My mum is to blame for the state of British tennis. I think it was the tennis correspondent of the Guardian that came up with that joke. He said she should have had more children. But when you looked at where we stood in the world at the start of 2008, maybe he had a point. My brother Jamie was still the reigning Wimbledon mixed doubles champion, my win at the Qatar Open had taken me to number nine in the world, but while there were twelve Spaniards, fourteen Frenchman, eleven Argentinians, eight Germans, six Russians, four Croatians, three Serbians, three Swedes, three Australians, three Chileans, two Swiss and two Belgians among the top-100, from Britain there was just one. Me. Same as Latvia. Same as Cyprus. Tim Henman still had enough ranking points to be number four in Britain, but he'd been retired six months.
Of course it was an indictment of a system that's been wrong for years. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen I saw at first hand what it was like. That is when I was most actively involved in British junior tennis, even though I was living away in Spain for some of the time. I often practised with British players, before and during competitions. You could just see the sort of stuff they got up to.
There are some players that work hard. Jamie Baker, my fellow Scot, is one of them and he's moved away to Saddlebrook in America now, just like I went to train in Spain. In Britain, there is something wrong with the mentality. There's just so much jealousy and negativity at most of the tournaments.
I used to go away on trips as a junior with one of the British teams for up to five weeks at a time and the other British guys were wanting me to lose. That's when you know something's wrong. These guys are supposed to be your friends, but nobody wants anyone to do better than they do themselves. It's good to be competitive, but why couldn't they just try to raise their own level or believe in themselves instead of wishing someone else would lose in the first round, so that they weren't the worst player there.
I've been there when British players are talking behind the back of another British player. There is way too much jealousy. It is so, so annoying. There is no need for it, especially at that age when everyone is trying to get better. It's not about just winning at that stage. It is about developing – but many of the players, parents and coaches seem to think that winning is the only thing. You just have to see what some of the kids and parents are like at some tournaments, and you would understand.
If I was sitting watching a match alongside the court, you would see me clap and shout and get pumped up on their behalf, but there were loads of examples of fellow British players sitting watching my matches, emotionless.
I've never seen a punch-up, but I have seen parents arguing when their kids are playing. It was completely different in Spain. When I was playing Futures over there, the players didn't come with their parents. They didn't even have coaches with them half the time. They were just playing a tennis match. There were no other people involved.
There was no cheating or people 'forgetting' the scores, as I have experienced in Britain. Some kids had a habit of pretending they didn't remember the score because the rule is that if you don't have an umpire on the court – and many junior matches do not – you go back to the last score both players can agree on. Essentially you get cheats 'forgetting' that they have just lost a game. Funnily enough, the last thing they can remember is a score of 15-all. It happened to me all the time at that age.
We have such a closed mind compared to the rest of the world. Everyone seemed to think that being the best in Britain was great. I was always asked: 'What's it like to be number one in Britain?' I used to say: 'I don't mind.' I meant it. I didn't mind. It's a worldwide tour and I would much rather be 11th in the world than number one in Britain. You don't hear Rafa Nadal celebrating the fact that he's number one in Spain. He wants to be known as number two in the world. We live on a world circuit. That is how we are judged. I don't understand the whole British mentality. Why do they think it's a big deal to be British number one, when it's so completely irrelevant?
I can't work out exactly what is wrong with us. Perhaps it is as simple as money. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen in Britain, you do get given a lot, but I think you have to be hard on players at that age. Maybe the people around them aren't hard enough. I don't think they understand how much effort the Spanish players put in, for instance, and when a Spanish guy turns eighteen, his funding stops. That's it. That is the cut-off. They make it on their own or they don't. It makes them work hard and look after themselves. However, when you're funded all the way through your career, then maybe subconsciously you relax.
I know people could accuse me of being hypocritical when saying that, because one of my coaches, Brad Gilbert, was subsidised by the LTA when I was on the tour. But when I went to train in Spain as a teenager, my mum and dad had to find the money from all kinds of sources and I genuinely think it made me work harder, knowing the sacrifices they were making for me. I definitely did not have money on a plate during my junior career.
