When Andy Murray Served From His Historic Wimbledon Title
Without question, the crowning achievement in the career of Andy Murray came when he won Wimbledon win in 2013. It ended decades of frustration of British men at the All England Club when he became the first man from the United Kingdom to win the Wimbledon men’s singles title since Fred Perry 77 years earlier in 1936.
The following is the excerpt from the book “Andy Murray: Wimbledon Champion” by Mark Hodgkinson (for sale and download here: https://a.co/d/3sSGeU8) which tells the tale of Murray’s historic run to his first of two Wimbledon singles titles while also narrating Murray’s rise to become one of the top tennis players in the world.
Two breaks of the Djokovic serve later, and Murray found himself leading 5-4; all he had to do now was hold serve and he would become the first British man to win Wimbledon since people used to chop down trees to make rackets. Or, if you prefer, the first British champion wearing a baseball cap. ‘One little wobble’ was how Andy Murray’s father Willie later described the tenth game of the third set, in a wonderful example of understatement. Just listen to Nick Bollettieri, regarded by many as the greatest coach of all time, and someone who has been around the tennis block a few times: ‘Holy, holy, holy mackerel, and all the fish in the seas – I have been watching tennis for sixty years, and there has never been a more emotionally draining occasion. Oh, baby that was special.’
Would Bollettieri have said that if Murray had just won Wimbledon by beating Djokovic 6-1, 6-2, 6-1? No, of course not. Along with everyone else, Bollettieri had just witnessed the most chaotic, fraught, bewildering and brilliant passage of play ever seen on Centre Court, eclipsing John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg’s tiebreak – the so-called War of 18-16 – in the 1980 final. People had camped for two nights, or paid thousands of pounds, for the privilege of watching a match that would cause them more than three hours of suffering. And they never suffered more than in this 12-minute game. Even Ivan Lendl, who as a player had been so unemotional that he had sometimes been referred to as ‘The Blank Czech’, and who as a coach had demonstrated that he was capable of sitting through entire grand slam fortnights while maintaining the same non-expression, had forgotten what it was to be either calm or collected. ‘Lendl was actually a bit agitated,’ said Boris Becker. ‘I had never seen him like that before. So he is human after all.’
Pick up a scorecard for this final, and you can’t help but immediately turn to that game, and wonder at how much angst and agony is contained in all those dashes and dots on the umpire’s grid, akin to the script of a horror movie being transmitted by Morse Code. Never again will Murray experience a service game like this, or play points like that, or contend with those levels of panic, stress and excitement. How Murray would have loved to have taken a mid-game loo break, to have gone off court for a few minutes to splash some water on his face, look himself in the mirror, give himself a pep talk and generally collect himself. But that wasn’t an option.
Unlike in American sports, he couldn’t form the shape of a ‘T’ and call a timeout; he just had to stay out there and survive. In all the time that had elapsed since Fred Perry’s victory, in all those 77 years, there had never been 12 minutes as excruciating as when Murray served at 5-4. You sensed – and you might have been wrong, but this was how it looked at the time – that whoever won that tenth game of the third set was going to win Wimbledon. Obviously, if Murray won the game, he was already the champion. But if Novak Djokovic broke for 5-5, would Murray have then have been so deflated that he couldn’t possibly have been competitive for the remainder of the set and the match? Was the BBC about to find themselves broadcasting The Tennis Apocalypse? And the match itself would just have been the start of it for Murray; he would have had years to relive the time he hadn’t converted three Championship points. That’s not the sort of experience you’re going to get over in a week.
When Murray had served for the US Open’s silver trophy, he had thought about Fred Perry, with the Scot giving a few seconds’ thought to what he was hopefully about to do for British tennis. Perhaps it had been almost inevitable that Perry would make a guest appearance in Murray’s head. After all, Murray had been reminded of him almost every week of his professional life. But that didn’t change the fact that Murray was playing primarily for himself, not for Queen and country. And Murray certainly didn’t have Perry on his mind as he served for the Wimbledon title; he had more than enough to be processing mentally without giving a moment’s thought to Fred. Or to consider for the umpteenth time that, the year that a British man last won Wimbledon was also the year that the BBC had started broadcasting on television, the British monarchy was going through an abdication crisis, the world’s athletes were doing Nazi salutes at the Berlin Olympics, and the book Gone With The Wind had just been published.
