky.
He has beaten Nadal seven times and Federer and Djokovic 11 times.
Serbian Murray and his friend playing doubles together at the 2006 Australian Open. (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Okay Andy, it’s nice to occasionally beat a top player, but a Brit hasn’t won a Grand Slam in almost a century. It can’t happen.
And he won the 2012 US Open and Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016, all while facing more pressure than any modern player has ever felt on Centre Court.
And don’t forget his five losses in major tournament finals or semifinals, including one in the Australian Open final, to Djokovic or Federer alone.
“I play against guys who have won this tournament 12 times every year,” he recalled in an interview last year.
Yet he still won 46 tournaments, including 14 Masters 1000 titles. That’s just below the Grand Slam and far more than any player of his era outside of the Big Three. Not to criticize Waurinka, but he won 16 titles and only one Masters 1000.
Okay, Andy, but in this day and age, being number one is a long way off.
He took the job in 2016, when Nadal and Djokovic were still in their primes and Federer had three more years to win a Grand Slam and reach a final.
It wasn’t easy.
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Fifty Shades of Andy Murray
“I basically did everything,” he recalled. “I was on the track. I was in the gym, I did weight training, I did core sessions, I did hot yoga, I did sprints and speed work, I just threw everything at myself.”
He paid the price, putting so much stress on his hip that he had to have resurfacing surgery in 2019. The doctors told him he would be lucky to be able to hit a tennis ball with his kids one day. He turned that into a challenge to prove them wrong as much as possible, and climbed to No. 36 in the world last summer.
He loved being a guinea pig of sorts, and was one of the first top athletes to test the limits of buttocks made mostly of metal.
Murray’s butt first derailed him, then became one of the symbols of his career. (Ashley Western / CameraSport via Getty Images)
“Nobody really knows where the limit is,” he said.
“I want to see what it is.”
But all of that is just his inherent competitive rebellious nature, which extends to his off-court empathy for subjects and people that are excluded or avoided in sports.
Men’s tennis players have never shown so much respect for the women’s game. Murray has taken it upon himself to hire a female coach, Amelie Mauresmo.
They also rarely speak ill of their fellow players or support actions that could cause great discomfort to one of them. Murray was one of the first to criticize the ATP Tour for its sluggishness in the months before it announced it would investigate domestic violence allegations against Alexander Zverev. The German player settled a case involving an out-of-court complaint filed by his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child during the French Open.
Murray bought a condo in Miami and studied the training and business habits of NBA players to see what he could learn from them. He opened his own shop after he was dissatisfied with the way management companies treated players. He bought an old, run-down hotel in Scotland where his family used to celebrate weddings and other important occasions, but advisers told him it was a terrible idea. He and his wife, Kim, turned it into a luxury travel destination. He collects art.
Murray joins Kim and his team at Wimbledon after finally winning in 2013. (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
So of course he won’t be leaving the tennis courts when everyone else starts planning their retirement. Of course he’ll do it his way, trying to squeeze out of his body the last chance it might have or might not have for glory, and the new Yonex racquet he tried earlier this year got him to Gilbert in Miami at 4 a.m.
He just didn’t conform, and he tried to play his last singles match on Centre Court after recovering from spinal cyst surgery, but he probably would have lost. There’s a reason Murray has come back from two sets down to win 11 times, the last being in five sets at the 2023 Australian Open. After 45 minutes, he defeated Thanasi Kokkinakis 4-6, 6-7(4), 7-6(5), 6-3, 7-5. Just after that magical hour, 4 am..
When you live and play tennis that way for about 30 years, it’s hard to break old habits.
Murray knew that the end would come eventually.
Accepting conventional wisdom is one thing. Defeating time and aging is a completely different animal. Murray just had to fight as hard as he could, and that was the easiest part of the hardest part, because he never knew any other way.
(Top photo: Joe Toth/AELTC Pool, Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb) The Athletic)
