Andy Murray made you care.
That was his superpower. There were better players in his era; there were more stylish ones. But none possessed the ability to make you invest emotionally in their matches as much as Murraydid.
As someone British, and the same age as Murray, I probably would have felt a degree of kinship however he’d played. But it went a lot deeper than that.
When he arrived on the scene as a scruffy 18-year-old in 2005, Murray seemed to experience tennis as I’d always experienced it: as an unbelievably frustrating sport that seemed almost designed to wind you up. Murray would moan and berate himself and do all the things that felt to me entirely natural. Why wouldn’t you scream in anguish after missing a shot you knew you should have made? That wasn’t odd. Even saying “Take your time, you d**k” after missing a serve, as Murray once did, wasn’t that odd to me. It was everyone else who was odd, somehow pretending that they were OK when they messed up.
Defending Murray against accusations of dourness, rudeness, and surliness that arose from his on-court demeanour became a bit of a passion of mine around this time. The fact a lot of people didn’t get him only made me get him even more and when those anti-Murray views became more entrenched after he joked that he would be supporting “anyone but England” at the 2006 World Cup, so did my defence of him.
For me, very much a committed England supporter, comments like this just showed off his dry sense of humour and his ability not to take the media circus too seriously. On the court, his complete determination, raw emotions and supreme athleticism added to his appeal — even if the habit that he could never kick of berating his team was a bit much. Murray was not perfect, but that was kind of the point — throughout it all, he was a potent combination of the superhuman and the relatable.
When we thought Murray was about to retire in 2019, friends reminded me of my habit from the mid-to-late 2000s: spending student nights out earnestly trying to explain to unsuspecting revellers why Andy Murray was misunderstood. In the same period, I remember making this point to a woman in Bedford who was trotting out the usual lines about how rude and boring he was. Eventually I relented, but in my mind, she had shown her true colours: how one felt towards Murray was a genuine bellwether for me about what they were really like. If you were unable to look beyond the lazy tropes about him, then that was you pretty much written off.
