Thank you, Andy

This is an excerpt from Hannah Wilks' latest monthly column for Friends of The Tennis Podcast.

I’ve been trying to avoid writing the words ‘Andy Murray’s last Wimbledon’, but I don’t think I can put it off any longer, and adding ‘(probably)’ doesn’t help. Doesn’t it feel like it’s over, bar the expletive-laden shouting, even if we’re no more ready for it to be the end than he is? Anyway, Murray’s tearful retirement documentary came out four years ago; this really has been a bonus - in open defiance of bones! – and a coda which has distilled his career down to its most essential quality, namely sheer bloody-mindedness. They shouldn’t put up a statue to Andy Murray at Wimbledon. They should just send for a trilithon-sized granite boulder and put it somewhere in the way; if you want to get to Centre Court, you have to get past this. 

It's all David’s fault, because he brought up the Richard Gasquet match from 2008 during last week’s pod and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Yes, the moment, the one that launched a thousand montages: the cross-court-run, the flick, the flex, the roar as camera flashes exploded unstoppably in the dying light. But also the match as a whole. What I remember, watching it then, was the slow, slow realization dawning on me: So, this Andy Murray guy is really good. Not just British-at-Wimbledon good, but properly good. (I know everybody else already knew, but I was raised on plucky failures! I wasn’t prepared!)

What I think now, watching it back, is how apposite it was that Gasquet was the man across the net. Because this is the thing that I can’t stop wanting to tell people about Andy Murray, that I have been accused of accosting virtual strangers with, that I don’t think people understand: He could so easily have been a Gasquet. There’s been a lot of talk on the pod lately about the comfortable life it’s possible to live if you come from a Grand Slam nation; Andy Murray could have dined out on that 2008 comeback win for the rest of his life, he really could. He could have got to a certain stage in his career, seen how tough the Big Three were, thrown up his hands, said ‘Oh well, born in the wrong era’ and done what was comfortable for him for the rest of his career; been roared on at Wimbledon, nibbled off a 500 title here, made a quarterfinal run at a Slam there, retired a might-have-been. It would have been so easy. It would have been so easy! 

Instead he turned himself inside out, left no stone unturned (and no joint unstressed), swallowed his pride, straitjacketed his magnificently improvisational game, sweated his guts out in Miami, lay still with nerves screaming, unpacked his trauma on a sofa with Sue Barker for the eyes of the nation, got closer, got further away, piled up the plates, dreamed he won the trophy, woke up. Got back to work. Turned himself into the man who stared down the barrel of a fifth set against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the tournament all but on his racquet, and said, loud enough for everybody to hear: ‘There’s no fucking way I’m losing this match.’ And I believed him. And it was true.  

He did what we – The British Crowd – had no right to expect, and even if he didn’t do it for us, we got to go along for the ride. Not one but two ‘where were you when…?’s. How did we get so lucky? Will we ever be so undeservedly fortunate again? Probably not. Thank you, Andy.