Obviously there isn't just one way of getting to the top. Borg did it differently from Becker, who did it differently from Agassi who was different from Sampras, and Federer was completely different again. There isn't just one way of doing it – but whichever way you choose to do it, players have to be made to work hard. If a player isn't told 'Go to the gym,' they're not going to go.
To me, the most important days in tennis are weekends. That's when semi-finals and finals are played. We don't have a nine-to-five job. We're not getting paid for five days a week. I can understand someone taking Sunday off, if they have worked really hard all week, but not the whole weekend.
I'm away a lot of the time, but I turn up at the National Training Centre in Roehampton, the multi-million pound headquarters of British tennis, and no one is there. I'm often looking for a partner to hit with and I have to call one of the coaches to try and find someone. He will call around three or four players and the response I have got from them range from: 'No, I don't normally practise at weekends' or 'I'm feeling a little bit sick today.' Last time it happened, I eventually found one guy, James Ward, who had already left the Centre because he couldn't find anyone to hit with either. He was on a train home, but he turned round and came back to practise with me. I really appreciated that. Maybe it's just a coincidence that he has spent much of his time training at an academy in Spain.
As for the others, there are fifty-two weekends in a year and if you are missing most of them, plus taking time off over Christmas, that's a lot of potential practice days lost. I would say that a large number of British players only practise half the days of the year.
At the Sanchez-Casal Academy during the time I was there, it was fine to take Sundays off. If you were absolutely knackered by the Saturday – and we were – it was sensible to have one day of rest. In Britain, however, I don't see the players doing what we did in Spain: the four-and-a-half hours on court every day, the four hours of school, the hour of fitness. I don't see it at all. Sometimes I turn up at Roehampton and it's like a ghost town.
I don't really know why the coaches don't enforce a greater work ethic, but if they're only paid for five days a week – and quite a few of the Belgian coaches go back home on a Friday evening and come back Monday morning – I can see their point of view. But I just don't get why nobody is going to the gym at weekends, or doing a recovery job. The LTA have built the facilities, but the players don't make the best use of them. When I go to the gym there never seems to be anyone in there. Basically, I have the equipment to myself, which is great for me, but what a waste. Only a couple of times have I ever walked in and found four or five other people there. There is something wrong with the mentality and work ethic of most of the British players.
There doesn't seem to be anyone who's brutally honest about it either. I think the best way is to confront it, especially when it has been so bad for so long. Someone in authority at British tennis should come out and say: 'Look, we're doing really badly. We're not good enough. We must make some changes.' But everyone is being really unrealistic with goals: things like: 'We're going to get eight players in the top-100 by 2008, and then it changed to seven players in the top-100 by 2010.'
Which players are they then?
The new regime at the Lawn Tennis Association has definitely tried to improve things and get great coaches involved – that's without a doubt – people like Brad Gilbert and Paul Annacone. They are excellent and will do a good job – but, at the same time, would Sir Alex Ferguson ever work with Plymouth Argyle? You've got the best coaches in the world, who have helped Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and Pete Sampras between them, but they are working with players who don't really deserve it.
These world-class coaches have gone from working with world-class players to teaching someone how to play tennis. That is not what they have done before. As a coach to Agassi or Sampras, they were not teaching them the game – it is pretty obvious that that had been sorted already – they were teaching tactics and helping with the mental approach. In my view, the current regime are putting the wrong people together.
The LTA have obviously spent a lot of money on their coaches, but the first thing the players need is to get into much better shape: to train harder and get in the gym more. I appreciate the irony of me saying this, when I was criticised so heavily for being unfit, but I always understood I needed to be fitter and I made the commitment to improve.
