As Sir Andy Murray treads the boards at the New Wimbledon Theatre, the final tour stop in his tentative conversion from athlete to anecdotalist, he finds the stage artfully decorated with dozens of his old tennis rackets. Each of them, it turns out, tells a story.
“This one,” he says, picking up one marked “Sunday” with a string tension of 56lb, “was the one I used to win my first Wimbledon final.” He grimaces slightly when his attention is drawn to a less pristine exhibit, its frame horribly mangled during one of his many fits of pique. “Rotterdam, March 3, 2021,” he announces, inspecting the throat. “I’m assuming I lost that day.”
In mitigation, Murray was never an inveterate racket-smasher. His rage would tend to be directed more towards his long-suffering support crew at courtside, most of whom are in the audience tonight, with his mother Judy taking prime position in a box of gleaming brass and bronze. “It wasn’t good,” he reflects, as one of his memorable self-combustions is replayed on screen. “Sometimes it wasn’t even in real English. I was just trying to deal with the situation and the pressure, but not in the right way. It’s not as though I look back on it and think it was a great way to behave. I’m embarrassed by it at times.”
“Don’t be!” cries a lady from the dress circle. His fan club, it is fair to say, is out in force this evening, cherishing the chance to watch him back in his adopted manor 20 years on from his first Wimbledon. It is hardly his natural SW19 setting: while the tournament begins a couple of miles away on Church Road, Murray is trying to fathom life after tennis in an Edwardian theatre gearing up for the latest run of War Horse and a visit by Jason Donovan. “Andy was worried nobody would come,” says his host, the broadcaster Andrew Cotter, who swiftly apologises for not bringing his two Labradors. “Even when it sold out in 20 minutes, he thought people must have got it confused with the Oasis reunion.”
On a sweltering night, the place is packed with 1,700 admirers, ranging from Billie Jean King to Sir Gareth Southgate, who finds himself baited repeatedly by Cotter. “Knighted for services to losing to Italy,” he teases. You can see why Murray wanted him as compere: both these Scots share a sense of humour as dry as the Kalahari. John McEnroe is in the building, too, having brought forward his transatlantic flight just so he could salute the star attraction in person. “Andy, I hope that you stay involved with the sport, in whatever way you’re happy with,” he tells him. “This sport needs you, and it would love you to be around on a somewhat regular basis.”
Mapping out his next chapter is, you sense, the most fraught exercise that Murray faces. At 38, he is the same age as Novak Djokovic, happily embarking on his own tilt at an eighth Wimbledon title, but none the wiser as to where his long-term future lies. While Murray made his first serious foray into coaching with the 24-time major champion, helping him reach the semi-finals of this year’s Australian Open, he gave little sign he savoured the experience. At the opening of this four-date mini-tour, he said: “I thought I should give it a go and see whether I enjoyed it – I’m not sure whether I did.” Here he cements the impression, muttering: “I had better not say any more as I can see Novak’s agents are in the audience.”
The commentary booth, likewise, has been discounted as his next destination. Murray reflects how he signed off from his solitary TV stint on BBC – Rafael Nadal’s five-hour Wimbledon quarter-final win over Juan Martín del Potro in 2018 – with the words: “Well, that was horrific.” All of which leaves him in this unexpected environment, turning his life into a production called Centre Stage, nervously submitting to a This Is Your Life-style inquisition. Murray is not a natural choice as a rollicking raconteur, given the gloom that would define him in press conferences, but he ends up drawing a standing ovation through his readiness to share the least flattering details.
This applies especially to discussion of his wife Kim. She inspired a cult following of her own during a tense Australian Open duel in 2015, caught on camera apparently mouthing towards Tomas Berdych’s team: “F—— have it, you Czech flash f—.” “It was the first time where, in the build-up to the next match, we did a joint psychology session,” Andy says. Her response to the controversy was, sassily enough, to parade a ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics’ T-shirt at the final. But can her reputation for profanity, given her cut-glass elocution, possibly be deserved?