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A hundred years from now, a tennis nerd will ask the floating hologram next to his ear about the great male players of the early 21st century.
The hologram will wax poetic about a triumvirate of players known as the Big Three: Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. They ruled the sport before the advent of nuclear-powered strings and 200-mile-per-hour serves, winning about 70 Grand Slam titles between them.
Then, almost as an afterthought, there will be a mention of a few others who won some of Earth’s major tournaments before the tours expanded to the exoplanets of Alpha Centauri.
“Stan Wawrinka and Andy Murray each won three Grand Slams and were the next best of the Big Three era,” the hologram will say.
People of 2124: don’t trust your holograms, especially when they mention that in his last Wimbledon competition, probably the penultimate tournament of his career, he had to put up with a 21-year-old who decided to call off a mixed doubles match with him at the last minute. Emma Raducanu, his compatriot who revived her burgeoning career with a second-week run at Wimbledon, withdrew to prioritize her singles chances over an open draw over a chance to be on the court with Murray, her idol, for what was thought to be his last match on the grass of Wimbledon.
Andy Murray spent his career defying expectations, under the pressure to live up to them. (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
So barring a planned doubles performance at the Olympics, this really is the time for Wimbledon to begin the efforts to secure its proper place in the tennis lexicon. No disrespect to Wawrinka, an excellent player with a great career, but Murray has not bucked convention over the last thirty years, because he was the ultimate thorn in the side of so many assumptions about tennis, to have holograms and the tennis nerds who use them remember it in the same sentence.
Perhaps this is what has kept Murray going for the past year and a half, desperate for another run to the business end of the sport’s biggest events, long after pretty much everyone could see it wasn’t in the stars. Perhaps this is why he limped onto the field to compete against the best players in the world, while climbing stairs became a struggle.
Late in March, Murray was in a hotel gym at 4 a.m. with Brad Gilbert, the former pro and longtime coach, in Indian Wells, California. Murray, an early-rising insomniac and a jet-lagged Scot who talks about new racket technology, told Gilbert that he might have found a new stick that could give him a little extra… something.
Something that could prove he still had the magic.
Perhaps Murray really did stick around simply because he loved almost everything about his job: the feel of the racket in his hands, the life of a globe-trotting superstar, the incomparable highs brought about by the heat of the matches. He burned with jealousy when he saw players like Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz as they started their journey. If that were possible, he would have gone back to the beginning, not to necessarily change anything, but just because he would have liked to do it all again.
“I want to play tennis because, you know, I enjoy this,” he said last year in Surbiton, where he played a Challenger event instead of the French Open to get extra time on the grass ahead of Wimbledon.
“I love it. It’s not like this is a chore for me.”
Murray and his new Yonex racket in Geneva earlier in 2024. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
It never really was, even though it looked that way when he grunted his way through a thousand matches. But it was also the joy of playing a game he loved, and proving virtually every assumption about him and his sport wrong.
First there was the idea that a Scot could even be good at tennis at the junior level. Golf maybe, but not tennis. Too many talented kids from friendlier tennis climates and locations to contend with. There weren’t many indoor courts, and not many expert coaches other than his mother, Judy, and certainly not enough elite competition to help him develop, other than his older brother, Jamie.
Murray wasn’t about to let that get in his way, whether that meant training harder during those early formative years or taking the radical step that few of his peers took.
“My mother did her best to create an environment not only for the two of us, but also for the players who had a certain level of performance, and to bring us together as much as possible because she understood how difficult it was,” Jamie Murray said . during an interview last year.
“Obviously Andy left when he was 15. He went to Spain, he made the decision: ‘I really want to be a tennis player and to do that I have to go to Spain and train’ and he was obviously very single-minded about playing tennis. that and he went. I stayed home.”
Habits form early in tennis. In most cases, a 25-year-old’s forehand won’t look all that different from its 15-year-old version. The same goes for attitudes and approaches, such as Murray’s penchant for countering conventional wisdom.
