In 2007 I stopped talking to the BBC. There were a number of things that contributed to the silence, but the main reason was an interview that I did with one of their journalists at a smaller tournament in Metz. He said he was interviewing me about one thing, but it seemed to me more like a covert operation to get me to talk about something else entirely. Something that then dropped me into a whole heap of trouble.
Some people, I understand, would just let this sort of thing go. I am one of those who can't do that. If I think something is wrong or unfair, I will say so. It makes my life harder in many ways, but I have never changed. It is just the way I am.
The situation arose out of nowhere. I was playing in one of the smaller ATP tournaments in Metz in France, my first visit back to Europe following the wrist injury that wrecked half my year. I was playing in the singles and also in the doubles with my brother, trying to get back to match sharpness after such a long lay-off. I wasn't anticipating any press interviews. It wasn't the kind of tournament that the world's media would find of great interest.
On this particular day, I was in a bad mood. My brother and I had just lost in the doubles and I didn't play that well either. I was just about to jump into my car and go back to the hotel when the press woman in charge of the event ran up to say: 'Someone from the BBC is here, just wondering whether you could do five minutes with him.' I said I didn't really want to.
'Well, they've requested it. I'm sorry. It's just a general chat about the tournament.'
I had no reason to be suspicious because normally Patricio, my agent, would red flag a situation that could be awkward. But this time he had no idea it was happening. The ATP did not send him their usual email about interview requests at tournaments probably because it was one of the smaller ones on the tour. Then a guy came up to introduce himself. I'd never met him and I had no clue who he was. It turned out to be Brian Alexander, a BBC journalist who had been trying to talk to me for ages – so my agent Patricio told me later – because he was doing some sort of investigative programme into the state of British tennis. Patricio had said no, explaining that I wanted to concentrate one hundred per cent on recovery from the wrist injury. This guy didn't seem too happy about it. He sent an email back just saying, 'would 15 minutes with me seriously delay his recovery process?!'
So the man said to me: 'I don't believe we've met. Nice to finally meet you. I just want to talk to you about some of the smaller tournaments on the ATP tour and what life is like away from the glitz and glamour of the grand slams. Is that OK?' I said it was fine. No alarm bells were going off. It sounded perfectly OK to me. I swallowed my tiredness and disappointment about losing the match and tried to be as decent as I could.
The interview began without any problem. He asked me about the atmosphere in Metz, what it was like to play in somewhere like an old school hall. He asked me about the Davis Cup and whether it was important to me. I explained how much I enjoyed it, although the scheduling could put a huge strain on the body. Then he said: 'Can I also ask you this. There's obviously been some negative stuff about tennis recently. About betting and suspicious betting on odd matches. Are you shocked about that?'
I answered truthfully, that I really wasn't surprised. I said it because I'd been reading in newspapers that four different players had said they had been offered money to throw tennis matches. Arvind Parmar, the British player, was one; the Belgian Gilles Elseneer was another. Gilles said that he had been offered £70,000 to lose a match at Wimbledon two years before. Dick Norman had also said he had been offered a bribe to lose a Challenger match. A few guys had come out and talked about it.
That is why I said I wasn't surprised. I also said that it wasn't acceptable and that it was difficult to prove whether someone was trying or not in a tennis match because they can do their best until the last couple of games of each set and then make mistakes or serve double faults. It is virtually impossible to prove. I said it was disappointing for the other players, but 'everyone knows it goes on'.
I wasn't properly prepared to have a serious conversation about something as sensitive as gambling in sport. In trying to be helpful, I had blurted something out without really thinking about it. I didn't mean to imply I knew matches were being fixed, only that approaches were being made to certain players.
For the record:
He then asked me two follow-up questions on the same subject. I should have realised what was going on – that this was the whole purpose of the interview – but it was late, I wasn't thinking straight and maybe I was a bit naïve. We were talking about the fact that you couldn't stop people betting on tennis and therefore it was difficult to stop potential problems with players being offered money to lose.
He said: 'You don't sound surprised then. You actually feel this is locker-room talk. You and fellow players know this kind of thing is going on?'
