Hitting Back Read online

  Meanwhile, things were getting seriously weird. People came to watch my practice sessions, which I had never experienced before. I was signing autographs and when I walked into the press conference room for the first time after the Bastl match there were more people in there than had ever stood round the court to watch my matches.

  Press conferences aren't easy. I was quite shy when I was younger and all of a sudden I was being asked to be quite open with strangers who were firing questions at me – and not just about tennis either.

  I was asked about my girlfriend. I didn't even have a girlfriend any more. I'd gone out with a German girl in Spain but that was all over now. Yet – this is how crazy it was – two journalists and a photographer flew over to Barcelona and offered her money to do an interview and take pictures. (She took the money but she didn't say anything bad.) I couldn't believe it. This whole Wimbledon thing was amazing. I'd never experienced anything like it and I never expected anything like it. How could I? I'm ranked 300 in the world and there are photographers following me around. It wasn't right.

  So with all that going on, I had to try and concentrate for the Stepanek match that I really, really wanted to win. It was the one I was most nervous for. When I woke up that morning I couldn't believe it. I had a raging temperature, and was sweating buckets. My mum called Jean-Pierre Bruyere, my physio, and asked what she should do. He suggested a cool bath at some awful temperature so she rushed out to buy a thermometer. I took the bath and sat around with some cold towels on my forehead, drinking lots of water. I managed to practise for a bit with Mark Petchey, the former British player who was helping me on a part-time basis, and by the time my match was called, I was feeling OK. The next day some of the papers blamed it on a dodgy curry, a pretty wild guess of theirs because I hadn't even had a curry.

  The match was taking place on Court One, the court shaped like a bullring that you reach by walking along this underground tunnel that seems to go on for miles. It was quiet and intimidating down there. All you've got for company are two security guards and your opponent. When that opponent is someone like Stepanek, seeded 14th, with loads of experience and coached by the coach of a Wimbledon champion, it was enough to make anyone nervous. I'd never been on Court One in my life, not even to practise, and now I was, officially, the lowest-ranked player left in the tournament.

  We walked and walked. It felt like forever. The butterflies were going and when we finally arrived in the open, I looked around me and the court felt huge. Then the crowd saw me and gave me such a big cheer that the butterflies began to subside and it settled me down a little bit. I looked up at the players' box to see my mum, my brother and Petch, and that settled me down even more. I don't find the support of a crowd intimidating. I like it. It was nice to know they were on my side. They obviously wanted me to win but didn't really expect me to.

  The match started and my nerves seemed to melt away. I was ahead all the time. I broke his serve early in every set and he broke me once during the whole match. It really couldn't have gone any more smoothly. I returned well and countered everything he tried. He probably didn't expect me to play as well as I did and at 6–4 6–4 5–3 I had two match points.

  The first one he saved with an unbelievably hard diving volley which I hit long because I wasn't expecting it. He saved the next one with a really good pick-up which hit the net and just dropped over on to my side. He walked up and kissed the net and then walked back to the baseline, pointing to his head like I was choking or getting nervous or something.

  I didn't know what to do. I had no experience of tennis at that level and wasn't sure whether players were supposed to behave like that, but in the next game at 30–all I hit a forehand that just touched the top of the net and dropped over. I ran up to kiss the net. Doing the same thing back to him was my way of letting him know that I may be younger but I wouldn't be intimidated.

  Winning that match was pretty special. He was the highest-ranked player I'd ever beaten by a pretty long way and when I walked into the press interview room later it was absolutely packed. I was asked about the gamesmanship. I said he was trying to put me off, but in the end he was the one looking silly because he'd lost to an 18-year-old ranked 317 in the world. That got a bit of a laugh.

  Later, Petch told me that he shook hands with Tony Pickard in the players' box at the end of the match and said: 'Tough luck.' Pickard just said: 'That was a terrible match. Both of them played badly. It was embarrassing. I can't believe that was on Court One.'

