Two years ago, just before leaving his teens, Britain’s top tennis player spoke to Alan Franks about his parents' divorce, Dunblane, the love for his older brother – and his explosive temper.

There's no pleasing us. For the past ten years we've had two of the best British tennis players since Fred Perry. One of them, Tim Henman, we dismiss as being too bland; the other, Greg Rusedski, as too Canadian. Then along comes an absolute tiger of a teenager, Andy Murray, all snarls, sulks and outbursts, and we go huffy about his manners. We even have him down as a sexist because of a pretty harmless joke about women's serves, and complain when he celebrates a victory by giving his girlfriend a public kiss. What is our problem? Simple. We want someone who plays tennis like Superbrat John McEnroe and swears like Noddy. And because we are stuck with the dated notion that we are a world power in both sport and etiquette, we take such a creature to be our prerogative. For most of his brief and remarkable rise to the top of the game, the unruly Murray has been seen as our problem, while the truth is that we are his.
In the course of a remarkably candid conversation about his growing up and the pressures of young adulthood, he talks about the tennis court as an early refuge from his divorced and arguing parents; the old sibling rivalry and intense love for his older brother; and his home town of Dunblane, riven by tragedy when a gunman burst into the boys' primary school and killed 16 of their classmates.
He turns 20 in ten days. Viewed from the sidelines of a practice court, he can still look magnificently sullen in a classic teen way; the head hung down from a height, the unimpressable face, the walk turned into a sort of slouch by the huge shorts. It's the body language of the unjustly gated.
He's tall and rangy, about 6ft 2in, but with the look of someone who has not yet done with growing. Apart from all the other pressures of his life, he's probably a bit fed up about having to wait for the completed version of himself to arrive.
On this exhibition court at the Glasgow Science Centre he is playing people even younger than himself. Although he's barely in second gear, you can see that the ungainliness is actually just long limbs waiting to obey orders with grace and power. The way in which this happens in competitive matches makes crowds gasp at his powers of retrieval. Last month he entered the top ten of the world rankings for the first time. Henman was 23 when he reached this elite, and Rusedski 24. Even Roger Federer, currently the best player in the world, was 20. Murray could now boast, if he chose, that he has beaten that other competitive Scot Gordon Brown to Number Ten.
His manner has become confident and assertive beneath a dogged drawl, but he is far more polite and restrained than the rumours suggest. His friends say that when he is relaxed he is a good and perceptive listener, and that his conversation ranges as broadly as his strokes. If he is not at his most relaxed today it might be because he is doing this  talking to the press, with whom he still has issues. Today's event is an open tennis clinic organised by Murray's sponsor the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust. As the name of this body implies, its aim is to help Murray's young compatriots to do in their own way as he has done, and turn their talents and initiatives to productive ends.
Such occasions teem with corporate minders who hover proprietorially around the young star while he hides his annoyance more stoically than before many an umpire. One of these figures even snorts derisively when I ask the question  a fair one if not the most original  of whether he is going to win Wimbledon.
He talks of his own maturing, his gaining of control. Having compared the tapes of the last two Wimbledons, he realised he was managing to stay calmer for longer in 2006 than in 2005, even though this does not apply to the really crucial points. "That's when I might get more fired up and throw the racket and shout a bit.' Then, inevitably, there's the press. I ask him what it was like to become the focus of so much attention so young  he turned professional at 17, and the following year became the youngest British player to take part in the Davis Cup. He also beat Henman, still British number one at that point, in the first round of the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) Tour event in Basle. It was strange, he agrees, being so young, away from home so much, and being asked so many questions.
"Some of the negatives,' he says carefully, "are that if I say something that I've maybe not worded correctly, then a spin can be put on it.' This brings us to the briefly notorious case of Auckland last year, when he observed, jokingly, that with seven service breaks out of 12 games in the first set, he and his opponent had been serving like women. "Now, when I said that, no one there seemed to take offence,' he recalls. "In fact, they seemed to find it funny. So it was odd to see it splashed over the back pages [of the British tabloids] as me being sexist. If I was at lunch with friends, it was just the sort of thing I would say. But those are the occasions I have to learn from. I can't think about saying that sort of thing if every time it gets blown out of all proportion and I'm the one who ends up with egg on my face.' But then, almost as if to flout the need for reticence, he begins to talk as never before about the forces that have shaped his ferociously competitive spirit, the difficulties he experienced with his separated parents, and above all the relationship with his older brother.