When Perry won the tournament in 1936, did anyone still imagine that, 77 years later, we would still be waiting for the next British male champion on these lawns? The Union flag kept coming out on the day of the final, but only to be draped over the presentation table before some non-Brit lifted the prize. While Britain waited for another male Wimbledon champion, the Empire disappeared, the Berlin Wall went up, the Berlin Wall came down, man walked on the Moon, the world entered the digital age, and Tim Henman was a tea-time tease. After all that, Perry was still the last champion. To mods, skinheads and the British band Blur, the name ‘Fred Perry’ meant a brand of their favourite polo-shirts; to anyone in British tennis, and across the sport, his name was forever a reminder of all the years, the decades, that had passed without success (we shouldn’t of course forget about Virginia Wade winning the women’s title in 1977).
It had been a while since each of the four slams had had a home player win the men’s title, but no grand slam nation had waited like the British had. What’s two days in the queue, when you’ve waited three generations for a British champion at Wimbledon? The last home winner at the Australian Open was Mark Edmondson, the champion in 1976, while the last Frenchman to triumph at Roland Garros was Yannick Noah in 1983, and America had hardly been waiting at all since their last winner, which was as recent as Andy Roddick’s victory at the 2003 US Open. No grand slam nation could beat themselves up like Great Britain could. And Perry, who died in 1996 at the age of 85 after a fall in a hotel bathroom in Melbourne, probably would have quite enjoyed the idea of posthumously tormenting the British tennis establishment.
A couple of days before the final, someone wondered what Perry might say to Murray if he had the chance, and the Scot came up with his best line of the summer: ‘Why aren’t you wearing my kit?’ Perry would doubtless have enjoyed that remark, a reference to how Murray had changed kit suppliers from Fred Perry to Adidas. But would Perry have been smiling down on Murray as the Scot tried to close out a first Wimbledon victory? More likely, given the nature of the match, and Djokovic’s reputation for playing himself out of danger, Perry would have been on the edge of some celestial seat (the same part of the seat he would have been on when watching Murray throughout most of the 2012 US Open final).
One tennis modernist once mooted the idea of tennis players wearing heart-rate monitors during matches, with the numbers to be shown live on the video screens inside the stadium and also linked to the television feed – between points, why not also let the crowds listen to the thump-thump-thump. Just imagine if tennis had gone ahead with the idea; there would have been huge concern for Murray’s wellbeing as he attempted to serve for the match and then, from being 40-0 up with three Championships points, had found himself breakpoint down. Cardiologists in the crowd would have been making themselves known to the honorary stewards.
Could the Victorians have even begun to imagine, during the early years of lawn tennis, what anguish this game would be causing in the 21st century? Anguish not just for the players, but for the spectators, too. Just like everywhere else on Centre Court, the Royal Box was jumping. ‘It was just as well there was no sign of the tennis-mad Duchess of Cambridge,’ thought Robert Hardman of the Daily Mail, ‘as this experience could have induced the first royal birth in South London since Elizabeth I came into the world at Greenwich.’
When Murray had sat down at the preceding change of ends, with chants of ‘Andy, Andy’ all around him, he hadn’t felt overwhelmed by what was ahead of him; in fact, he had done just as most coaches and sports psychologists would have recommended if they had had the opportunity, which was to focus on where he was going to serve on the first point. So Murray won the first three points of the game to take the score to 40-0 and to give himself three opportunities, and everything was going as well as anyone could have hoped for. Murray didn’t feel that nervous at 40-0, he didn’t even feel that anxious at 40-15, but when the scoreboard moved on to 40-30 – rather than what more than 17 million British people were hoping for: game, set and match – tension gripped his body.
