In the space of four sets on Centre Court yesterday, Andy Murray ‘lost a match and won the heart of a nation” as author Tony Parsons put it, to Roger Federer.
Post-match comments about the “two champions” in the match flooded in, like the tears down Murray’s cheeks. Actor Russell Crowe even tweeted, ‘Andy Murray, you are a champion in my eyes’.
Murray’s reaction to his defeat was emotional, apologetic and endearing but it didn’t change the result of the match. Yes, we saw beneath the rugged, taciturn exterior of Andy Murray, the tennis player, and got a glimpse of Andy Murray, the young man, but ultimately, the crowd’s ‘sustained applause, collectively placing an empathetic arm around [his] shoulder’ (Tom Fordyce, BBC) will not bring him any closer to winning a grand slam title at the fifth time of asking.
Their empathy, like a parent’s ‘don’t worry son, it’ll all be okay’, only endorses the monolithic phrase of sporting mediocrity, that ‘it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part that matters’. How naive, how glib.
We could endow Murray’s match against Federer with a kind of patriotic grandeur, basking in the historical significance of our first Wimbledon finalist since Fred Perry, 76 years ago, but this is no time for a typically Anglo-Saxon appraisal of courage in defeat.
The facts remain unaltered by emotion. Murray was quite simply outplayed by a much better player. He managed only 56% of his first serves; produced only three-quarters as many winners and converted less than a third of his break points. On numerous occasions the crowd was forced to watch on helplessly as Murray let 40-15 leads slip to deuce and, crucially, failed to convert a number of games that he should have won.
In that light, this is no time to exhort second place. Although Murray was indeed aggressive, and showed more than fleeting glimpses of true brilliance, it is ultimately the winning and not the taking part that counts. To misappropriate Talladega Nights’ Ricky Bobby, ‘if you ain’t 1st you’re last’. Only the British crowd, it seems, want to remember second place.
Murray’s old coach, Miles Maclagan, said afterwards that ‘Andy has almost resisted being liked, he has wanted to be liked for winning titles, not for who he is’. Teary-eyed moments, like yesterday, come dangerously close to blurring this boundary between the articulate young man he is off-court, and the ruthless champion that he needs to become. Tennis is more than a game; winning matches is not for mere enjoyment but a profession. Murray neither needs our sympathy, nor he another British” nearly-man” like Tim Henman: never quite good enough to win a grand slam.
He should therefore not be consoled with clichéd platitudes like ‘it’ll be alright, just stick at it’. I was thus encouraged to see, when reading his BBC Sport column, that Murray is ‘more determined than ever’ and acknowledges the pain of Sunday’s defeat.
As Al Pacino famously declares in ‘Any Given Sunday’, and Hawk-Eye reminds us, ‘life’s this game of inches … one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don’t quite catch it’.
Murray must remember the pain of this defeat and disappointment because it will help him to make those extra inches, to strain a bit harder for that drop shot, to run a bit harder as he charges along the baseline, and hopefully leave Wimbledon next year with a grand slam title under his belt.
