Hitting Back (11 page)

Tim was a great player, he had been ranked 4th in the world
and had played in six grand slam semi-finals. He was also my
friend, he was my mentor, and I looked up to him. We had
practised together many times and I had never beaten him. I
knew this was going to be a tough game for me mentally. He
wasn't just an opponent. He was the man who had been
generous to me with his time and his advice. He often talked to
me about my game and what I could do to improve. Now I was
playing him. It was a very strange feeling.

I saw him briefly before the match but it was quite awkward.
I just tried to concentrate on how I was going to play. My game
stacks up quite well against his. He likes to come to the net and
I like to pass. I felt very, very confident going in, but it was very
close. I served for the match in the second set and then became
a bit nervous which dragged us both into the third set, which I
finally won 7–6.

That was a big win for me mentally. To beat him in a match
as close as that when I could easily have crumbled was huge for
my confidence. At the end he just said to me: 'Good job.' I
didn't really say anything. I would
never
do or say anything to
Tim to offend him. It is not the nicest moment when you shake
hands with one of your friends after losing. Well, one of your
friends is not so bad, but when it is someone who you know
respects you and looks up to you as much I did to him, it must
be a little bit strange. Maybe I was more sensitive about it than
he was.

The press wrote about it afterwards as though some kind of
baton had been passed between us. The end of an era, and that
kind of thing. It wasn't that at all. It was me winning a tennis
match and, to be honest, Tim having a bad back. Not for the
first time, the media had gone slightly over the top.

After that match Sean Connery phoned me again. I can't
remember exactly what he said. I suppose he might have been
pleased that I'd finished the year pretty strongly. I was too.
That Christmas I went home to Scotland as the 64th best tennis
player in the world.

My mum is to blame for the state of British tennis. I think it
was the tennis correspondent of the
Guardian
that came up
with that joke. He said she should have had more children.
But when you looked at where we stood in the world at the
start of 2008, maybe he had a point. My brother Jamie was
still the reigning Wimbledon mixed doubles champion, my
win at the Qatar Open had taken me to number nine in the
world, but while there were twelve Spaniards, fourteen
Frenchman, eleven Argentinians, eight Germans, six
Russians, four Croatians, three Serbians, three Swedes, three
Australians, three Chileans, two Swiss and two Belgians
among the top-100, from Britain there was just one. Me.
Same as Latvia. Same as Cyprus. Tim Henman still had
enough ranking points to be number four in Britain, but he'd
been retired six months.

Of course it was an indictment of a system that's been wrong
for years. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen I saw at
first hand what it was like. That is when I was most actively
involved in British junior tennis, even though I was living away
in Spain for some of the time. I often practised with British
players, before and during competitions. You could just see the
sort of stuff they got up to.

There are
some
players that work hard. Jamie Baker, my
fellow Scot, is one of them and he's moved away to
Saddlebrook in America now, just like I went to train in Spain.
In Britain, there is something wrong with the mentality.
There's just so much jealousy and negativity at most of the
tournaments.

I used to go away on trips as a junior with one of the British
teams for up to five weeks at a time and the other British guys
were wanting me to lose. That's when you know something's
wrong. These guys are supposed to be your friends, but
nobody wants anyone to do better than they do themselves. It's
good to be competitive, but why couldn't they just try to raise
their own level or believe in themselves instead of wishing
someone else would lose in the first round, so that they weren't
the worst player there.

I've been there when British players are talking behind the
back of another British player. There is way too much jealousy.
It is so, so annoying. There is no need for it, especially at that
age when everyone is trying to get better. It's not about just
winning at that stage. It is about developing – but many of the
players, parents and coaches seem to think that winning is
the only thing. You just have to see what some of the kids and
parents are like at some tournaments, and you would
understand.

If I was sitting watching a match alongside the court, you
would see me clap and shout and get pumped up on their
behalf, but there were loads of examples of fellow British
players sitting watching my matches, emotionless.

I've never seen a punch-up, but I have seen parents arguing
when their kids are playing. It was completely different in
Spain. When I was playing Futures over there, the players
didn't come with their parents. They didn't even have coaches
with them half the time. They were just playing a tennis match.
There were no other people involved.

There was no cheating or people 'forgetting' the scores, as I
have experienced in Britain. Some kids had a habit of
pretending they didn't remember the score because the rule is
that if you don't have an umpire on the court – and many
junior matches do not – you go back to the last score both
players can agree on. Essentially you get cheats 'forgetting' that
they have just lost a game. Funnily enough, the last thing they
can remember is a score of 15-all. It happened to me all the
time at that age.

