Hitting Back (6 page)

Since I left as pupil, I've never been back to the primary school. But
Jamie and I have been in touch with the secondary school. They
named the new assembly hall after us. It's great to be remembered
like that. I would like to go back one day and see what it's like, maybe
visit the Memorial Garden at the primary school. I'm glad it's still a
school and that children still play there. Dunblane is still the quiet,
lovely place I remember from when I was a kid. What happened was
a terrible, horrible tragedy but I think it's important that one madman
didn't destroy the place I'm proud to come from.

Murrays don't like leaving home as a rule. My mum had joined
the women's pro tour when she left school and only lasted a
few months because of homesickness. My brother left home at
twelve to go to an LTA training school in Cambridge and spent
seven miserable months there. Somehow I broke the mould. By
the time I was fifteen, I was desperate to go. I lived in a cold,
damp climate with limited facilities and county-standard
players to practise with. What I needed was sunshine, hard
work, open-air courts and world-class opposition. Maybe
going to Barcelona wasn't too hard a choice.

Jamie's stay in Cambridge was a terrible mistake. After what
happened to him I would never advise a kid to leave home so
young. When he came back seven months later, I practised
with him. He looked upset and unhappy, the complete opposite
of his old self. He used to enjoy himself on court but all
that had changed. I remember Mum walking to the back of the
court and muttering: 'I can't believe what they've done to him,'
with tears in her eyes. She was so upset.

It wasn't just that Jamie was homesick. It was amazing how
quickly he went from being a happy kid to missing his home,
missing his parents and not enjoying his tennis. I made headlines
once, during the Aberdeen Cup in 2005, by saying the
LTA had 'ruined' Jamie. The press asked me about him and I
just said what I believed: 'He was number two junior in the
world when he was around age twelve. Then he went down to
an LTA academy in Cambridge and they ruined him for a few
years. It was their fault.' I have stuck by that opinion ever
since. I am not saying the LTA, as a whole, was to blame, but
that set-up at Cambridge did not work for him.

So there was no way I wanted to leave home at that age, but
once I'd made the decision that tennis was my chosen sport, it
all changed. If I wanted to make it, then I had to go away.

Sometimes you need a kick-start. That came when I played
in the European Under-16 team championships in Andorra.
We lost in the final against Spain and Rafa Nadal was playing.
I've known him since we were about thirteen and after the
match a few of us were hanging round a racket-ball court, just
talking. He started telling me that he practised with people like
Carlos Moya, one of the Spaniards on the tour ranked in the
World Top 10. He said he'd never beaten him, never even
broken his serve, but it was significant that he was playing him
at all.

I started thinking. And steaming. I never got the chance to
practise with Tim Henman. I didn't even meet him properly
until I was sixteen. I went home and said to Mum: 'Rafa Nadal
is practising with Moya! And I'm having to practise with a few
county-level players, my brother and my mum. Rafa's out in
the sun all day – he hardly goes to school and he's playing four
and a half hours a day. I'm playing four and a half hours a
week. It's not enough!'

That's when it began, my determination to go and live in
another country, possibly Spain. We went over to look at a
couple of Academies, one run by the Catalan Tennis
Federation and then the Sanchez-Casal Tennis Academy at the
Open Sports Club in Barcelona. It even occurred to me to try
the Harry Hopman School at Saddlebrook in the USA that I
remembered so well from my Orange Bowl win in 1999. I was
due to spend a month there in May 2002. However, the night
before I was due to leave for Florida, I was playing a game of
football for a team called Auchterarder Primrose as a bit of fun
and I had just run three-quarters of the length of the pitch
when this guy, who was probably a bit fed up with me, stood
on my foot just as I was about to cross the ball. That was me
done for six weeks. Badly sprained ankle. I couldn't walk or
anything and I wasn't much fun because I had to sit around the
house doing nothing. I didn't even have an excuse not to do my
homework.

The Sanchez-Casal Academy was the one that attracted me
most. I went there with Mum to have a look around and played
a match against Emilio Sanchez, one of the founders of the
Academy and a five-times grand slam doubles champion. I beat
him 6–3 6–1. I loved it already. I was playing against a guy
who, even though he had retired a few years previously, had
been in the World Top 10, and had won a silver medal at the
1988 Olympics. I came off court dripping with sweat. I saw
loads of kids, good tennis players, all around me. This was
what I wanted.

