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“Never even liked tennis anyway”.
These were the words tennis legend Sir Andy Murray, 37, wrote on Twitter just hours after his illustrious decades-long year career came to an end in Paris last night as he and doubles party Dan Evans were knocked out of the Olympics in the quarter-final.
Beady-eyed fans might also have noticed he changed his Twitter bio at the same time: “I played tennis” now reads his humble description of one of the world’s all-time sporting greats — a simple but important distinction after years entertaining followers with the humble bio “I play tennis”.
It was a fitting end to the career of a man known for his quiet Scottish wit and down-to-earth everyman persona. Dry. Sarcastic. Quietly epic. He bowed out in the way he always has done — or at least since Murray 2.0 showed us a softer side — by shedding a tear, looking up at the sky... and cracking a joke.
Obviously — and even non-tennis followers know this part — he bloody loves the sport he’s made a career out of as a three-time Grand Slam champion. Perhaps more than any athlete Britain has ever seen.
Which leaves most people asking... what on earth will he do now? Commentating? He tried that a couple of times and didn’t love it. Coaching? Quite possibly — he’s hinted at wanting to train young British star Emma Raducanu and perhaps help to nurture the next generation of female coaches.
Spend time with his family? That part is for sure. The two-time Wimbledon champion and former world No. 1 — once a key member of the Federer and co clan — has made no secret of the fact that he has missed his wife Kim Sears and their four children a lot while on tour, and that whatever he does next, making up for that part will come first. Perhaps one of the kids will go onto be the next Murray Jr, turning a two-generation tennis family into a three. Or perhaps he’ll teach them that it doesn’t matter if they don’t play at any kind of professional level; it’s OK to play the sport simply for the love of it.
Whatever he does next, one thing is for sure: Murray leaves behind a sporting legacy like no other — for both the men’s and the women’s game. “Thanks @andy_murray for two decades of phenomenal entertainment and sportsmanship. A true British great,” prime minister Sir Keir Starmer wrote in a tribute on Twitter last night. Longtime rival Novak Djokovic labelled him tennis’ “greatest ever warrior”.
Murray himself was humble, insisting he simply felt lucky. “I’m glad I got to finish on my own terms… I feel lucky,” he told the crowd after the final match of his career at Roland Garros.
From his unlikely off-court passions to his new young Scottish mentee, here’s what his retirement might look like.
Embarrassing his daughter and dropping the kids at clubs
"My eldest daughter finds me very embarrassing... When I go to collect her from school, she refuses to walk next to me,” Murray recently said of his daughter Sophia, aged eight. "I'm not allowed to leave the car when I drop her off at school. She treats me like a stranger in front of all of her friends and stuff. So yeah, it's tough. Tough for me. She's only eight and she’s already feeling that way. So I can only imagine what it will be like when she's older."
He could be about to find out the hard way, with more of his time being freed up for the family as he enters retirement. “I’ll be away from the sport, certainly for the next few months, maybe longer,” he told the Standard in Paris last night.
“Be at home and assess what my options are, see what I fancy doing. If that’s nothing and it’s just being at home and being with my family, being a dad, that’s also something I really look forward to. That’s what I want to do immediately. I’m sure after a few months there’ll be some options and I’ll think of a few things I might like to do.”
Murray’s kids are still young — Edie is six, Teddie is four, Lola is three — so there’s still plenty of time to turn them into sporting prodigies if he so wishes. Sophia has been playing tennis once a week since the age of five, according to the Wimbledon champ. But the others could take some coaxing — at the Nottingham Open last year he joked that they were still more interested in going to McDonald’s than watching him play.
He is, however, certainly keen to give them the same active upbringing he and his brother Jamie had. “It wasn’t just tennis,” he told me when I interviewed him ahead of his 15th Wimbledon last year, having just spent a week “doing normal things” like the school run, dropping the kids at their clubs and making the most of sleeping in his own bed after pulling out of Queens.
“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.”
Art, interiors and time with his wife
Murray’s tale of how he met his wife Kim Sears at 18 and asked her for her email address (”I don’t think that’s a normal thing to do”) gained rapturous applause when he retold it on court during his tearful farewell speech at Wimbledon last month.
The couple are notoriously private, splitting their time between their in a 28-acre mansion in Leatherhead, Surrey, which they bought for £5m in 2016, featuring a tennis court, swimming pool and a gym, and Scotland, where they own and run the luxury, 15-room Cromlix House hotel in Dunblane. They got married there in 2015 and Sears’ “passion project” has been giving it a revamp over recent years (Murray’s favourite room is reportedly its billiards room, which he helped to design).
The Murrays’ Surrey home is a regular feature on Murray’s Instagram, where he has 2.1 million followers. Dressing up as Harry Potter, messaging around in a dragon onesie and creating a makeshift outdoor gym during the pandemic are among the snaps he’s shared from inside the family home over recent years.
Sears, an English Literature graduate, is an artist (her Instagram account, Brushes and Paws, mostly contains paintings of animals and flowers) and the tennis great has long spoken of being a keen art fan. In 2019 he wrote a piece for BBC Sport about trying a hand at painting himself. “I wasn't trying to paint anything in particular,” he wrote. “When I've looked at different pieces of art, sometimes I've not known what it is. So I was just trying to paint something - and my attempts were hilarious! I was trying to flick the paint and use all sorts of techniques but I was getting it on the ceiling, everywhere. It was a disaster!”
