Andy Murray thinks it might be a boring story, but he tells it anyway.
He splays his left hand out on the table. The nail of his ring finger has an odd jagged crack running across it like a geological fault line. When he was a kid, Andy was winding his brother Jamie up, gloating about finally having beaten him at an under-10s tournament in Solihull. The minibus ride back to Dunblane stretched out ahead of them. Eventually, the older Murray retaliated by punching his brother’s hand straight down into the armrest.
“My mum had to pull the van over,” Andy says now, looking at his hand. His nail immediately started going weird. “It had gone totally black and blue and I lost this nail and it's never grown back properly since then. That was my first sort of big win. I remember that one. And I've got the scars to prove it.”
Outside of our suite at Wimbledon, it’s all going on. It’s cool still at the end of May, jumper-and-jacket weather. The championships are a couple of months away. Benches are being power-sanded. Whole nurseries of bedding plants are lined up, hydrangeas and petunias in white, lilac and purple. On courts 16 and 17, two men in Wimbledon uniforms set wooden posts in sockets and roll out a net across the lawn between them.
Murray is a straightforward interview. When an answer is forming as it’s coming out of his mouth, he stares off at a 45-degree angle and talks to the middle distance. Once he’s warmed to what he’s saying, he looks right at you, occasionally grimacing slightly and rubbing his face with one hand. He’s particular about saying what he actually means, but you never get the sense he’s politely backing away from anything. He’s very drily funny, and that familiar level tone makes everything sound both very fair and very blunt.
(There is a reason for this. As I’m leaving after the interview, a makeup artist walks in to give Murray a face mask. He’s never had a face mask before. “Where’s that accent from?” the makeup artist asks as she sets up. “Ahm, well, I’m from Scotland originally,” says Murray. He explains that his slow, careful cadence came when he moved to Spain when he was a teenager, where very few people could understand his accent if he spoke as quickly as he normally did. So he slowed down, and his voice stayed like that).
Murray's here to chat as an American Express ambassador; he'll feature in three interactive games in the Fan Experience space in the Southern Village (including ‘Race To Wimbledon,’ developed in Fortnite, where players leg it past London landmarks to arrive at Centre Court in time). Looking at him now, Murray’s tan shows crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes, but that’s the only sign he’s in his mid-thirties. His hands are, as you might expect, absolutely massive.
Sir Andy Murray OBE gets sneak peek of the new interactive game Race to Wimbledon developed on Fortnite
He is, it’s worth pointing out, one of British sport’s great champions. During an era in which four of the greatest players in the history of men’s tennis converged at once – Murray, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic – Murray held his own with three grand slams, two Olympic gold medals and a Davis Cup victory. He’s proud of what he won during that era of frankly superhuman dominance.
Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic at a Gala Dinner ahead of the Laver Cup at The O2 Arena
.jpeg)
