Scott Free

Andy Murray may be the tennis hero Great Britain wants. And Dunblane needs

Andy Murray is borderline obnoxious and perfectly improper, and the Canadian fans at the tony Hollyburn Tennis Club are wholly unamused. They are here in early August to see the latest crop of young Canadians who have turned up in the draw at the Vancouver Open; they have not come to see Murray carry on like this, shouting "C'mon!" after every lost point and exhaling loudly between serves. After giving away a tiebreak point to American Cecil Mamiit, Murray bellows, "I have never failed under pressure so much in my life." Mamiit shakes his head disapprovingly, but Murray goes on to win the match.

One man in the stands, a Scotsman like Murray, can't take his eyes off the court. And he's not rolling them, either. John Anderson knows tennis, loves it actually, and is as impressed with the way Murray channels his aggression as he is with the easy way Murray switches from flat two-fisted backhands to tricky slices and furtive drop shots. "I've been waiting 30 years to see a Scot play tennis like this," Anderson says.

A Challenger event in Vancouver is a long way from Wimbledon, both in miles and in the quality of tennis. Yet only five weeks before, Murray had raised the hopes of not just Scotland but all of Great Britain when he went much farther at Wimbledon than the world's 317th-ranked player had any right to. Having just turned 18, Murray rolled over George Bastl in the first round, then picked apart No.15 Radek Stepanek in straight sets in the second round. The victory over Stepanek came on the same day that perennial British hope Tim Henman lost in five sets to unheralded Russian Dmitry Tursunov. So the Brits promptly changed the name of the grassy area north of Centre Court from Henman Hill to Murray Mount. And the back pages of London's Sunday Times read: THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING.

Lost in the rush to anoint Murray as royalty was the thought that he actually might be playing for the pride of something other than his nation.

DUNBLANE, SCOTLAND, is a fairly happy place, a middle-class community of about 10,000 on the road from Glasgow to Perth. It is a city of cousins and nephews, uncles and in-laws, grandparents and close friends. People born in Dunblane tend to stay in Dunblane.

On the morning of March 13, 1996-a stone's throw from spring but still bitterly cold-the crocuses were pushing up through the silvery layer of frost that covered the lawns. As the bell in the town's 13th-century gothic cathedral chimed 9 a.m., the children of Dunblane Primary School pushed through the gates on Doune Road.

A half hour later, a balding, heavyset man wearing glasses entered the school. In his pockets were four handguns and more than 700 rounds of ammunition. He walked, unchallenged in such a friendly place, down the hall and into the gymnasium filled with kindergartners. He opened fire, first at the teacher and then at the children, 5- and 6-year-olds who ran for their lives-or froze on the spot. After three minutes of gunfire, 28 of the 29 children in the gym had been hit, along with three teachers who had tried to shield them. One teacher and 16 children were dead. Headmaster Ron Taylor would describe the scene as "utterly appalling, one's worst nightmare." The gunman, eerily cool, slipped the barrel of a pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

On the way to the gymnasium had been a class of fourth-graders, but at the first sign of trouble, the teacher ushered her boys and girls into the closest classroom and instructed them to hide under the desks. They stayed there for hours, singing songs, unaware of the horror down the hall, even though stray bullets had shattered windows in outlying classrooms and wedged into the walls of the school library. One of the boys was 8-year-old Andrew Murray.

Judy Murray had been in her mother's toy shop on High Street when she heard word of the shooting. Massed with the other parents in the parking lot of the school, she waited for news of her children, Andy and his 10-year-old brother, Jamie. "I was so nervous," she says. "Without question, it was the worst day of my life."

NINE YEARS later, Judy was again nervous, but this was one of the best days of her life. A former Scottish national tennis coach and tour player, she was in the stands at Wimbledon's Centre Court, watching her son play No. 19-ranked David Nalbandian of Argentina in the third round. Andy's victory over Stepanek had brought forth wellwishers from all of Scotland-politicians, pop stars, TV chefs. If he felt a little out of his element as he took his first steps onto Centre Court, with a plastic bag full of drinks and his iPod headphones hanging out of one ear, who could blame him?

But it was the battle-hardened Nalbandian who looked lost at first, as the lanky (6'2", 160 pounds) Murray attacked with his entire repertoire and a 130 mph first serve. Murray took the first two sets and won over the crowd with his fist-pumping antics, displaying a refreshing alternative to Henman's sobriety. Mum, too, was into it, cheering wildly as cries of "Go on, Andy" and "C'mon, Braveheart" poured down from the grandstand. Sean Connery jumped up and down in the royal box, and Judy thought to herself, "Oh goodness, there's James Bond cheering for my son."

Alas, Murray lost that day in five sets to the fitter, stronger Nalbandian, but it was not for lack of gumption or talent. It was his first five-setter, and he simply ran out of gas. Said Nalbandian, "Andy only lost this match for physical reasons."

All of Britain took pride in Murray's showing, but nowhere was the celebration felt as deeply as in Dunblane. Says Murray, "The town has coped well with getting itself back on its feet, but it's still known around the world for the wrong reasons. I'd like to think I'm putting it in the headlines for the right ones."

MURRAY WAS 3 when he first picked up a tennis racket, albeit a tiny one, at the modest four-court sports club in Dunblane. It wasn't long before he could rally, serve and keep score. By 7, he had played his first tournament. At 8, he played mixed doubles with his mother and was shocked to hear her swearing under her breath between points. "I think that's where I get it from," Andy says.