He said that it was a one-off experiment at the time, and that he was happy to “hang up [his] brushes”. Could retirement be a chance to pick them up again? Perhaps. But it’s more likely he’ll continue his art appreciation from the sidelines — an increasingly passionate hobby in recent years. Insiders say he and fellow Brit Cameron Norrie are regularly spotted huddled together in the player lounge at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, discussing their shared love of abstract artwork.
Murray is a big fan of British painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling — they were introduced by a mutual friend (Hambling reportedly has a deep passion for tennis) and have formed an unlikely friendship — and even posed for her in a commission from the National Portrait Gallery in 2019. Could a partnership with Hambling be in the works now he’s retired?
A £50m business empire from apparel to padel
Latest reports suggest Murray has a net worth of around £85 million and career earnings of around £50.7 million, so he certainly has the funds to play with if he and his wife want to dive a little deeper into the art and property worlds.
He’s made no secret of his plans to build a major business portfolio, increasingly growing his investments outside of tennis and founding his own tennis apparel brand, AMC. “Although I spend most of my time on a tennis court, I have a real interest in business,” he wrote on joining LinkedIn last year. He has also spoken of the “clear boundaries” for brands he’ll let his company work with. “Tobacco, gambling and alcohol companies” are on the red list, for example.
Recent years have also seen the tennis icon invest in tech startups Perkbox and WeSwap, and padel company Game4Padel — a nod to his love of tennis’ cool younger sister. “I think [padel is] going to keep getting bigger and bigger,” he said in 2022, tipping it as the next big sport for the UK. Could a padel empire be on the cards now he’s hung up his bigger racket?
Punditry out... for now at least
The natural move would, of course, be sticking to a career within the tennis world he knows and adores. But which one? “I wasn’t particularly good at English at school so I don’t think writing would be my thing... I don’t think it’ll be a journalist,” he told the Standard last night, joking with our reporter: “you can keep your job!”.
He also veered away from a career in commentating, despite insiders say he’d made an excellent pundit and pointing to players like Norrie, who is known for contacting Murray when he’s facing a new player in a bid to tap into the Scot’s incredible retention of information on each opponent.
“I don’t think I’ll do that. I really didn’t enjoy it the couple of times I did it,” he told the Standard, referencing the time he tried his hand in the commentary box alongside Tim Henman in 2018. “I don’t see myself doing that. But who knows?”
Murray the mentor
He might not take up a career in public commentary, but Murray has increasingly dedicated time to being a practice partner, mentor and sounding board for his fellow British players in the years since the pandemic.
Last year he told me he feels for younger players like Emma Raducanu, 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 said, 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.”
Insiders say they expect that mentorship to continue, but — in true Murray style — behind the scenes with no publicity. Could he go on to become the next GB Davis Cup captain after Leon Smith? Or might he look at supporting young players from within a governing body? “The sport itself has to do a better job of educating and protecting players in those situations,” he told me last year.
Coach Andy — could Charlie Robertson be his new prodigy?
Coaching is fast looking like the most obvious avenue for Murray, a man who famously prefers life away from the cameras despite maturing away from his mysery-guts “moody Murray” image in recent years. He expressed interest in coaching Raducanu himself one day and said last year that coaching was definitely on his radar post-retirement, once he’s taken a good chunk of time off to spend with family.
Asked by the Tennis Channel to name the four players he’d most like to coach in 2022, he said: “female player – Emma Raducanu, male player between [Carlos] Alcaraz, [Stefanos] Tsitsipas and [Jack] Draper.”
A Raducanu-Murray pairing would certainly have the world watching, but is probably less likely than it was now since she pulled out of the mixed doubles at Wimbledon last month, denying the Scot the final farewell he was hoping for at the All England Club.
The father-of-four has been spotted mentoring another rising British star in recent days, with Judy Murray posting a picture of her son on court with Charlie Robertson, 17, on social media on Tuesday. “The Scottish teenager following in Andy’s footsteps,” she captioned the photo. Could Robertson become Murray’s new post-Olympic prodigy?
Feminist hero, ally, female coaching champ?
Whether he takes on Raducanu and Robertson as coachees or not remains to be seen, but most commentators expect Murray to focus on helping to push the women’s side of the game going forward.
The former world No. 1 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.
Last year he told me that 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) was “interesting” but in many ways pointless, given that it’s a decision that has come from governing bodies rather than female players themselves.
He also hit back at a new “Wimbledon legends” artwork featuring everyone from Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal — not because of his own exclusion, but that of several top female players. “I don’t think that me being excluded from it was the biggest issue with the painting, to be honest,” he said of the poster, calling it a “disaster”.
He was being coached by former world No 1 Ivan Lendl at the time and told me 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,” he said, prompting speculation that he might dedicate his career to nurturing the next generation of female coaches.
Coach, art connoisseur, feminist champion, perhaps, then? The man widely considered Britain’s greatest tennis player of all time might only just be getting started.