We have such a closed mind compared to the rest of the
world. Everyone seemed to think that being the best in Britain
was great. I was always asked: 'What's it like to be number one
in Britain?' I used to say: 'I don't mind.' I meant it. I didn't
mind. It's a worldwide tour and I would much rather be 11th
in the world than number one in Britain. You don't hear Rafa
Nadal celebrating the fact that he's number one in Spain. He
wants to be known as number two in the world. We live on a
world circuit. That is how we are judged. I don't understand
the whole British mentality. Why do they think it's a big deal
to be British number one, when it's so completely irrelevant?

I can't work out exactly what is wrong with us. Perhaps it is
as simple as money. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen in
Britain, you do get given a lot, but I think you have to be hard
on players at that age. Maybe the people around them aren't
hard enough. I don't think they understand how much effort
the Spanish players put in, for instance, and when a Spanish
guy turns eighteen, his funding stops. That's it. That is the cut-off.
They make it on their own or they don't. It makes them
work hard and look after themselves. However, when you're
funded all the way through your career, then maybe subconsciously
you relax.

I know people could accuse me of being hypocritical when
saying that, because one of my coaches, Brad Gilbert, was
subsidised by the LTA when I was on the tour. But when I went
to train in Spain as a teenager, my mum and dad had to find
the money from all kinds of sources and I genuinely think it
made me work harder, knowing the sacrifices they were
making for me. I definitely did not have money on a plate
during my junior career.

Obviously there isn't just one way of getting to the top. Borg
did it differently from Becker, who did it differently from
Agassi who was different from Sampras, and Federer was
completely different again. There isn't just one way of doing it
– but whichever way you choose to do it, players have to be
made to work
hard
. If a player isn't told 'Go to the gym,'
they're not going to go.

To me, the most important days in tennis are weekends.
That's when semi-finals and finals are played. We don't have a
nine-to-five job. We're not getting paid for five days a week. I
can understand someone taking Sunday off, if they have
worked really hard all week, but not the whole weekend.

I'm away a lot of the time, but I turn up at the National
Training Centre in Roehampton, the multi-million pound
headquarters of British tennis, and
no one
is there. I'm often
looking for a partner to hit with and I have to call one of the
coaches to try and find someone. He will call around three or
four players and the response I have got from them range from:
'No, I don't normally practise at weekends' or 'I'm feeling a
little bit sick today.' Last time it happened, I eventually found
one guy, James Ward, who had already left the Centre because
he couldn't find anyone to hit with either. He was on a train
home, but he turned round and came back to practise with me.
I really appreciated that. Maybe it's just a coincidence that he
has spent much of his time training at an academy in Spain.

As for the others, there are fifty-two weekends in a year and
if you are missing most of them, plus taking time off over
Christmas, that's a lot of potential practice days lost. I would
say that a large number of British players only practise half the
days of the year.

At the Sanchez-Casal Academy during the time I was there,
it was fine to take Sundays off. If you were absolutely
knackered by the Saturday – and we were – it was sensible to
have one day of rest. In Britain, however, I don't see the players
doing what we did in Spain: the four-and-a-half hours on court
every day, the four hours of school, the hour of fitness. I don't
see it at all. Sometimes I turn up at Roehampton and it's like a
ghost town.

I don't really know why the coaches don't enforce a greater
work ethic, but if they're only paid for five days a week – and
quite a few of the Belgian coaches go back home on a Friday
evening and come back Monday morning – I can see their point
of view. But I just don't get why nobody is going to the gym at
weekends, or doing a recovery job. The LTA have built the
facilities, but the players don't make the best use of them.
When I go to the gym there never seems to be anyone in there.
Basically, I have the equipment to myself, which is great for
me, but what a waste. Only a couple of times have I ever
walked in and found four or five other people there. There is
something wrong with the mentality and work ethic of most of
the British players.

There doesn't seem to be anyone who's brutally honest
about it either. I think the best way is to confront it, especially
when it has been so bad for so long. Someone in authority at
British tennis should come out and say: 'Look, we're doing
really badly. We're not good enough. We must make some
changes.' But everyone is being really unrealistic with goals:
things like: 'We're going to get eight players in the top-100 by
2008, and then it changed to seven players in the top-100
by 2010.'