  Mark just said: 'I suppose Andy did what he had to do to win,' and left it at that. I didn't get upset; I found it quite funny. This kind of backbiting was typical of British tennis at the time. I'd grown used to some players and coaches not wanting me to win because I was doing well, this was just an extension of the same thing. I knew what he had said to my mum and I thought it was very rude. It was basically someone who thought he knew better trying to tell Mum what she should be doing. I don't mind people offering advice, but only when you ask for it.

  I woke up early the next morning, really excited to see what was being said about me. Obviously being in the papers at that time was pretty cool. I was on the back pages of all of them. However, the thing I found most weird then was the live TV interview, because you couldn't pause to think. There was no room for error. The BBC reporter Gary Richardson was coming round almost every morning to talk to me. We didn't know how to say 'no' in those days. It was irritating the first time it happened because my mum hadn't told me she had agreed I'd do it and I got woken up really early. She'll tell you that I never like getting up in the morning. I'm always at my grumpiest then (although I'm absolutely nothing compared to Jamie). It is not my favourite time of day.

  It wasn't all bad. We were staying in the basement of this house in the village and a BBC crew wanted to film me coming upstairs from my flat, and the cameraman taking the shot was walking backwards when he tripped and fell over and smacked his head on the ground. Understandably he then completely snapped at the guy who was supposed to be guiding him. I didn't laugh out loud at the time – I waited ten seconds until I was in the car taking me to the courts. It was awesome. Right up there with one of the funniest things I've seen.

  I'd made the third round of Wimbledon. I'd gone from a Court Two nobody to a Court One winner. Next stop the Centre Court against David Nalbandian, a player so famous in Cordoba he had a bus stop and hot-dog stand named after him – but that wasn't his real claim to fame. He was a brutal player, one who could run all day, and a hero in his home country for making the Wimbledon final three years ago against Lleyton Hewitt. He had lost, but he was a huge opponent for me.

  I couldn't wait to play him. It was one of the biggest matches of my life and I thought I had a chance.

  The morning of the match I was fine. I've always been good at killing time. I just went down to the courts and practised in my 'Ronaldinho' shirt, a souvenir from my time in Barcelona. I could pretend and say it was just like any other practice, but I'd be lying. There were people and cameras everywhere. Tim Henman had been knocked out in the second round to Dmitry Tursunov, 8–6 in the fifth set, and I was the last Brit left in the tournament.

  I didn't feel as nervous as for the Stepanek match, but I think, subconsciously, I was. I just didn't want to understand the situation I was in. Maybe I was trying to blank it. I went to the toilet a lot of times before the match and my legs were heavy, all signs of nerves that I was desperate to ignore.

  I've talked about boxing. I love the sport and I really do compare tennis with it sometimes. It's about performing well in front of a big crowd with one man out to stop you. You've got two competitors. You have to beat the other one. You have to come up with a game plan. You've got to know his weakness, your weaknesses. Tennis is hard on the mind as well as the legs. You can go from feeling really comfortable and confident to seeing it all slip away. You've got to be mentally strong. When it starts to go wrong, you have to make sure you don't get angry, don't get annoyed. Ac
tually, now I come to think of it, it's fine to get angry and annoyed. Just don't let it affect your game.

  I have had my moments of madness on court. I know that everyone's seen me on TV roaring with frustration or getting pumped up. It's just the way I am. I got defaulted once when I was twelve at the Scottish Junior Championships at Craiglockhart. I was playing one of my brother's best friends and in a moment of frustration I flung my racket towards the chair. It went underneath the fence and just seemed to keep going forever. The assistant referee defaulted me and I had to trudge off the court to pick up my racket. Afterwards I ran off to my mum. I was really upset and wanted her support but she was just annoyed. I thought that was a bit unfair, considering her history. Mum got defaulted when she was a junior and my gran was so disgusted she drove home without her. My mum had to call one of my gran's friends to come and pick her up. So it's definitely there in the family, the fury, but you've got to keep it under control.

