When people look at who are the greatest “Tennis Moms” in the history of the game, Judy Murray may be at the top of the list. In the book “Andy Murray: Wimbledon Champion” published in the United States by New Chapter Press and for sale and download here https://www.amazon.com/dp/1937559408/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_2.xPEbQ3C4GTX author Mark Hodgkinson writes about the mother of Andy and Jamie Murray in this special book excerpt.
Once in a while at Wimbledon, a player beats someone they are not supposed to, goes deeper still into the draw, has a career breakthrough, and then the full story emerges of how he or she made it from whatever tennis ‘backwater’ they are from, all the way to the wrought-iron gates of the All England Club. But it is no less remarkable for the small city of Dunblane, just off the M9 motorway heading to the Scottish Highlands, and a few hundred miles north of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, to have produced a player of great international standing. World-class British tennis players are rare enough. However, Scotland had never previously had a man in the world’s tennis elite. The world was cruel and it laughed at British tennis, at how Britain had failed to produce a male Wimbledon singles champion since Perry was in flannels and Brylcreem. And Scottish tennis was even taking hits from Monty Python’s Flying Circus; there is a sketch about a tennis-playing blancmange which comes close to winning Wimbledon by ensuring its opponents are from Scotland, ‘well known as the worst tennis nation on earth’.
The Scottish climate is not the weather you need for producing tennis players. Plus, as Judy once noted, Scottish children have been deep-frying their bodies in chip fat. It is a short drive from Dunblane to the William Wallace monument in Stirling. And, for kids from that part of the world, William Wallace probably has as much relevance to their daily lives as another man immortalised by a statue, Fred Perry. You don’t expect tennis players who know the words to ‘Flower of Scotland’.
One of the first reports of a Murray victory was a report in the Scotsman in 2000 headlined ‘British Player Wins Tournament Shock’, and which began: ‘Wee Andy Murray . . .’ About the only family north of Hadrian’s Wall with any great tennis pedigree were the Erskines. Judy Erskine’s parents, Roy and Shirley, enjoyed their tennis. Roy, who had played football for Hibernian, Stirling Albion and Cowdenbeath, was a half-decent tennis player and, to this day, he still thinks he invented topspin. Watching his grandson’s matches when he is at home in Dunblane, Roy can find himself shouting at the television screen, imploring Murray: ‘You shouldn’t be playing like that.’ But he knows that, when they go to watch Murray play live, he has to control himself.
Judy was the dominant force of Scottish women’s tennis – the tartan Chris Evert, if you like – winning 64 Scottish girls’ and ladies’ titles. But life was not so easy when she left Scotland to scuffle around the lower levels of the international tennis circuit. The tent she was sleeping in at a French campsite, where she was staying for a tournament nearby, collapsed around her during a thunder-storm. Even with the money her parents were wiring her from Scotland, which she picked up from post offices, she often did not have the funds to fly between tournaments, and so bought bus tickets instead. This was a backpacker’s tour of Europe, just with tennis skirts and rackets stuffed into her bag. Judy was a good sport – she once lost in the first round of a tournament to Mariana Simionescu, and then stayed in the locker room to provide cover so the Romanian could enjoy a cigarette without having to deal with her boyfriend Bjorn Borg’s disapproval.
The day that Judy’s playing career effectively ended was when the teenager had her purse pinched while riding a bus in Barcelona. Inside the purse had been her passport, some money which her parents had just wired to her, and her airline tickets. On her return to Scotland, her father told her she should think seriously whether it was wise to continue. He was concerned for her safety, and also wondered whether this was really heading anywhere. So she learnt some shorthand and typing, and found secretarial work, first in a glass factory and then for an insurance firm. A job as a trainee manager at a department store followed, before she worked for a while as a travelling saleswoman for a firm which made sweets and chocolates.
She studied French and business at Edinburgh University, and met and married Willie Murray, a retail manager. Such was the pain that Judy experienced when she gave birth to a son, Jamie, on 13 February 1986 (‘He was a very big baby with a very big head, it was horrendous and I thought, “Oh, I’ll never do that again,”’ she is quoted as telling the Los Angeles Times), that there was some doubt whether she and Willie would ever have a second child. But she must have quickly changed her mind, as Andy arrived just 15 months later, born on 15 May 1987 in Queen Mother’s Hospital in Glasgow. Years later, Stephen Bierley, then the tennis correspondent for the Guardian, wrote that Judy ‘should be held personally responsible for the ills of British tennis; she stopped producing children after she had Andy’.
With the two young boys she had ‘produced’, she sometimes struggled with what she called ‘the frustration of an active person suddenly surrounded by mashed vegetables’. As the boys grew, she found that tennis – or at least a version of it – would burn off some of their energy. Murray’s tennis life began when he was a toddler; he started by hitting balloons and sponge balls around the house and the garden. Judy wasn’t starting the long march to Wimbledon’s Centre Court or to the US Open’s Arthur Ashe Stadium; she was just trying to improve their co-ordination and movement so they would get the most out of any sport they played (as the years have passed, she became so convinced that the games she devised for her sons had helped them, and also convinced they could benefit others, that she pulled them all together and put them on an iPad app).
