Andy Murray, who announced his retirement after the Paris Olympics, announced Tuesday morning that he would not play in the singles draw at Wimbledon. The reason, surprisingly, is injury. Recent surgery on his painful back has left him with little time to prepare for the agony of the singles, although he will play in the tournament’s doubles draw. Wimbledon is of course the site of Murray’s most famous triumph, where in 2013 the Scot became the first British player to win the tournament in 77 years. The end of that remarkable career will not be celebrated as it deserved in front of the fans who loved him most, at least not in the singles format that Murray mastered so well.
What else can be said about Murray? The eulogies of his career have already been written and his greatest moments are already legendary. He is grumpy. He is preternaturally talented. He is the hardest worker of all. He has won three majors and once reached the world number one ranking, despite a career that has overlapped with Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. He was good enough to convince the tennis world to call the dominant group the “Big Four” for a time; in recent years there has been a return to the “Big Three.” Good people will remember that the first nickname was correct.
Maybe I can talk about the second act of Murray’s career, after he stopped being Andy Fucking Murray and became a guy with a rebuilt hip who stubbornly tried to get his hands on more metal than he was touching while catching his breath. With age and his body deteriorating further, Murray’s final years were a bit of a disaster. He was so monumentally successful in his prime in part because he ran like a rabbit when he seemed to expend the effort of a screeching hippopotamus—he’d make little “ah!” noises when an opponent hit a drop shot, as if he’d been kicked in the nuts, but you knew he was going to get to the ball. Murray’s route running worked because he was willing to play a violent, attritional style and his body could handle it. When he came back, he stuck to that style, but he was a step slower. The grunts and groans continued to fill the court, but the product wasn’t the same. He made 10 rallies instead of 15 and missed his backhand passes on the run by a few feet instead of putting them in the collar of the service box.
The obvious countermeasure for Murray was to hit harder. He had always been a bit passive for casual fans’ tastes – despite a two-handed backhand that could shatter rocks, he rarely hit the line. In his prime, he could get away with relatively unassertive play, because his legs could nullify all his opponent’s aggression. Now, with his defence functioning at about 70 per cent, he had to hit those backhands down the line and crush even more forehands to avoid having to run as much.
He couldn’t do it. He played exactly the same way, and because he wasn’t the same player defensively, he lost a lot of games. Winning more than two games in a row was an extremely rare feat. At first, I found Murray’s loyalty to his defensive style infuriating. I He understood that he had to adapt, he probably had a plan in place the moment he woke up after surgery. Besides, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic had all reinvented themselves after injuries or dips in form. Why couldn’t Murray do the same? I admit that I may have underestimated the impact of a metal hip on an individual’s ability to force their body to hit a 100mph forehand. But then there’s the natural struggle to change significantly, which in tennis means you’re probably still going to play the way you’ve been maniacally trained to do for most of your life. Murray rose to the level of his big three rivals for a time, but he never surpassed them, so perhaps he wasn’t destined to emulate their comebacks either.
Once it became clear that Murray wasn’t capable of becoming an attacking player, his matches became a struggle. He was in a difficult situation with opponents who would have been happy to lace his shoelaces in 2016. Every match was the same. He had tiny vintage shots, a phenomenal catch or a backhand crosscourt winner, but not enough. These moments became almost like taunts, you thought the old guy was back, then he’d stumble after missing a routine forehand and you’d come back to reality with him.
Murray has persisted in his comeback, taking wild card after wild card (which annoyed some who thought he was taking spots from promising players, but then, only three other players in the world would have been more deserving of wild cards) and losing most of the time in the early rounds. He has had his moments, like his victory at the 2019 Antwerp Open against longtime rival Stan Wawrinka, and his thrilling five-set victory to open the 2023 Australian Open. But they were few and far between, and I winced every time people predicted he would have a chance at Wimbledon because I knew they would be disappointed. Murray is stopping now not because he is tired of losing, but because his body can no longer handle the losses.
In 2021, I started a tennis website with a friend who loves Murray more than anything. He has a cardboard cutout of the man and cherishes it. Every time Murray lost, he would write the most exquisitely sad lyrics about being broken but willing to be broken as long as Murray wanted to play. Through my friend, I met other Murray fans, whose love for him was just as pure. They have a podcast dedicated to him. If I were them, I honestly think I would have abandoned ship. There is a limit to how many times I want to experience heartbreak. But my friends never gave it a second thought, and I dare say they wouldn’t have wanted Murray to change, even if it meant more winning. The joy for them seemed to be in supporting the person, not encouraging him to become an idealized version of himself.
Murray never lost the ability to maintain that kind of support, because he gave his all in every match, losing not because he lacked effort or willpower, but because he no longer had the ability to play well enough. I will miss him because he will miss my friends. I am relieved that he is finally relaxing, although knowing the man, he will probably have an epic doubles run and decide he has another year ahead of him. But I would rather not see his blinding support tested, which it may well be if he keeps tilting at windmills until even his metal contraption gives out. No, stop it, Andy, and we can all continue to believe that love is harder to remove than a hip.