I said: 'Yeah, I speak to a lot of guys, especially experienced ones who have been around a long time. They obviously know that it happens. A lot of guys have been approached about it. I've seen articles saying guys even at Wimbledon are doing it, so . . . everyone knows it goes on . . .'
Those were the words that came back to haunt me: 'Everyone knows it goes on.' A few days later, Patricio called me and said: 'Have you been talking about betting? Because there is a guy doing a show on Radio Five called The Usual Suspects and it's about betting in tennis.' I said: 'Yeah, but I only answered a couple of questions.' I didn't think I had said anything that other people weren't saying. Tim Henman had been on television saying that he thought betting on matches was a growing trend because of the internet, and tennis would have to be vigilant against it. John McEnroe had even talked about it as a 'cheap way to make a buck'. So there were lots of opinions out there and I didn't think I had said anything different.
Then the programme was aired and it was something like: 'We're talking about corruption in tennis. This is what Andy Murray thinks about it.' Then it was my words: 'Yeah . . . everyone knows it goes on.' They made it sound as though I was saying tennis was a corrupt sport.
The BBC website made the situation even worse. On there I was quoted as saying: 'Everyone knows corruption goes on.'
Many things seemed to happen very quickly after that. It caused headlines around the world, the ATP told me I shouldn't be saying such things; and some of my fellow professionals like Rafa Nadal and the Russian Nikolay Davydenko, who was being investigated following unusual betting patterns on a match he lost in Poland, had a public go at me. I just didn't think it was fair for a number of reasons.
The ATP ought to have found out what the BBC were looking for when I was asked to do that interview. They are the ones that asked me to do it, as one of our media obligations. If they had said: 'No, sorry, he can't do the interview' or even if during the interview, the representative from the ATP had cut in and said: 'Sorry, you said you were here to talk about the tournament, not ask questions about betting' they might have solved the problem before it started. It was obviously a touchy subject and the ATP woman was standing right next to me at the time.
The context of this is important. It is a fact that tennis players are not allowed to bet on matches, their own or anyone else's. Neither are people in their entourages. There was an Italian player called Alessio di Mauro who was suspended for nine months and fined £29,000 for being found guilty of betting on matches – not his own – but I thought the punishment was a little bit harsh given that the reports said he only bet a few lire. The real fear for tennis was a different one: that players expected to win matches would be bribed to deliberately lose them, so that criminal gamblers could back the longer-odds opposition knowing they were likely to win.
So it was a real, live, dangerous issue. There was an investigation going on into that Davydenko match against the lower ranked Vassallo Arguello in Poland when Davydenko pulled out in the third set with an injury and I think the ATP staff might reasonably have intervened when they sensed what the interviewer was after. Of course, you can blame me too. Maybe I should have taken the responsibility myself – I do try as I get older to do that – but I was taken by surprise, and I had believed this guy when he told me he just wanted to ask about the atmosphere at minor tournaments. At no point did he tell me he was gathering material for an investigative radio programme on match-fixing. If I had known that I wouldn't have done the interview. I thought it was pretty poor.
It turned out that he had spoken to five or six other players at Metz, all about betting. It was clearly his mission, but he didn't mention that to me. In the programme that went out, they just ran part of my answers and none of his questions so the context was completely lost. Obviously we protested and the head of BBC radio sport wrote a letter to me in part-apology.
The issue of betting is still there. I haven't said any more about it than most people. Since that interview, Michael Llodra, Arnaud Clement and Dmitry Tursunov have all come out and said that people have approached them to throw matches. It happens. We know that the approaches happen. But I don't know anything else. They have been holding investigations, but no one's been found guilty of trying to fix their own matches.
It is not fair to say that tennis is corrupt and make it sound as if those words are coming from me. I never once said that tennis was corrupt. It is my sport. I couldn't give 110 per cent every match, or even play it at all, if that were the case. I have to believe in its essential honesty. I have never been offered money myself and when I spoke I was going by what other people had been saying.
I had a great deal of negative press afterwards. Nadal, obviously, had read all about it. He said I had gone 'overboard'. Davydenko clearly didn't like getting asked about the subject in press conferences. 'If Murray says that he knows, that means he gambles himself. This is outrageous. How does he know what I was trying to do? I was so upset with the whole thing I started crying.'