Which players are they then?

The new regime at the Lawn Tennis Association has
definitely tried to improve things and get great coaches
involved – that's without a doubt – people like Brad Gilbert
and Paul Annacone. They are excellent and will do a good job
– but, at the same time, would Sir Alex Ferguson ever work
with Plymouth Argyle? You've got the best coaches in the
world, who have helped Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and Pete
Sampras between them, but they are working with players who
don't really deserve it.

These world-class coaches have gone from working with
world-class players to teaching someone how to play tennis.
That is not what they have done before. As a coach to Agassi
or Sampras, they were not teaching them the game – it is pretty
obvious that that had been sorted already – they were teaching
tactics and helping with the mental approach. In my view, the
current regime are putting the wrong people together.

The LTA have obviously spent a lot of money on their
coaches, but the first thing the players need is to get into much
better shape: to train harder and get in the gym more. I
appreciate the irony of me saying this, when I was criticised so
heavily for being unfit, but I always understood I needed to be
fitter and I made the commitment to improve.

To my mind, the LTA should not spend so much money on
a number of the world's greatest coaches. That does not mean
I am ungrateful for my time with Brad, but I think British
tennis at this stage needs good, experienced, committed, less-expensive
coaches plus experienced fitness coaches and
physiotherapists who understand the demands of the game. To
me, that is more of a priority than the tennis. The players have
to understand what hard work is. They need someone who's
not going to take any shit from them and if they say they're
tired – tough. They still have to work hard.

I don't know if it's going to get any better under the new
LTA regime. I hope so but it's one of those cases where you
have to wait and see. I'm not an expert on running a national
federation, but I have my ideas and I can pass on my experience
of what I saw when I was younger. I don't think it's changed a
whole lot since then. The results would suggest not.

The other issue in British tennis is how much people like to
put you down. When I started to do well as a junior, British
coaches like Alan Jones – who worked with the number one
British woman Elena Baltacha – and Tony Pickard and a few
others criticised me in public. I just don't understand the
attitude. It is as though success is a bad thing.

When you go over to the United States, it is completely
different. Over there, everyone is pumped up for the young
players. You hear people within the sport saying: 'Have you
seen this kid play?' and they say it with pride, not criticism.
Last time I was there, the talk was about a young American kid
called Donald Young, who turned professional and then lost
thirteen ATP matches in a row. They didn't rip into him. They
still said they believed in him. By 2008, he had broken into the
World Top-100.

I think a lot of British tennis is influenced by the media. The
people who run tennis have rarely confronted things head on.
From my point of view, they seem to mismanage the news that
sneaks into the papers. If it is something negative, they get all
defensive about it. Why can't they be honest and less frightened
of the media? Sometimes they get themselves into the ludicrous
position of saying how great everything is.

Meanwhile, within tennis, there is just so much badmouthing
going on. Within days of me taking David
Nalbandian to five sets at Wimbledon, there was virtually a
queue of former Davis Cup captains waiting to criticise me.

In a newspaper article, David Lloyd said: 'Murray is an 18-year-old
who played pretty good on grass. That's as far as you
can go. You can't say he is going to win a grand slam. But
because we are so desperate, he already has a noose around his
neck. We have to be careful with him. It is hard to live with
that expectation and hype.'

He was basically saying that I wasn't that great and don't
rush me, which is fine. I didn't disagree with that.

Then Tony Pickard said: 'He is off now to play some
Challengers in the US, and if he can win a couple that would
set the fire, it would mean he has taken away an awful lot from
Wimbledon. But he has never won a match at Challenger level
yet, and that worries the hell out of me.'

He shouldn't have worried so much. I had won quite a few
matches at Challenger level. I'd reached a quarter-final
actually. So he was wrong about that. But the rest of the
things he said didn't quite make sense. David Lloyd was
saying don't rush me. Tony Pickard was saying that I needed
to win matches straight away: so, rush me. Which is it? Rush
me or don't rush me?

It just all seemed so negative. I can understand what they
were saying. I wasn't in the top-10 yet – not even close – and I
needed to work to get there, but they were giving these views
straight after my first Wimbledon, aged eighteen, where I'd
won two matches in straight sets – one of them against a top-20
player – and lost in five sets to a former finalist. It would
have been nice if they could have been a bit more positive or
maybe even waited to criticise me. After all I was completely
new to this but within the next six weeks, won two Challengers
in America.