To my mind, the LTA should not spend so much money on a number of the world's greatest coaches. That does not mean I am ungrateful for my time with Brad, but I think British tennis at this stage needs good, experienced, committed, less-expensive coaches plus experienced fitness coaches and physiotherapists who understand the demands of the game. To me, that is more of a priority than the tennis. The players have to understand what hard work is. They need someone who's not going to take any shit from them and if they say they're tired – tough. They still have to work hard.
I don't know if it's going to get any better under the new LTA regime. I hope so but it's one of those cases where you have to wait and see. I'm not an expert on running a national federation, but I have my ideas and I can pass on my experience of what I saw when I was younger. I don't think it's changed a whole lot since then. The results would suggest not.
The other issue in British tennis is how much people like to put you down. When I started to do well as a junior, British coaches like Alan Jones – who worked with the number one British woman Elena Baltacha – and Tony Pickard and a few others criticised me in public. I just don't understand the attitude. It is as though success is a bad thing.
When you go over to the United States, it is completely different. Over there, everyone is pumped up for the young players. You hear people within the sport saying: 'Have you seen this kid play?' and they say it with pride, not criticism. Last time I was there, the talk was about a young American kid called Donald Young, who turned professional and then lost thirteen ATP matches in a row. They didn't rip into him. They still said they believed in him. By 2008, he had broken into the World Top-100.
I think a lot of British tennis is influenced by the media. The people who run tennis have rarely confronted things head on. From my point of view, they seem to mismanage the news that sneaks into the papers. If it is something negative, they get all defensive about it. Why can't they be honest and less frightened of the media? Sometimes they get themselves into the ludicrous position of saying how great everything is.
Meanwhile, within tennis, there is just so much badmouthing going on. Within days of me taking David Nalbandian to five sets at Wimbledon, there was virtually a queue of former Davis Cup captains waiting to criticise me.
In a newspaper article, David Lloyd said: 'Murray is an 18-year-old who played pretty good on grass. That's as far as you can go. You can't say he is going to win a grand slam. But because we are so desperate, he already has a noose around his neck. We have to be careful with him. It is hard to live with that expectation and hype.'
He was basically saying that I wasn't that great and don't rush me, which is fine. I didn't disagree with that.
Then Tony Pickard said: 'He is off now to play some Challengers in the US, and if he can win a couple that would set the fire, it would mean he has taken away an awful lot from Wimbledon. But he has never won a match at Challenger level yet, and that worries the hell out of me.'
He shouldn't have worried so much. I had won quite a few matches at Challenger level. I'd reached a quarter-final actually. So he was wrong about that. But the rest of the things he said didn't quite make sense. David Lloyd was saying don't rush me. Tony Pickard was saying that I needed to win matches straight away: so, rush me. Which is it? Rush me or don't rush me?
It just all seemed so negative. I can understand what they were saying. I wasn't in the top-10 yet – not even close – and I needed to work to get there, but they were giving these views straight after my first Wimbledon, aged eighteen, where I'd won two matches in straight sets – one of them against a top-20 player – and lost in five sets to a former finalist. It would have been nice if they could have been a bit more positive or maybe even waited to criticise me. After all I was completely new to this but within the next six weeks, won two Challengers in America.
Pickard also complained that I'd taken what he called 'the glamour trip to Newport', instead of stepping down immediately in class – but if you are eighteen years old and offered a wild card into an ATP tournament, what the hell are you going to say? 'No, sorry, I'm going to play a Futures tournament, just to keep me grounded.' Then they would have accused me of lacking ambition.
Lloyd even had a go at Jimmy Connors for saying something nice about me at Wimbledon. I would have thought that a compliment from one of the greatest players ever was a good thing. Everyone in tennis has a lot of respect for his judgement as a match commentator, but when he was nice about me some people disagreed. Lloyd said he shouldn't have praised me so much because I was that 'kid who didn't try in the fifth set against David Nalbandian.'
