As the hours ticked by, the odds of Andy Murray risking surgery to save his tennis career grew irresistibly shorter. On Wednesday, 24 hours after he pulled back again from re-entering the grind of the Tour – nearly six months after being cut down at Wimbledon, four months since pulling out of the US Open at the last minute and less than two weeks before the Australian Open – he confronted his most daunting dilemma alone in a Brisbane hotel room.
A few miles from the Sofitel in the centre of the bustling state capital, the sub-tropical sun blazed on the Queensland Tennis Centre as players went about their business in the second round of the Brisbane International, an ATP250 event bedevilled by late injury pullouts. Alexandr Dolgopolov beat Horacio Zeballos in straight sets; the men’s No3 seed, Nick Kyrgios, struggled past his compatriot, Matthew Ebden, in three; and the women’s No3 seed, Elina Svitolina, crushed Ana Konjuh.
How Murray would have loved to have joined them all. How he looked forward to his first competitive match in nearly six months. How it pained him to admit that his body was not ready. “I just want to play,” he said when he arrived here, putting his fall from No1 in the world to No16 into sharp relief. On Monday his ranking will slip a further two places, pushing him further to the margins of a sport he ruled, statistically at least, as recently as last August.
Kyrgios, who has had his own hip problems and is a friend of Murray’s, said: “It’s not comfortable. And it definitely affects a guy like him, who relies on his movement and athleticism so much. He’s one of the best athletes the game has ever seen. He’s going to have to get his hip right to get to the top of the sport again, and hopefully he can do it.”
Lleyton Hewitt, who spent much of his career held together by the nuts and bolts of clever surgeons, provided qualified hope. “I had a labrium tear on my left hip,” the Australian former world No1 said. “I played through it for four or five months, and then I got to the point where I had to have a small operation. I was out for three months.
“When I started to feel the same thing on the other side [a couple of years later], I got it done straight away. My foot operation was a much bigger deal. I don’t know anything about Andy’s situation, but it’s possible his hip is in worse shape than mine was. I can only speak for myself, but it wasn’t too bad for me.”
Murray, meanwhile, sat by himself in the penthouse suite of a hotel 12,000 miles from his wife and two young children and agonised over the choices: to continue on to Melbourne, or fly home. The mood was for a low-key retreat from the sun to mid-winter Oxshott. Speculation swirled.
Wayne Sleep, renowned in his own field, no doubt meant well recounting in gruesome detail in the Times how he coped with his own hip surgery, but his revelation that he was back dancing in Cinderella within six weeks bordered on the surreal as a reference point. If only Murray’s life on court were such a fairytale.
While back surgery in 2013 rejuvenated his game, this time it is different. Murray is wary of another operation – not because he fears the pain (he was born with a split knee-cap, as well as weak ligaments in ankle and wrists and a string of other ailments aggravated by his calling) but because, as he revealed in his poignant post on Instagram the previous day: “The chances of a successful outcome are not as high as I would like.”
Now he was his own umpire in a bigger game. Rather than subject himself to the inquisition of a press conference on Tuesday, he had poured his heart out on social media, achingly, and it was obvious there was an unspoken subtext. So serious has the injury become, the accumulated baggage of a dozen years twisting and turning against the best players of his or any other era, that his post-career health is the most significant, perhaps overriding, issue.
Then from left field came the news that he had signed the promising Katie Swan to his small roster of young athletes at 77 Sports. Murray’s management team issued a statement from him: “Katie is a player I’ve been watching for a while. She’s got great potential and has already had some good results. I’m hoping we can offer support to her in areas on and off the court and complement the team she has in place already.”
Was he already thinking of retiring from playing? At 30, Murray is limping like an ageing postman at the bottom of a tower block. As much as he loves tennis, he loves his family more. Perhaps, contrary to indications, that will be the game-changer. He once said that if he failed to win a grand slam but had performed to the best of his ability, he would be happy enough with his career to walk away. He has won three of them; whenever the day arrives, family life and a wonderful cv might just make his final decision easier.