"Yes, I found it difficult,' he recalls. "My parents separated when we were very young. They didn't speak too much and they didn't get on too well together. They are just two different people. I think that's quite normal.
Most guys that I know say that if they had a problem they would go to their mother. And that was kind of the same for me, because my father was the one who was trying to make me stand up for myself.
"I always felt there was maybe a little competition [between the parents], so if I stayed with my mother for two nights, then I should stay with my father for two nights. At Christmas, I didn't know how long to spend with each of them. I would get stuck in the middle of their arguments. I would get really upset, and one of the things I would have loved to have more than anything was a family that worked better together, although I love my mother and father to bits.' Does he relate his anger to all this? "It could
When I was younger and went on court, and I was free from the arguments and fights my parents were having, I could just go out and play. But it could be.' During our conversation his mother Judy is a few yards away, talking to the young tennis enthusiasts. It's not that she's chaperoning him  they both grew out of that a while ago  just that she is still deeply involved with the game. She is a former Scottish Ladies champion, and coached both Andy and his brother Jamie, who is 15 months older, from when they were three.
When I ask Andy whether he would mind my speaking to her about him, he says that's fine, but probably better if he's not there. When he speaks of "home' he still means the Scottish town of Dunblane, where he grew up and went to school. He was nine, and Jamie ten, when a gunman burst into their primary school in 1996, killing their teacher and 16 classmates. At the time of the attack the two brothers were on their way to the gym and managed to hide under a desk in the headmaster's study. The killer turned out to be Thomas Hamilton, an ex-Scout leader who ran a youth group which both the boys had belonged to. Both they and their parents have since said that the two were too young at the time to have been aware of the enormity of the tragedy.
Yet another interested presence today is his manager Patricio Apey, who says that the only other British sportsman who has excited as much interest as his young charge is Wayne Rooney. Murray, he says, will make tennis cool. He will also make himself wealthy, having already landed lucrative contracts with Tag Heuer watches, Head rackets, Fred Perry clothing, David Lloyd leisure, and others. "This country has never seen a tennis player with this young man's personality,' says Apey. There is, he adds, just one other player with an equal commercial potential; not Roger Federer, but Rafael Nadal, the glamorous and formidable 20-year-old Spaniard.

It's tennis wherever he looks. Even his girlfriend's father, Nigel Sears, is head coach of the British women's game. Then there is his brother Jamie, a professional doubles player. Until Andy was 12, Jamie was the better player.
"I'd never want to play against him because I would always lose,' he recalls. "Then I would get angry and he would wind me up. I always wanted to beat him, and I never did.' Until the day that he did. "Yeah, that was special for me.' And very difficult for Jamie? "Well, tennis is the only thing that I'm better than him at. He is cleverer than me, studied harder than me, was better at athletics. It [Andy's first victory over Jamie] was probably not too much of an issue, but once I started to win more, and the games got closer, well, he didn't like it at first. But now he's just great, and has been more supportive than anyone. And I'm exactly the same with him. I want him to be more of a success than me. I get more upset when he loses a match than I do when I lose one.' The difference between their games might have become a problem in the classic manner of sibling rivalry. As Andy was climbing the singles rankings, beating such giants as Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt and becoming the first British teenager since Buster Mottram to enter the top 100, Jamie was stranded around the 800 mark. "It did look like he wouldn't make a career in singles,' says Andy. "He was making about £100 a week in tournaments; last year my earnings were about $700,000.' However, in February Jamie and his American doubles partner Eric Butorac won the finals of the SAP Open in San Jose, delighting Andy quite as much as his own successful defence of the singles title. This made the Murrays the first brothers to win singles and doubles at the same tournament since Emilio and Javier Sanchez at Kitzbuhel 18 years ago. Four months earlier they had also reached the finals of the Bangkok indoor tournament as a doubles team in their own right, losing to the Israeli pair Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram. "I would have felt much happier winning that match with Jamie than I did winning the singles in San Jose,' he says.
Would the brothers feel awkward, as the Williams sisters do, about the prospect of playing against each other? "Probably not now,' says Andy. "At least, not in singles. That is not where he has chosen to make his career.