Why couldn't the critics just have sat back and said: 'It's been a great run, hopefully he can build on it for the rest of the year'? That's all you need to say. But that tells you everything you need to know about the mentality of British tennis. Those guys are two of the most experienced coaches in Britain and they are coming out with stuff like that. Obviously, there are so many different ways of making it to the top. No one is going to be right all the time. Whatever they said, I had to do it my way.
It was the same for Tim Henman. He did it his way too. Not everybody liked that. He was horribly and unfairly criticised for it, but I know that as his successor, I owe him a great debt. He gave people hope in British tennis when, before he came along, there was just disaster.
I didn't meet him properly until I was sixteen. I'd obviously watched him and supported him while I was growing up, so when I did meet him, it was strange. You can imagine what I was expecting. Everyone knows that Tim comes over as a pretty serious guy on the court. He doesn't show too much emotion, except those little fist-pumps. He seems very reserved. So when I joined the Davis Cup squad in Luxembourg in April 2004. I thought I would be totally intimidated by him.
I couldn't have been more wrong. He was friendly and funny, always making jokes and wanting to play games – any game from Top Trumps to throwing a piece of screwed up paper into a bin, or seeing how many times you could keep a tennis ball bouncing on your head. I was at the age I wanted to do all those things as well. It was as though the thirteen-year age gap just didn't exist.
I was a 16-year-old kid who couldn't even play because of my knee injury and I would have understood if he was almost a little bit rude to me. But he wasn't and he could not have been more the opposite. I obviously couldn't practise, but I watched all the time and picked up balls by the side of the court. Tim was never less than great to me.
He does a good job of covering up his real personality. It was his way of dealing with the fame and you have to have a lot of respect for that. He didn't want to have to deal with the hassle of being asked about controversial subjects. I should know. Controversial subjects tend to involve fellow players or someone you are going to be seeing for the rest of your career. He understood that controversy puts you in an uncomfortable position. He did a really good job of making his life easier.
He was also a great guy to have around the locker room of any tournament. He always spoke to everyone. After thirteen years on the tour, there are almost bound to be guys you have arguments or problems with, but I don't know anyone who dislikes him. There was just the one time when David Nalbandian said something after their match in Madrid and, apart from that, I have never heard any other player say anything. Nalbandian was raging that Tim was pretending to be something he wasn't. The quote was: 'All this selling himself as a gentleman is not true. He is the worst rubbish there is.' It was so obviously against everyone else's opinion that Nalbandian was probably just upset because he lost.
I don't think Tim ever really cared about his press. He had a really successful career. He played at the top level of his sport for thirteen years. He is now the father of three daughters and I am sure he is going to enjoy settling down with them and his wife. I am positive he has no regrets about the way he dealt with the press, even if they regret he wasn't more colourful. He never had any big issues with them, he never threw them any bones to chew over. He just tried to be positive in his press conferences. I completely understand. It gives you time to concentrate on your tennis.
It is part of the job, the press conference, but it can be tough to conduct one after every single match. In the end, it becomes a routine. If I've won I say: 'I played well. I executed my game plan well.' If I've lost, I say: 'I didn't play well.' That is, more or less, it. We probably have to do about 110 press conferences a year and who can blame someone for sparing themselves the trouble of being interesting.
Anyway, I think it is unfair of the media to comment on how somebody deals with them. They don't know what it is like to be on the receiving end of some of the articles that get written. I don't think it was right of the press to criticise Tim's dealings with them, especially someone under as much pressure as he was. They didn't see it from his point of view. Tim has done a lot for British tennis, no question. It is not his fault that there aren't enough British kids playing tennis. That is the responsibility of the governing body. His responsibility was to win matches. It was irrelevant whether his personality was best suited to young children.
He was even accused of coming from a background of middle-class privilege, but that is how he was brought up. Was he supposed to act as if he was working class? It is not comfortable trying to change your personality, pretend to be someone you are not. Tim was always the person he was, in terms of being middle class. He just didn't show the real and funny side of his personality. I don't blame him. I have seen first hand that you can get yourself into trouble when you do.