I told Mum that I'd just beaten Emilio in straight sets and she
said: 'Andy, I'm not sure that was such a good idea.' But I
wanted to play really well against him to show I was a good
player. He didn't ban me; I enrolled at the Academy.

It hadn't been that hard a decision to go abroad. It wasn't
just what happened to Jamie. I didn't want to train at one of
the national centres in the UK because of the attitude of the
players and some of the coaches. That scene wasn't me. It was
the wrong environment. Everything is paid for and they're
spoiled and pretty lazy. Not every single player, but most. The
majority didn't want to be top tennis players, and it brings
everyone else down.

Everyone at Sanchez wanted to be there. They had all
paid
to be there. It cost about £25,000 a year plus competition costs
which I had to find from somewhere: sponsorships, the LTA,
sportscotland and my parents. I was lucky that during my time
there the Royal Bank of Scotland started to sponsor me and
have done ever since. It was, and still is, really difficult to
convince companies to invest in young players with potential
and RBS had never got involved with tennis before. But they
took a chance on me and I hope I have repaid their faith.

If I had stayed in Britain I would have been practising with
kids my age who didn't have the right attitude and there is a
chance I would have been spoiled myself. In Spain I was
practising with guys up to thirty years old, some of them
already on the Men's Tour, some who had just started, but all
of them with highish world rankings and ambition. To me, it
was perfect. I was fifteen and the next youngest guy to me in
that group was nineteen.

I had to look after myself, be disciplined, hard-working and
get used to playing on clay in hot conditions. I learned so much
just being away from home. There's so much bitching that goes
on in British tennis, between parents and players and everyone.
It's ridiculous. I still have friends from that age group, and I
remember well what it was like. We laugh about it now, but it
wasn't fun to be around at the time. When you went to
tournaments, the parents were saying things about you, hoping
you would lose because you were one of the best players. There
was way, way too much jealousy. In Spain there was no
jealousy, just hard work.

That is a huge part of the reason I left home. I remember
leaving my house feeling a kind of pang of regret. I don't know
what caused it exactly. Whether it was going into the unknown
in a foreign culture or worrying that I might be homesick, I
don't know, but once I was in Spain, I didn't want to come
back.

That does not mean that all went smoothly for me. There
were twenty-nine courts at the Academy, clay for the elite, hard
for the average players and another type of hard court for the
beginners. I remembered my mum telling me to go over to the
clay courts, say who I was and start practising. So I walked
over and the coach had never heard of me.

'I don't know anything about you,' he said. 'Go and practise
on the hard courts.' So, OK, I went over to the hard courts and
the first person I found there was a guy called Danny Valverdu
from Venezuela and he was quite rude to me. I didn't know
anyone. I had lunch on my own, dinner on my own. It was
awkward.

Then, at dinner on the second day, Danny said: 'Come and
sit over here.' He's one of my best friends now. We played
doubles together for a while on the junior circuit and never lost
a match. We had to surrender the final of the Canadian Open
Juniors because I had to go and play the qualifying event for
the US Open, but we have never lost a match together on court.

Very soon Barcelona seemed perfect to me. I lived in the
dormitory above the school block and every night we would
play football on the artificial pitch, copy each other's homework
and have fun on the PlayStation. There were always
people around. I liked that. You could be immature and mess
around, and not get told off by your parents. I must have got
quite a few things out of my system at that age. Lights out was
midnight and there was a woman called Arantxa to make sure
we all went to bed in time. Of course, we didn't. We'd be
making a noise or annoying one another. Then you would hear
Arantxa open a door, march down the hall and we would all
have to pretend to be asleep. No one was really wicked,
though.

A couple of my friends did a few things like boxing with a
proper helmet and gloves. They were always trying to get me
to do it but I wouldn't. I didn't fancy it. One of them used to
get punched without a mouthguard and braces on his teeth. He
cut his mouth every single time. He was mad. He didn't make
it on the tour either.