But if I were playing against him in doubles, I would not want to win.' It is, he notes, very important to have a stable and steady girlfriend in your career. This he appears to have in Kim Sears. She is the same age as he, comes from a tennis family and, most importantly, "kind of gets it, which is pretty tough to find nowadays'. They have been going out for 18 months and he says it is quite possible they will settle down together. She is a former pupil at the £18,000-a-year Burgess Hill School in West Sussex and is considering a career as an actress. When she found herself in the media spotlight after Andy's first San Jose triumph, she deflected attention by saying, "This is all about Andy, not me.' Comparisons between him and Wayne Rooney there may be, but fewer between her and Coleen McLoughlin.
With the help of his mother and an accountant, he is gradually working out how to live with his wealth. In some estimates, including that of the celebrity publicist Max Clifford, this could amount to £50 million or more in the course of his playing career. Such prosperity is strange, he agrees.
When he was in Spain during his teenage years, developing his game at Barcelona's Sánchez-Casal academy, he had little money. Not surprising when you consider the fees were £30,000. The Lawn Tennis Association funded one third of this, while his parents managed to get most of the rest from Tennis Scotland, Sport England and sundry sponsors.
"I was struggling a little there,' he says. "I don't really know how to live with money, and so I didn't go straight out and buy a big car, big house and so on. That doesn't interest me. I'd rather have money than not  if I want to help someone, or think about having a big house in a few years' time. But it doesn't bother me. I might eat in nicer restaurants, but apart from that I don't do anything differently.' His mother Judy says she saw from the very start that he was not only very fast and competent at ball games, but that he was also tactically shrewd. "I remember taking them to the European Junior Badminton championships at Kelvin Hall,' she says. "He would have been ten or 11. I got them magazines and sweets and they came along humphing and grumphing. He pretended not to pay any attention and then said, 'Can we go now?' I said, 'But there's another set to go,' and he said, 'But it's pretty obvious how to beat this guy.' He was talking about the number one in Europe, remember. 'You just play everything up high into the backhand corner. All he does is drop it short to the other corner, and you get him with a drop shot.' He'd worked all the patterns out.' Neil Harman, The Times tennis correspondent, sees Murray as "very different from what we have come to expect from a British player. There's a bit of devil there, which you do need. He's astonishing, he's ahead of schedule, and he believes he can be the best. He's a great thinker, a wonderful moverŠ but he's not going to be easy to handle. He wants things on his terms and sometimes you have to stand up to him.' This is a young man who has had to learn at a colossal rate these past two years. You can't help but feel there are a few tirades to come; perhaps too the odd faux pas, like his pre-World Cup hope that "anyone except England' should win it. Still, his trainer these days is Brad Gilbert, who won 20 singles titles in his own career, turned Roddick and Agassi (Murray's idol) into world-beaters and could match his young charge for volatile temperaments. We talk of Henman, against whom Murray won't hear a word. He thinks the older player has been severely undervalued by press and public alike. And of Roger Federer, and how you beat him, as Murray has (round two of last year's Cincinnati Masters). He makes it sound so simple. "Basically the most important thing is to believe. It's the same in all walks of life.
If you go into a business believing it won't do well, you aren't going to put your whole heart into it. You have to believe you have a chance of winning. Yes, maybe you hope he has an off-day, but half the battle is already lost if you are convinced you won't win.' Wimbledon? "Well,' says Neil Harman, "someone has to beat Federer there some time. When that happens, Andy will have as good a chance of winning it as anyone.' For what it's worth I thought he was a fabulous young man  forthright, burning, diplomatic, and really giving it everything. I am not the only one to find, when talking to him or his mother, that Dunblane stands there like an elephant in the corner. What effect must that atrocity have had? Nor am I the only one to be told to get lost for even raising it. When I do ask Murray about the incident, he replies patiently that he has been asked about it a lot. "I just can't remember enough about it,' he says. "If I had been older, maybe it would have been more significant. But I was too young to understand everything that was happening, and it didn't seem like such a big deal to me. I understand, now, that it was huge, and had it happened now I would be shocked and completely devastated.' I want to ask if he is still close with families who lost children, but am told to "move on' by one of the corporate minders who has lurked close and looks at me as if I am scum. Well, point taken. But it was the last question on the subject, and from the way Murray looks back at him, it's clear he neither wants or needs anyone else to speak on his behalf. If he ever did.
 

This article first appeared in The Times Saturday Magazine in May 2007.

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