The gardeners are doing the final touch-ups on Murray Mound. The ball boys and girls are into their last days of training. And Sir Andy Murray — British tennis legend, two-time Wimbledon champion and former world No 1 — is having his hair cut.
It’s not the reason I expect my interview with the famously unflashy, down-to-earth Scot to be delayed when I greet him at the All England Club in south-west London just days before the start of the home Grand Slam event he is about to undertake for the 15th time.
Then again, this is not the same Andy Murray. This Murray — 36 and sporting a new metal hip — is a very different man from the shy boy from Dunblane who became famous for his mysery-guts “moody Murray” image. This is Andy Murray 2.0: father-of-four, feminist icon, comeback king. Ten years since he ended Great Britain’s 77-year-wait for a men’s singles champion at Wimbledon and six years since that career-derailing hip injury in 2017, he is back in the world top 100 at No 38, in the best shape he’s been in since surgery and a long way, he hopes, from wanting to hang up his racket.
“It definitely feels like a different stage of my career. Obviously I want to do as well as possible but there’s definitely less expectation than when I was in my mid-twenties,” the three-time Grand Slam champion tells me from a quiet corner of the Wimbledon site where he is settling in for an afternoon of ambassador commitments for Championship sponsor American Express.
He seems chirpy, chilled-out even, for a man just days away from the tournament he has won twice and had his sights set on for months now, swerving the French Open in May and pulling out of last week’s doubles tournament at Queens to focus on training on grass for the 2023 Championships. After being defeated by Australian 24-year-old Alex de Minaur — the boyfriend of British No 1 Katie Boulter — in the first round of the Queen’s singles, all eyes are on the gritty, plainspoken Scotsman to prove his comeback on the grass courts of SW19.
Murray crashed out of the 2022 tournament in the second round and has made it clear he wants to have a deeper run this year, even if the odds are against him making it to the final (there are only 32 seeds for Wimbledon so being unseeded at No 38 means he could play the likes of Novak Djokovic or Carlos Alcaraz in the first round). But any heat he is feeling about going in front of the nation at his most beloved Grand Slam is well disguised.
Greeting me cheerily, he switches straight into reflective mode, telling me he is relishing every minute of that second chance post hip-surgery (“with everything that’s gone on with the injuries and stuff over the last few years, I want to make the most of these last few tours”) and explaining it is the younger players like Emma Raducanu and new No 1 Alcaraz, both 20, whom he feels sorry for, still dealing with the pressures of overnight success and under the brutal spotlight of social media.
“There’s nothing that really prepares you for that [overnight success] … I made my fair share of mistakes, obviously,” he says, remembering his first Wimbledon, half a lifetime ago at the age of 18 when he faced his first big crowds and press conferences (he has long been haunted by a joke he made at a press conference the following year in 2006, aged 19, about supporting “whoever England were playing against” at the World Cup). “You’re still at that stage where you don’t really know yourself. You’re still very self-conscious about things and you’re constantly changing. It’s really difficult when you’re young.”
Clearly this is a man who knows himself very well by now. He is at home here at the All England Club, the setting for so many of his highest career moments and just a 25-minute drive from his home in Oxshott, Surrey, smiling when I ask him about some of the changes to this year’s event, like the promise of AI commentary on some of its highlights clips. “I’d probably prefer my commentators to be doing it live, but yeah I’ll be really interested to see what that’s like,” he laughs.
We are sitting in the brand’s newly unveiled SW19 Fan Experience, a flower-filled fan zone plastered with Murray’s face across almost every surface. It’s little surprise his team has chosen this particular corner of the site for our meeting. Just a few hundred metres away sits a rather less flattering unveiling for the man widely considered Britain’s greatest tennis player of all time: a new Wimbledon artwork commissioned as a tribute to the tournament’s past, present and future champions and featuring everyone from Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to the Williams sisters, Björn Borg and John McEnroe. The reason it has been doing the rounds on Twitter in recent days? Murray, the man who ended 77 years of British hurt and once a key member of the Federer and co clan, is nowhere to be seen.
Murray, a keen art fan, insists he “wasn’t particularly bothered” about the painting when he saw it (his mum Judy and brother Jamie both spent recent days giving angry comments to the press, Jamie asking ‘Where’s Andy Murray?” and Judy calling it “appalling at every level”), adding: “I don’t think that me being excluded from it was the biggest issue with the painting, to be honest” before a member of his team politely requests that I leave that part out in a favour to the All England Club.