  Getting ready for the match, I just tried to stay focused. Tactics, stretching, warm-up, I'd done everything I could to prepare. I wanted to walk out on court with no excuses. If I won I won, if I didn't I had done everything I possibly could to win.

  The thing I find most amazing about the whole Centre Court experience is not the stadium, not the crowd but the actual court. It's perfect. The grass is so well cut; the lines are so perfectly drawn. After years and years of junior tournaments, and playing on surfaces like car parks, the courts at Wimbledon are incredible.

  The only thing about the court that isn't so good – and I'm not joking – is the bottom of the umpire's chair. You might say I'm nit-picking, but the wheels are black and it looks really ugly in comparison to the rest of the court. The chair is green. The grass, obviously, is green. I don't understand the wheels being black when everything else is perfect.

  The main difference though between the Centre Court at Wimbledon and the main stadium court anywhere else in the world is the quietness. You hear the ball being hit so clearly. It sounds so clean. At the US Open, people in the crowd are talking, shouting, arguing, eating. At Wimbledon, if someone opened a packet of crisps at the back, you'd hear it all over the court. It's that quiet. It's so silent it's almost intimidating, especially when you know they're all watching you.

  Tennis is one of probably only two sports – golf is the other one – where the players get pretty wound up over noise. I actually don't mind that much. I think players need to get on with it more. Obviously, I don't like it when you're reaching up for a lob and then you hear the clicks of thirty cameras as you're about to hit your overhead, but I don't mind when the crowd shouts out between points. It adds to the atmosphere.

  I don't think quiet was the right word that afternoon when I finally stepped on the Centre Court. I don't know exactly how loud it was because I still had my iPod on, but it was loud enough. Luckily, I didn't have to stop and bow to the royal box because they had stopped all that by then. That's a good thing, because I wouldn't have known what to do. I'd never done it before and I'd never met royalty. Well, I'd met the Duchess of Gloucester once, I think, but I didn't have to bow then either.

  I walked to the umpire's chair, put down that ridiculously heavy drinks bag and prepared to play the match. It was great that my dad had come down from Scotland to watch me in person, among all the other people supporting me.

  What happened next was nearly unbelievable. The atmosphere was fantastic and I won the really long first set in the tie-break. The second set was the best set of tennis I'd played all year and I found myself leading 7–6 6–1. I had loads of chances in the third set but that was when the momentum started to change a little bit. We were playing points of a really high intensity. I had game points in the first three games but suddenly found myself 0–3 down. That's when I decided to give Nalbandian the set. People might not have realised at the time, but it seemed like a good idea to start fresh in the fourth. The trouble is I'd never played a four-set, let alone five-set, game in my life except in the Davis Cup doubles. In the singles, never.

  I took a toilet break. One of the security guards had to keep me company. I'll never forget him because all the time we were walking, he was muttering: 'Come on, Andy. Come on, Andy. You can do it!'

  The fourth set was really close. I had chances. He had chances. You'd think I'd be nervous at 4–4 in the fourth, against one of the best players in the world, but actually it was great. I'd never played anywhere near that level of tennis before. Then I had a break point on his serve. He hit a shot on to the baseline. The line judge called it out, but the umpire over-ruled him. I knew it was in – I saw chalk – but it was one of those that you hope the umpire will leave alone. He didn't. I lost the game. I lost the set. It wasn't a mental let-down. It was just inexperience. Nalbandian knew that the most important thing to do was stay solid and make few mistakes. I was more impetuous. I was in too much of a rush to finish off the point.

  He broke me early in the fifth set. To be honest, I can't remember much about it any more. I was starting to hurt a lot and I was cold. This was the last match on and it was getting late. Whenever I stood up after the changeovers I was feeling really stiff. My legs were hurting. It was the longest match I'd ever played. My legs and my backside were really sore because of the low bounce of the ball. All that bending. That was when I understood what playing professional tennis at the highest level was all about. I realised that I had the potential to play at that level, but I was still a little kid.

