Tennis coach Judy Murray says that leading Andy to Wimbledon victory was worth the price of the “pushy” reputation she gained in the process because she believed that her son “was never going to be fully accepted for the great player he is unless he won Wimbledon”.
Speaking to Good Housekeeping magazine, the mother-of-two revealed, “I felt that nothing we did would be good enough until Andy won Wimbledon. It was always the big question hanging in the air. It wasn’t going to matter that he had been the runner-up the year before or had won the Olympic title”.
On an even more personal level, the 57-year-old says that Andy winning Wimbledon gave her a voice: “It was almost like he had to win Wimbledon before I could speak,” she told the Guardian earlier this month. It gave her the confidence to take part in Strictly Come Dancing in 2014, which, she says, “helped me to stop feeling that everyone thought I was a nightmare pushy mother”.
Her confidence had taken a number of knocks over the preceding years, she admits. After a presenter at the Scottish Sports Awards asked her whether Andy “couldn’t have bought [her] something decent to wear” on stage, she vowed never to get “caught out” again. “I turned down most things, as I was too self-conscious and I didn’t want to risk getting it wrong again,” she reveals. “If I couldn’t get out of going, I would sit in the loo with the door shut until they called everyone through. It’s not my world. I didn’t have money for clothes. I had no interest in dressing up. It was horrible.”
She also recalls her horror on spotting a newsagent’s billboard saying “Boris Becker tells Andy to ditch his mum” whilst buying milk in her local shop. “I thought, ‘People will think he knows what he’s taking about. She must be a nightmare.’ He would have no thought at all about the impact that would have on me,” she recollects.
Judy, who previously admitted that Andy and wife Kim have called her ‘glam-ma’ since the birth of their daughter, has said she has no intentions of pushing her 1-year-old granddaughter, Sophia, to follow in her father’s footsteps.
The tennis coach is still involved with nurturing young talent in the sport however, having launched ‘Miss-Hits’ – an introduction to tennis for young girls to get more girls playing tennis. Judy also runs tennis workshops, one of which was attended by the Duchess of Cambridge in Edinburgh last tear.
Judy is “hopeful” that Andy, who is currently struggling with a hip problem, will be fit for Wimbledon this year. “He’s been unlucky this year with a few illnesses and an elbow injury,” she explains. “You have not got as much time to practice on the court and not as many matches as you would like.”