Two days later, that request quickly falls by the wayside when Murray is widely quoted calling the poster a “disaster”. His reasoning? Not his own exclusion, but that of several top female players — a comment that will come as little surprise to even the mildest of Murray fans, given his history of championing his female counterparts over the years. “Me not being on [the poster] is certainly not a problem,” he has since added.
Murray might be famously competitive but if he is as offended as his family members for his own exclusion from the poster, he’s certainly doing a good job of hiding it as he laughs through various photo calls and talks fondly about his kids, Sophia, Edie, Teddy and Lola, aged between seven and two, who surprised him at the Nottingham Open for Father’s Day last month thanks to his wife, Kim Sears, who is an artist. “We have a [tennis] court at home and they play once a week for 45 minutes on a Sunday,” he says, smiling. “They seem to enjoy it, but most of the time they’re just messing around rather than actually playing tennis… I would never push them [to play professional tennis], but if they decided that’s what they wanted to do I would absolutely encourage them to do it”.
These more relaxed couple of days have come as a bonus for Murray. While his Serbian rival Djokovic, also 36, was lifting the French Open trophy in Paris last month, the father-of-four was busy winning his first grass-court title in seven years at a less prestigious tournament in Surbiton, south-west London — one of the latest in a run of 10 consecutive wins at various Challenger Tour titles he has competed at around the UK so far this summer.
That lucky streak ran out last week when he was knocked out of Queens in the first round, but Murray has been insistent on focusing on the positives. After falling to a career-low ranking of 839th in the world after his injury in July 2018, taking on (and beating) players half his age has felt like a pre-retirement golden era he wasn’t sure he’d be lucky enough to have. “I’m so proud that you’re still grinding it out in Challengers, still working as hard as you ever have done,” was his wife Kim Sears’ touching congratulatory message when he won at Surbiton last month.
The silver lining to Murray’s early Queens exit is that it also gives him some extra R&R time before Wimbledon, where he hopes to have a deep run, given his history and credentials for playing on his preferred surface, grass (he swerved the French Open and pulled out of the doubles at Queens to focus on preparations). He spent the latter half of last week “just doing normal things” like the school run, dropping the kids at their clubs and making the most of sleeping in his own bed. “I’ll definitely come to Wimbledon having played a lot of matches,” he says. “But also because Queens didn’t go so well, the positive to that is that I get a lot of time to prepare here, and also should go into the tournament pretty fresh.”
This will be Murray’s 15th Wimbledon and he certainly doesn’t want it to be his last. He repeats to me the line he’s told anyone who’s asked him in recent months: that he has a plan for when he’d like to stop playing and it is not now. “It’s not definitive but I have an idea of roughly when that would be,” he says, undeterred by those who spent Queens commenting on his “battered”, fatigued form and need to retire to save his body.
So do the trolls and snubs like the new Wimbledon painting get to him? “I’m sort of indifferent to it. I try and avoid the comments side of things,” he tells me in his signature Scottish monotone when I ask about platforms like Twitter, where he has more than three million followers. Abusive messages have knocked his confidence in the past, but he tries to take a healthy approach to social media today, only checking Instagram DMs from people he follows (his feed is a mix of people and players he knows and artists he likes, “I try and stay off the tennisy ones”) and posting occasionally, uninterested in building that glossy, influencer-style image that many of his peers have. Some sponsored posts and brand shout-outs have inevitably crept onto his grid over the years, but always mixed in with that sarcastic, everyman persona his fans have always followed him for (see: snaps dressed in silly Christmas outfits with his brother and “prepar[ing] for Wimbledon” in a dragon costume “#kids”).
It hasn’t always been this way. Murray returns to his earlier comment about younger players like Raducanu, beginning their careers in the age of social media. The 20-year-old golden girl won’t be playing at this year’s Wimbledon due to a wrist injury but spoke candidly about the pressures of professional sport last month, saying there were times she even wished she’d never won the US Open — the latest in a growing stream of younger players speaking out about their mental health. Two-time US Open winner Naomi Osaka announced her decision to skip press conferences to protect her mental health two years ago and since then several players have spoken out in support, with Australian star Nick Kyrgios, 28, recently revealing he had contemplated suicide after Wimbledon in 2019.
Murray tells me he is saddened but not surprised to hear young players speaking about the pressures of the tour. He was 18, the same age Raducanu was, when he first played at Wimbledon, and still remembers the intensity of the overnight fame.