He was never completely perfect. He swore on court, although he didn't make it as visible as some players. He loved winning, he hated losing, but instead of getting really pumped up or obviously down, he just showed the same emotional level all through the match. Who is to criticise that? Some of the greatest players of all time were the same. Bjorn Borg was one and Roger Federer, to an extent, is another. I can't be like that, but there is nothing wrong with it as an approach.
Tim and I have spent a decent amount of time together ever since. After Wimbledon in 2005, when I was embarking on the tour in America for the first time and didn't know any of the players, he took me out for dinner. He also played backgammon with me and tried to make me feel comfortable. It could have been really horrible for me as the new boy. He always made an effort, despite the fact that I was a potential rival. That is why Jamie and I, and so many other guys on the tour, have so much respect for him. He was always, always helpful to us. He's a great person.
He always said I was hopeless at backgammon and I needed a lot more practice, so when my eighteenth birthday was approaching, he had his chance. He was out shopping when he saw a great backgammon set for sale in a London store and went in to buy it for me. But when they told him it cost about £400, he thought better of it. 'I like Andy,' he told my mum, 'but not that much.'
Even though he's clearly a bit tight when it comes to my birthdays, I regard him as a friend. When Greg Rusedski was a star in ITV's Dancing on Ice, Tim and I were texting each other all time with our comments. Some of Tim's were pretty funny. I imagine he would no more go on one of those reality programmes that I ever would, but that doesn't mean Tim is not a fun guy to be around.
It annoys me that some people saw him as a loser. That is the press. If you don't really follow the sport and just flip through a newspaper, you would have seen headlines like: 'Henman Loses' or 'Henman Fails Again.' That was not the real story. Headlines rarely are.
Tim was a god at Wimbledon. He had unbelievable support and has a fantastic record. He didn't win a grand slam, that is true, but he came along at the wrong time. During the years he played Wimbledon, Sampras was all-dominant through the nineties, followed by Federer who recently won five years in a row. There wasn't much room for Henman to be the champion.
I don't think you can see it as failure when you spend your career at the highest level. If a journalist was the fourth-best journalist in the world or a lawyer the fourth-best legal mind in the world, they would be considered pretty damn good. Then they would have to maintain it for ten years to be up there with Tim. To do what he did in such an unbelievably hard field is fantastic. To be at the top for so long in any area, let alone sport, is something to be proud of. Tim was not a failure.
I know people will say: 'But he didn't win a grand slam.' But would he exchange his whole career – the four Wimbledon semi-finals and four quarter-finals – with Thomas Johansson, who won the Australian Open in 2002 but only spent a couple of years in the top-10? I don't think so.
If you haven't played this sport at the highest level you cannot appreciate how hard it is to win a grand slam, especially with guys like Sampras and Federer around. What you do on court isn't always controlled by you. I could play brilliantly, then someone like Goran Ivanisevic would come along and fire down forty aces. You can't control that. That's the tough thing about this individual sport. You can do all the right things and then someone comes along who plays a little bit better on the day.
I'm not disputing that everyone really wants to win a grand slam, I would love to win a grand slam, but it doesn't mean that your whole career, everything you have worked for, is ruined because you don't win one.
It might surprise some people that Tim and I were good friends, given the difference in our characters. I seem to have generated more controversies in three years than he did in his whole career, but we still had more in common than people think, though not, I admit, in the disciplinary record.
As a British player, I was accused of triggering the country's first fine for player misconduct in the 106-year history of the Davis Cup, when I swore at a match official in Glasgow during the tie against Serbia and Montenegro in 2006. It caused a massive fuss, but it was ridiculous. That was another one of those things that the press jumped all over.