By the time Djokovic squared the game at deuce, and then gave himself a point to break serve, Murray was so on edge that he could hardly get air into his lungs. So Murray was playing the biggest game of his life, a game that would define him for the rest of time, and he could hardly breathe and he couldn’t think straight. But he was going to have to find a way of getting through this. Somehow, even though his head was now all over the place, he landed a big serve, and Djokovic didn’t have the control on his return to put the ball inside the court. Deuce. But if anyone thought that the panic was over, they were wrong, as on the next point Djokovic’s shot struck the tape on top of the net and dribbled over; the Serbian had a second breakpoint. This time, Murray couldn’t quickly kill off the danger with a big serve, and a rally broke out. This was an even more impressive save than when he had staved off the first breakpoint, with Murray ending the rally with an angled forehand winner. Deuce again, and Murray and Britain exhaled. Djokovic isn’t daft – he would have realised what was going on here. Just break here, Djokovic would have been forgiven for thinking, and I can give myself a real chance of winning this match. Still thrusting, Djokovic was, for a third time, a point away from parity in the set.
‘When you play Djokovic, we all know it’s going to be war out there,’ Lendl had said. ‘In a final against somebody ranked nine or ten in the world, the match could be a blowout. Against somebody like Novak, it’s very unlikely to end up that way. You know at some stage it comes down to who wants it more, who is tougher and who can execute under extreme pressure. I’m not just saying it to sound dramatic – it is war.’
That morning, Lendl had reminded Murray to fight for every ball, to give his all in every point, and the Scot had done just that all final. You didn’t have to tell Murray that some points were much bigger than others. Think back to the opening stages, and to the tension around the court at the time as a rally had determined whether a server would reach 40-0 or 30-15; here in the tenth game of the third set, these points were worth 50 or 100 times more than those that had once seemed so important.
Murray was aware that the game was ‘pretty much taking everything out of me’; with all his emotional energy going into trying to hold serve, how could he possibly cope if he was broken and the match continued? There was a voice in Murray’s head asking, ‘If this goes the other way, what’s going to happen?’ He didn’t have the answer to that. What he did have an answer to, in this moment in time, was dealing with Djokovic’s game and he saved the Serbian’s third break point with a volley winner.
Deuce again.
Boris Becker thought the Briton was showing his ‘heart and soul’ in these moments, that he was being ‘courageous and bold’, and the second seed won a pulsating rally, one he could easily have lost, to give himself another Championship point, his fourth. Murray would later say that he couldn’t recall much of the game; that those 12 minutes had just become a blur in his mind. He would later have to watch several replays of the game before he could even begin to appreciate what had happened – figuring out why It had happened was beyond him.
What was propelling Murray here? Was it the fact he had always been such a competitive bastard? Or was it instinct? Muscle memory? The crowd? Or perhaps it really was down to lucky number seven? As most had observed, this was the seventh day of the seventh month, with Murray attempting to become Britain’s first male champion for 77 years, and to become the first British singles champion of either sex since Virginia Wade in 1977. And that, on the occasion of Murray’s seventh appearance in a slam final, he would be trying to prevent Djokovic winning a seventh major. Some of the nerdier spectators in the crowd would also have picked up on the fact that Murray and Djokovic had been born just seven days apart, in 1987.
A few minutes earlier, when Murray had led 40-0, he had calmly thought to himself, ‘Andy, you’re about to win Wimbledon,’ but as he prepared to serve for the fourth championship point, there was no chance of the world number two getting ahead of himself. Murray’s attempt to serve out the match had begun at 5.12pm; now the Centre Court clock was showing 5.24pm, and such was the hysteria inside the stadium that there were a few premature cries when Djokovic’s backhand service return flew through the air, the spectators imagining that his shot would bounce long. Murray had known that the ball would be in, so he was already in position to play his next shot, a forehand directed at Djokovic’s backhand. It was the last shot that Murray played all afternoon, as Djokovic’s response never made it over.
There was a Slazenger in the net, and history had been made at the All England Club. Lendl smiled. The edges of Victoria Beckham’s mouth appeared to be turned upwards. And, for the first time since the summer of 1936, since Fred Perry won this competition in trousers, Britain had a men’s singles champion. In the time the umpire said, ‘Game, set and match, Mr Murray,’ half of Centre Court had started to cry, though none so spectacularly as Judy Murray, who was happily weeping.