  In the locker room afterwards I saw Mark, my coach. We'd hardly worked together for any length of time yet. I didn't really know him that well. Both of us were trying to be brave and hold back the tears. It was really difficult. I apologised to him for losing and he looked quite shocked. He said: 'You've nothing to apologise for. It was a great effort.'

  I just sat there for about fifteen minutes by myself, trying to take it all in. Actually, trying to get my legs working again. When I went for my shower I could hardly stand up. My legs buckled. I was absolutely exhausted, but somehow I gathered myself. I went and did my press conference and that was – nearly – the end of my first Wimbledon.

  I say 'nearly', because I had to come back on the Monday to play in the mixed doubles with Shahar Peer of Israel. She must have wished I hadn't. I was rubbish. We lost in the first round, but there was a huge crowd round Court Three where we played. They told me later that it was the first time in living memory that an unseeded player losing in the first round of the mixed doubles had been asked to hold a press conference. It was quite a fun conversation. They asked me about all the female attention I was getting. I just said: 'That's the best thing about this. It's great.'

  I wasn't being strictly honest. The Nalbandian match hurt for a few days but looking back on it now, it was the match that made me understand what I needed to do to become one of the best players in the world. It was maybe a good thing I didn't win. I played really well all week and just lost to a better player who knew how to pace himself. If I'd won in three or four sets, I might not have realised I needed to be much fitter and much stronger.

  There was a pretty funny mixture of responses to what I'd done. Jimmy Connors, Boris Becker, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova said encouraging things, which was nice, but there were quotes in the papers from some former British Davis Cup captains that were pretty critical.

  David Lloyd said: 'For an 18-year-old kid to be getting tired like that on grass is a big worry. Two weeks in a row, at Queen's and Wimbledon, he got tired. The worst thing in tennis is to have a weakness. Everybody else homes in on it pretty quick.'

  Tony Pickard said my temper was a problem: 'Obviously, nobody has been able to bounce it out of him. Now it will be a hell of a problem to get rid of it. To be doing that shows that when the going gets tough, somebody can't handle it. He isn't John McEnroe. He used it to break everybody else's concentration. Murray is only breaking his own.'

  Lloyd also said that Jimmy Connors had gone over the top about me, 'saying Murray was the
greatest thing since sliced bread. He should not have made a comment like that about a kid who didn't try in the fifth set against Nalbandian. You can't say he is going to win a grand slam. But because we're so desperate, he already has a noose around his neck.'

  In some ways, they were right. I went away afterwards and tried to grow up fast. I wanted to play at that level. Once you get that sort of buzz from playing the biggest tennis tournament in the world, you want to play that sort of tournament consistently. You don't want to go back and play in Challenger and Futures events, the lower-ranked tournaments, where there's no one watching, no atmosphere and not that much fun.

  You don't get Sean Connery phoning you after playing some lowly event in South America. I didn't know he was in the royal box that Saturday, but I saw it in the papers the next day. Then he called me. I might have thought it was a wind-up but my management company at the time had told me he'd asked for my phone number – and anyway, I recognised his voice. It was just like talking to James Bond.

  I didn't do much of the talking. I just listened to that voice I knew so well from all the Bond films I used to watch. Every Christmas there was a two-for-one offer and I had built up the entire set. Now, suddenly, after three matches at Wimbledon, I'm having a conversation with 007 himself.

  I was getting phone calls from James Bond and being followed by the so-called paparazzi. I had gone from being an absolute nobody to finding myself in the papers every day. However, I didn't confuse myself with a national hero. I just felt as if something had changed. I can tell you the exact moment that that began to sink in. It was when I walked out of our Wimbledon house with friends to have a day's go-karting the day after the Nalbandian match. There was a line of white vans with blacked-out windows outside in the street. As our car pulled out, so did they and they followed us all the way to the track. It was like being in a spy movie.