So Andy, nice junior career, but you certainly won’t be able to beat Federer and Nadal, or even your buddy in the juniors, Djokovic. Born in the wrong time. Bad luck.
He defeated Nadal seven times and Federer and Djokovic eleven times.
Murray and his buddy from Serbia played doubles together at the 2006 Australian Open. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
Okay Andy, it’s nice that you can get a win every now and then against top players, but a British man hasn’t won a Grand Slam in almost a century. Can’t happen.
And then he won the US Open in 2012 and Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016, despite more pressure than any player of the modern era has probably ever felt on Center Court.
And don’t forget the losses, including five Australian Open finals only to Djokovic or Federer, like so many of his losses in the finals or semifinals of major tournaments.
“I play against guys who win these tournaments 12 times a year in their careers,” he recalled during an interview last year.
And yet he still won 46 tournaments, including 14 Masters 1000 titles, the level just short of a Grand Slam, far more than any player of his era apart from the Big Three. Not to judge Wawrinka, but he won sixteen titles, only one of which came in the Masters 1000.
Nice, Andy, but the number one of this era is out of reach.
He arrived there in 2016, when Nadal and Djokovic were still in their prime and Federer had still three years of winning Grand Slams and reaching finals.
It wasn’t easy.
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“I kind of just did everything, you know,” he recalled. “I would be on the athletics track. I’d be in the gym, lifting weights, I’d be doing core sessions, I’d be doing hot yoga, I’d be doing sprint work, I’d be doing speed work, just throwing everything at myself.
He paid a price for this, putting so much strain on his hip that he had to undergo resurfacing surgery in 2019. Doctors told him he would be lucky if he could ever hit tennis balls with his children. He turned those words into a challenge to prove them as wrong as he could, rising to 36th in the world rankings last summer.
He relished being a guinea pig of sorts, one of the first elite athletes to test the limits of a largely metal-made hip.
Murray’s hip first derailed him and then became one of the symbols of his career. (Ashley Western/CameraSport via Getty Images)
“Nobody really knows where that line is,” he said.
“I want to see what that is.”
All that, however, was just the competitive unruliness in him, which extended to his empathy off the field for topics and people that the sport can degrade or try to avoid.
Male tennis players have never shown so much respect for the women’s game. Murray talked it out and hired a female coach, Amelie Mauresmo.
They also rarely speak ill of their fellow players, or support an action that could cause a lot of discomfort to one of them. Murray was among the first to criticize the ATP Tour for dragging its feet for months before announcing it would investigate domestic violence allegations against Alexander Zverev. The German settled a case during the French Open in which his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child had been charged.
Murray bought an apartment in Miami and studied the training and business habits of NBA players to see what he could learn from them. When he didn’t like how management companies were treating athletes, he opened his own shop. He bought a dilapidated old hotel in Scotland where his family had celebrated weddings and other important moments, even though advisers told him it was a terrible idea. He and his wife Kim have turned it into a luxury destination. He collects art.
Murray joins Kim and his team at Wimbledon after finally winning it in 2013. (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
So of course he would never leave the tennis court when everyone started planning his retirement. Of course, he was going to do it his way, trying to wring every last chance he may or may not have had at glory out of his body, and that new Yonex racket he tried earlier this year, which led him to Gilbert in Miami at 4 hours.
He wouldn’t just give in, even trying to return from back surgery for a spinal cyst in time for a final singles match on Center Court that he would likely lose. There’s a reason Murray has the record for coming back from two sets down, overcoming that deficit 11 times, the last at the 2023 Australian Open when he played five times. hour and 45 minutes and defeated Thanasi Kokkinakis 4-6, 6-7 (4), 7-6 (5), 6-3, 7-5 just after that magical time, 4:00 am.
After thirty years of living this way and playing tennis, old habits are hard to overcome.
Murray knew the end would come eventually.
Adopting conventional wisdom is one thing. Beating time and growing older is a whole different story. Murray just had to fight his best, which was the easiest part of the hardest, because he never knew any other way.
(Top photos: Joe Toth/AELTC Pool, Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb for the athletic)