I know players who have said way worse things than I did to umpires. In this case, the man was the youngest umpire in the history of the Davis Cup. I suppose that might seem pretty rich coming from someone who was a teenager at the time, but I felt he gave such a poor performance that I told him what I thought of him. I said: 'You're fucking useless.' That is terrible. I should never have said it. In the history of sport I think worse things have been said, but still, I am not saying it was right. I'd just lost a match and I was annoyed. I played rubbish. I was angry. It was wrong of me. However, the press were trying to suggest I had said something far worse. Then they started investigating what the maximum fine could be and speculating that maybe Great Britain could be thrown out of the competition for two years. They wanted to make the story as extreme as possible.
In the end, after the referee had sent in his report, we received the smallest possible fine, just over £1,000, about the same amount as you receive for a warning on the ATP tour. It was ludicrous. I didn't feel guilty afterwards, I was just amazed that something could be so blown out of all proportion. Obviously what I said was wrong, but I've sat in press conferences when one of the journalists has sworn while he was asking me a question.
We were talking about the sudden possibility of me qualifying for the end-of-the-season Masters Cup in 2007, and the reporter said something like: 'Did you think to yourself: "Oh shit! Now I've got a good chance of qualifying"'
I said: 'Hold on a sec, you can't swear when you're asking me a question. Imagine what you would say if I said that to you.' He just laughed it off, and to be honest, I found it quite funny too. You've got to have a sense of humour about these things, but I just thought I'd point out the hypocrisy.
I had pretty decent support from my colleagues at the time. Greg Rusedksi admitted: 'At Wimbledon I've used every bad word in the book. We have to remember he's only eighteen years old but he's moving in the right direction.' John Lloyd, who went on to become my Davis Cup captain, gave some pretty good advice: 'If he's going to swear he should learn where the microphones are.'
The truth is, I don't swear that much. When I'm with a group of people I don't swear that often. Anyway, a lot of people swear. Everybody swears sometimes, but just because you do it when you're on TV seems to make it worse somehow. When you're playing a tennis match, you don't think the cameras are on you. You are just in the zone and you say things you probably shouldn't.
I know it's not a good example to set to kids. I hope I can stop doing it. However, remember when I was playing football when I was young, the parents were swearing, the players were swearing, it went on all the time. It is pretty much similar in most sports. I'm never going to be on court not saying a word. Sometimes you need to let off steam.
It has never really caused me too much trouble, apart from that Davis Cup fine. The worst time I remember was when I was younger, playing in a team competition inn the Czech Republic and I swore then on the court. Gran had come over to watch me and she didn't speak to me after my match because I had behaved badly. Actually she didn't speak to me for quite a while. She was very angry.
People have this impression that I'm some sort of foulmouthed brat because I have so much attention paid to me if I shout on the court. I admit I do swear sometimes towards the people I know sitting in the players' box, including my coach and sometimes my mum. If you're getting mad, you're pretty uncomfortable and when you see someone in the crowd supporting you, you are basically looking for a bit of comfort from them. Just because I'm swearing in someone's direction doesn't mean that I'm swearing at them.
My old coach, Leon Smith, understood. He said he didn't mind when I shouted at him because he knew it was my way of getting my temper out. He used to think I did it because I had a close relationship with him and so he was the first person I turned to when I was feeling frustrated. He thought it was a positive thing, a trust thing. It was obviously better to shout at him than at the umpire or the crowd.
There were some negative comments about the way I seemed to be swearing at Brad Gilbert when he was my coach. I know it's not right, and after a few months of doing it, I tried to stop, but Brad said he understood. He did similar things in his playing days. He used to speak to the crowd a lot during matches. It wasn't an issue between us. He said he understood that I was not so much angry with him as raging at myself.
I am not stupid enough to wonder why my temper is a story. It seems ridiculously exaggerated to me, but I suppose the media will highlight anything that is different. Maybe I'll grow out of it. I think I am calmer and more mature on court these days. However, I have to accept there will always be attention on me that other players don't get. Wherever and whenever I play, there will always be a high level of press interest, not because I'm bad-tempered, not because I swear, but because – as Tim discovered – I'm British and the media in this country have a peculiar fascination with one of us winning Wimbledon one day.