Tennis player Andy Murray is ranked No 4 in the world, and his older brother Jamie is a Wimbledon doubles champion. Much of their success is down to their mother Judy – but is she a pushy parent? Joanna Moorhead meets the trio to find out
If there was a competition for Britain’s pushiest mother, here’s betting Judy Murray would win. There she is every year at Wimbledon, punching the air in delight or grimacing in pain at son Andy’s successes and failures; her face is the barometer of Britain’s tennis hopes, which are raised each year when Andy strides on to Centre Court. So far, victory in any of the four grand-slam championships has eluded him (not so his brother Jamie, who won the Wimbledon mixed doubles in 2007); some even think Judy’s constant presence, rather than encouraging him, is somehow holding him back. Boris Becker obviously thought so when he hinted, earlier this year, that Andy needed a bit of space from his mother.
When I mention the “p” word to Judy, she almost bristles; it is clear this is a label she loathes. “Because of the way it’s reported, people think I’m always right there beside Andy, always watching his games. But that’s not true, we’re very rarely in the same place. In the last eight weeks, I’ve only seen him a handful of times. I spend most of my life promoting tennis in Scotland … over the last few years I’ve gone to fewer and fewer tournaments.”
Andy is more forthright. “Being pushy is the worst thing a parent can be – if you push your children, you stop them enjoying whatever it is they’re good at,” he says. “At points in my youth I stopped playing tennis, and it wasn’t as though my mum or dad was saying, ‘you’ve got to go back to it’.” Piling on the pressure then would have meant he’d have burnt out by now, he says. “These days I’m under a lot of pressure, and I think if I’d been under a lot of pressure when I was younger it would have all been too much.”
More important than her pushiness – or lack of it – was, says Judy, the existence of Jamie, Andy’s brother, who’s 15 months older. “I think Andy has a lot to thank Jamie for,” she says. “He was just a bit older, and a bit better, and Andy was always striving to keep up.” A classic case of sibling rivalry, then? Judy shakes her head: “They have very different personalities and strengths, making Jamie a natural doubles player and Andy a natural singles player. And it’s probably a blessing their careers don’t conflict,” she says.
Interestingly, given that he has had so many championship defeats, Andy says having Jamie to play against gave him staying power. “He was bigger and better than me, so I had to learn to lose. I never enjoyed losing to him … but I kept on going, and by the time I was 15 or 16, I started to win.”
Judy insists the brothers are great friends. “They can say things to one another that they probably wouldn’t say to anyone else. But there’s no jealousy or rivalry.” This is not altogether convincing – there has been at least one high-profile row – but one suspects that smoothing over the waters is second nature to Judy.
What, though, about money – the rewards for being even a highly ranked doubles player such as Jamie pale into insignificance compared with what Andy, the world’s No 4 men’s singles player, can earn? “We’re a very normal family – we’ve never had a lot of money, and the whole fame and financial reward part of tennis has never been a big thing for us,” says Judy.
Their normality means they are all still rooted in the Scottish town to which they moved 25 years ago when Judy, now 52, was pregnant with Andy. Her then-husband Willie (they split up when the boys were teenagers) was working nearby, Jamie was just one, and the town – Dunblane – seemed a perfect, safe place to raise children.
I have been warned not to question the Murrays about what happened in Dunblane – they don’t want to speak about it any more, they say – but Jamie and Andy were both in school on 13 March 1996, the day when Thomas Hamilton walked in and shot most of the children in the Primary One class and the teacher, Gwen Mayor. All Judy will say is how unbelievable it still feels that something that terrible could happen in her home town. For a long while afterwards, she says, the whole place was silent, in shock.
In Andy’s autobiography, she relates how, after hearing that there had been a shooting, she raced to the scene. “I can just remember slamming on my horn and swearing at the top of my voice while shouting GET OUT OF THE WAY!” she writes. “Eventually I had to stop the car and pull over. You couldn’t get near the school for all the police vehicles and other cars that lined the road. I ran towards the school gates. You couldn’t get near those either.”
She has said it was the worst day of her life; after a wait that seemed like an eternity, someone asked all those parents with children in Mrs Mayor’s class to go with them; she remembers almost collapsing with relief, before being guilt-stricken when she realised a friend with whom she had been waiting had a daughter in that class.
Dunblane had always been almost too quiet for Judy. She had given up her job after Andy was born, and found herself going a bit stir-crazy with two small boys. The best way to deal with their energy and her frustration, she found, was to play games – ball games, balancing games, running games – in the sitting room and on the lawn; and to make them as imaginative, and competitive as possible.
Judy is convinced these games put her boys on the road to tennis super-stardom – and her sons agree. “We’d got used to playing sports, and it was what we wanted to do,” says Jamie. Now, Judy, is so evangelical about the value of playing games with young children that she’s started a campaign, Set4Sport, to encourage parents to do just that. It involves a series of roadshows around the country, and a book in which Judy offers a step-by-step guide to the games she played with her kids when they were young. “You don’t need a huge amount of space, and you don’t need lots of special equipment – just a few balls, and ordinary things you’d have around your house.”
But there was, of course, more to the Murrays’ success than a mother who wasn’t too precious about the paintwork, and was always up for a ball game. I have not been offered the chance to hear Willie’s point of view, but he surely had a part in his boys’ tennis playing? “Absolutely he did – everyone knows how involved my mum has been, and she’s become a big figure in the game,” says Jamie. “But my dad supported us just as much as my mum when we were growing up, and he made sacrifices for us so we could play, just as Mum did. He doesn’t get as much notice because he can’t come to as many matches – he’s the retail manager for a chain of shops, so he can’t just drop everything to jet to Madrid or Paris to watch our matches. But he’s very proud of us as well.”
It is clearly fortunate for the Murray boys that their mother never returned to her job in sales; instead, she retrained as a tennis coach, and has been coaching ever since (for nine years she was the national junior coach for Scotland, training Elena Baltacha and Colin Fleming as well as her own sons).
When first Jamie, then Andy needed more serious coaching, she sent them away to schools specialising in tennis; and when it became clear that Andy, at 15, needed to concentrate full-time on playing, she endorsed it. “We knew he could always go back to studying later on,” Judy says.
The truth about Judy is that she is tennis-obsessed. What is perceived as pushiness at Centre Court is arguably just mad-keen enthusiasm for the game. She once said that there is a big difference between people who push their kids to do things, and people who push to make things happen for their kids. Maybe next time we see her on the edge of her seat, we should give her a break. “Whenever they’re out there, I never stop myself from thinking how they’re a couple of little brothers from Scotland,” she admits. “They’ve done so well. It’s incredible, really.”
• For more on Judy Murray’s campaign, go to set4sport.com for details and to order a free copy of her book