“It’s just this changing of your whole life. [One day] you can just go out to the supermarket, a restaurant, the movies, do what normal people are doing. Then all of a sudden you do that and people are asking for your photograph and you’re getting followed by paparazzi and maybe your friends start seeing you a bit differently and you don’t necessarily know who to trust because lots of people then want a piece of you. Your family are trying to do the right thing for you but it’s new to them as well.”
That overnight success can be tough, says Murray. The tour can be lonely in a non-team sport like tennis, the abuse can feel relentless and very real — and he didn’t have the added challenge that is Twitter and Instagram for many years.
“A lot of the time you’re on the road, you’re away from your friends and family. You have a tough loss and you go back, you’re in a hotel room, on your own, you’ve got the whole social media thing to deal with as well now, and you’re probably not in a great place having just lost. You’re looking at your phone and you’re getting all sorts of messages of various types of abuse. So, yeah, I think it’s disappointing and sad to hear that someone who’s done what Emma’s done and achieved what she’s done at the age that she’s done it would feel like that about their biggest win and one of the most amazing stories probably ever in sport — but it’s not totally surprising.”
Murray thinks players must take personal responsiblity for handling their overnight sucess but thinks governing bodies could do more. “The sport itself has to do a better job of educating and protecting players in those situations,” he says. His advice to the next generation of players would be to surround themselves with good people, which can be hard when players themselves are the ones tasked with choosing and paying their own coaches, physiotherapists and support teams. “It’s really hard because at 18 you don’t know anything. You don’t know what makes someone a really good tennis coach, what makes someone a really good physio. It feels like tennis is quite back-to-front [in that way].”
The father-of-four has expressed interest in coaching Raducanu himself one day and tells me coaching is definitely on his radar post-retirement, once he’s taken a good chunk of time off to spend with family. He is currently coached by former world No 1 Ivan Lendl and says he doesn’t understand why there aren’t more female coaches in the sport. “I’m not sure of the exact numbers but I’d be surprised if there were more than 10 or 11 female coaches among the 250 singles players that are here. That’s something that needs to change.”
Murray has long spoken openly about the gender disparity in tennis and found himself becoming something of an unlikely feminist hero in recent years, the likes of Billie Jean King and Serena Williams thanking him publicly for his allyship. He maintains that reputation today, telling me the debate over the length of women’s and men’s matches at Wimbledon (women currently play the best of three sets while men play the best of five) is “interesting” but in many ways pointless, given that it’s a decision that has come from governing bodies rather than female players themselves.
“If it was something that the women were completely against doing and they were being asked and the tournament were really pushing them to play best of five sets then maybe that’s a different discussion there but my understanding is that that’s not what it is,” he says. “If the women were asked to play five set matches I’m sure they would be more than capable and more than willing to do that. But I don’t think it’s their decision … so that’s the end of the argument, for me.”
Murray’s kids are still young — at Nottingham last month he joked that they were more interested in going to McDonald’s than watching him play – but he is certainly keen to give them the same sporty upbringing he had. “It wasn’t just tennis. Me and my brother, we both played for football teams, we played lots of golf with our dad in the evenings, so many of our family holidays were to Centre Parcs and those sorts of places where it was like swimming, cycling, gymnastics… I loved it.
“There are so many positives that come from playing sport: the health benefits, the social side of things – certainly for me it kept me away from lots of distractions in the post-school hours. I think for learning about winning and losing, learning about hard work, how practising and working at something for a long time can improve things … There are lots of good benefits so whether that’s tennis or another sport, yeah I would definitely encourage it.”
For now, though, Murray is more focused on ensuring the kids don’t get bored while he plays, telling me he’s excited about the rumours of a new kids zone being built across the road from the All England Club and that the hardest aspect of remaining in professional sport is being away from his family. He was able to spend more time with them over lockdown, when fourth child Lola was born, but misses that family time now he’s back on the road, saying it’s the first thing he’ll prioritise on hanging up his racket. “When I do finish I will absolutely spend a good period of time at home before I’m off travelling much again.”
First though, he has got some shorter-term targets to tick off: aceing Wimbledon, then the US Open, climbing up the world rankings. It’s hard to imagine what else the two-time Wimbledon champion might need to do to make it on to that now-notorious champions poster (a third Wimbledon win?) but if there is anyone who could defeat the storm clouds and surprise us, it is probably him.