At the weekend, practice was optional. Most of the time I
would train in the morning and then take the bus into the
city, to the shops, the Hard Rock Café, the English-speaking
cinema, the go kart track or the internet café. I loved it. I felt
free and independent and, although the days were
ridiculously long, the priorities were tennis first and school
second which was the right thing for me. I still needed to
study, but the most important thing to me was tennis. My
priorities had been the same in Scotland, I just wasn't allowed
to follow them.

The days were incredibly busy. I'd train on court from 9am
to noon, do fitness from noon to 1pm; lunch 1pm–2pm; school
2pm–4pm; tennis 4.30pm–6pm; school 6pm–8pm. I'd certainly
said goodbye to my younger self. I'd gone from training one
and a half hours a day on three or four days a week, to four
and a half hours a day of high intensity tennis in hot conditions
abroad.

Inevitably there was trouble. I wasn't eating properly. I didn't
really like the food there. I'd still eat, but for the daily energy I
was using, I wasn't eating enough. Then I woke up one morning,
in the early hours, feeling just terrible. My head was throbbing,
I had a huge temperature and, having walked to the toilet, I
fainted. I found myself lying on the ground in the cubicle,
struggled to my feet and, still feeling terrible, fell again. I banged
my back and for two days I felt awful. I think I was literally
burned out. After that I realised I had to do things properly.

It may have helped that I've never smoked, and after two
episodes in Barcelona, I never drank again either. I had a bad
experience. I made myself look like a prat in front of my
friends. The only reason I was drinking was to see what it was
like to get drunk. I hate the taste of alcohol. I absolutely hate
it. I don't even like champagne. I don't like wine. I think beer
is disgusting and I haven't tried whisky.

It was just curiosity that made me drink on those couple of
occasions. I think you can have enough fun without drinking
and I prefer the taste of lemonade to beer. I was pretty sick
after my drinking bouts, but the only reason I felt bad in the
morning is because I knew I'd behaved like an idiot. I just
thought: Why? What was the real point?

It is not as if Mum and Dad had talked to me or given me a
lecture on the facts of life before I left. They didn't. When I
lived at home, I didn't want to go out on the street, drink cheap
alcohol and think it was cool to be hanging around. I was
always told to look after myself, but we didn't have a huge chat
about it. I called home every couple of days when I was away,
but basically I enjoyed doing my own thing.

When I first went to the Academy I didn't feel I had any time
to have a girlfriend, I wasn't interested at all, but after a year
of being there – when I passed my exams and stopped doing
school – then I started to have some time. I began to speak to
the girls more and take a bit of an interest.

People used to say that I was shy. I didn't feel it. Maybe it is
because until I know someone, I just don't like to say that
much. If I had to meet a roomful of people, I wouldn't feel
uncomfortable. It's fine. It's just that if I don't know someone
and trust them, I have never seen the point of going up and
speaking to them.

So there was this one girl from Germany at the Academy, we
were friends pretty much the whole time I was there. I always
liked her. Then a different girl came and I started spending time
with her. Then the first one got jealous and decided to go
out with me. It just sort of happened.

She was the one the newspapers descended on when I did
well at Wimbledon. However, we hardly saw each other. We
were both travelling and there was just no point in continuing.
I saw her for ten days in three months.

I was quite lucky really. There was no one I was really
infatuated with and couldn't stop thinking about. It never got
in the way of my training and practice. I was never trying to
sneak away from training to go and see someone. There was no
one I liked that much.

Eventually, I moved out of the dormitories and went to live
with a Romanian family who rented a couple of rooms in their
flat to me and couple of other guys. One of them, Matt Lowe,
was my best friend at the time. We used to mess around quite
a lot. The apartment was pretty high up and we would chuck
wet paper towels out of the window. On a scale of one to
Asbo, I guess it was pretty minor, but even so it nearly got us
into terrible trouble one day.

We were throwing the paper towels at a girl. She went away.
We thought that was the end of it. Fifteen minutes later the
same girl came back with five guys. We were completely
panicking when they came into the apartment block and
started banging on everyone's door. We didn't have a clue
what to do. They knocked on our door. We tried not to move
or breathe and didn't answer. Then some other resident
shouted at the guys: 'Get the hell out of our block.' Finally they
did, but not before the flat owner's son, who had been sleeping,
got up and asked us what was going on. What could we say?
Only 'Don't know!' with as much innocence as we could.