Tennis helped the Murrays move past the tragedy. Andy won the Orange Bowl Championships in Florida at 12. Two years later, he played for Britain in the finals of the Under-16 Championships against Spain. There, he met a young Spaniard named Rafael Nadal, who regaled him with stories of outdoor tennis played yearround on red-clay courts against Tour players like Carlos Moya. Andy returned, indignant, to his mother in Dunblane: "How am I supposed to get better just hitting inside with you?" Judy agreed. Andy had been practicing at home in Scotland and at camps throughout Great Britain. But the U.K., with its plentiful rain and not-so-plentiful competition, had done all it could for Andy's tennis. So Judy shipped her son off to the renowned Sanchez-Casal Academy in Barcelona.

Within weeks, Andy's on-court temper was softened (comparatively speaking). Whereas a missed shot was a devastating occurrence at home, in Barcelona a new ball was immediately fired at Murray; there was no time to gripe. The older players wouldn't have tolerated it, anyway. For a year-and-a-half, Andy lived in a yellow wooden bungalow within sight of the academy's courts. He watched as much as he played, honing his natural ability to assess an opponent's weaknesses and play to them. The clay also thickened his skinny legs and encouraged the creativity in shot selection he had shown in Scotland. Though he was raised on grass and plays best on hardcourts-which bodes well for the U.S. Open (Aug. 29 to Sept. 11)-clay became his favorite surface.

"Andy uses a mix of spin and pace in a day when a lot of tennis is about power," says Mark Petchey, his coach. "He has power, too, but he'd rather build a point than hit a big serve and a big forehand to end it. He has no problem playing 20 or 30 shots for a point, and that's partly due to the clay." Last year, Murray was seeded third in the U.S. Open Junior Championships. He dropped just one set and won the tournament.

At Queen's Club in London-the final grass tuneup before Wimbledon-this past June, Murray won his first ATP matches, including an upset of 34thranked American Taylor Dent in Round 2. He then came within two points of beating Thomas Johansson, former Australian Open champion and eventual Wimbledon semifinalist.

Quickly, the Henman comparisons hit full stride. Murray doesn't mind because he admires Henman, but he doesn't see many similarities. Henman charges the net; Murray stays at the baseline. Gentleman Tim is reserved on the court and off, while Murray's easygoing personality, accentuated by a shock of rarely-combed hair and an accent much gentler than the standard Scottish burr, turns to a roar on the court.

It's difficult to be a British tennis player at Wimbledon. The United Kingdom hosts the world's most prestigious tournament, but her people are seemingly hapless at the sport. A Brit has not won a men's Grand Slam event since Fred Perry won both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1936. (It's apropos that Perry's namesake clothing line sponsors Murray.) Yet when a Brit has any measure of success, rather than being praised, he is criticized for not going further. Henman raised his world ranking as high as No. 4 in 2002. He's reached the semis at Wimbledon four times, yet he is lampooned for losing too early.

Henman's success, though, has set the bar high; for the English, only a major will do. They have been quick to adopt the Scottish Murray as their own now that it seems possible he will surpass Henman. But even though he's shown the stuff and fire to compete with the big boys, Murray still has to plug away at Challenger events in Aptos, Calif., and Granby, Quebec, and Vancouver, chasing points and winning just enough money to pay for airfare to the next event. (He's up to No. 146 now, and no Scot has ever broken into the top 100.)

His immediate goals are to qualify for the U.S. Open-not a loch-and to move his ranking into double-digits by Wimbledon next year. But should Murray's play turn sour, the wet London wind could blow the other way. "If Murray wins, he's a Brit," says one journalist. "If he loses, he's a Scot."

That's fine, because Murray is a Scot first and a Brit second, and as long as you don't call him English, he doesn't much care which title you choose. But while all of Britain felt Dunblane's pain nine years ago, Murray claims to remember nothing of the shooting other than the resonant silence that descended upon the town in March 1996. And Andy, who is uncomfortable discussing details, likes to keep that silence. But it's only natural to speculate that it remains a source of both his inspiration and his on-court belligerence. "You have to try and make sense of it," says Murray. "But that's not easy when you're a child, and suddenly some of your friends aren't there anymore."

When Judy Murray found Jamie and Andy safe and sound that day, she was amazed: all the boys knew was that a man had been in the school with a gun. They would learn later that the man was Thomas Hamilton, a 43-year-old scout and boys club leader whom they knew, and that 17 people were dead. It's been years, and they're still trying to understand the enormity of the event.

The town buried many of its dead in a specially dedicated section of the local cemetery. One month after the shooting, the gymnasium, the most glaring reminder of the massacre, was demolished. Five years later, a standing stone, the Dunblane Commemoration, was erected in the Dunblane Cathedral.

At tennis tournaments, Andy and his mother used to say their hometown was Stirling, five miles down the road toward Glasgow, to avoid answering questions about the shooting. Though no one will ever forget, the people of Dunblane have steadfastly moved on. They'd like the connection between their name and the evil of nine years ago to be erased forever. They want Dunblane to be known instead as the gateway to the rolling Scottish countryside.

Or, better still, as the hometown of tennis champion Andrew Murray.

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