Both of them had received a message that I believe had been badly distorted by the BBC's reporting. You don't want that sort of issue with players. You spend thirty weeks of the year with them. It's not the most comfortable thing if you're trying to avoid them.
As far as Davydenko was concerned, it probably sounded as if I was directing some sort of blame at him or saying he was guilty. It was bad enough for him to be caught up in the whole betting controversy, but it must have been pretty tough to take when he was told that one of his fellow players was saying he was guilty. I guess what he said in regards to me was a reaction to that.
After I played him in Doha, I apologised to him for what had happened. I never did have any kind of row with him because we don't normally speak on the tour. I don't know him that well. He doesn't speak very good English and my Russian isn't that great.
As usual, I have learned from the mistake, but even now if someone came to me and said: 'What do you think about betting in tennis?' I am not sure what I am supposed to do. Should I lie and say nothing? Should I say: 'No comment', which basically makes it sound as though I think something dodgy is going on. Or should I tell the truth? That is what I did. I told the truth, which is what I was always taught growing up. I didn't point the finger at any player. I just told the truth as I saw it and then watched it get splashed round the world as a headline.
So that is why I decided I wouldn't speak to the BBC. I felt an important trust had been broken. It wasn't the only problem I had with them either. I was on the shortlist for the 2007 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award and one of the things they do on their website is a little 'Did You Know?' section about all the contenders. Amir Khan's said: 'Did you know Amir has a cousin who plays for the England cricket team?' Mine said: 'Did you know that Andy Murray was called 'Lazy English' when he trained in Spain?' That would be fine if it was true, but I never, ever heard anyone call me that. I was baffled. I asked all my friends who were at the Academy with me and none of them had heard that expression either. It came from nowhere and no one had bothered to check whether it was actually true. Perhaps you shouldn't worry about what people call you, but I had worked so very, very hard in Spain that it seemed to me unjust.
Then there was Jamie winning the mixed doubles at Wimbledon. Radio Five had asked me if I would come and speak to them on the air after the match and I said sure. I went along and did the interview, but as Jamie lifted the trophy, I couldn't speak. I was crying. So Jonathan Overend, the Radio Five tennis correspondent, cut in with the description: 'Jamie Murray lifts the Wimbledon trophy . . .' etc.
Then this woman says to me on air: 'Andy, just before you go – you must be jealous of Jamie. I'm an older sister and I love it when I get one over on my little sister.' I looked at her in disbelief. My expression must have said: 'What the hell are you doing?' I didn't say anything. There was just a moment of silence. I definitely wasn't jealous of Jamie, I was thrilled for him. If I had been jealous I doubt I would have been in tears. If you listen back to the interview, you can hear in my voice that I can hardly speak without my voice cracking.
I'm thinking: 'My brother's just won Wimbledon and you're freakin' asking me if I'm jealous of him!' I took my headset off and moved away. People were saying: 'Oh, I'm sorry' as I left because they knew it was out of order. I asked who the woman was, but I still don't know her name. All I know is that she wasn't part of the sports team.
In the end, I put all these things together and decided it wasn't worth speaking to the BBC any more.
Some people might think this is all very petty – the media have a job to do and I should get over it – but I don't think it's a bad thing to ask people who can influence millions of listeners, viewers and readers to get their facts right, and present them honestly, especially if it makes my life and work really difficult when they get it wrong.
The fall-out from the betting story went on for a while. When I turned up for my next tournament in Madrid, I had to speak to a couple of people from the ATP. Obviously, I had nothing to tell them, only the stuff they had been reading themselves in the papers. They told me that I had to be careful about what I was saying because it was a pretty rough time for the sport, but no one lectured me.
Then I met someone who is working for the ATP's new anticorruption unit. He asked me about five questions, such as did I know of anyone who had bet on a tennis match, had I seen anyone betting at matches? The answer to everything was no. I don't know of anyone betting on matches and I don't know of anyone throwing matches. I asked him a couple of questions in return. He said they were investigating over a hundred matches, mainly with strange betting patterns attached to them, but so far, they haven't found anyone guilty.
The trouble with these strange betting patterns is that a lot of them could be completely innocent. If you're a gambling man, sitting in the stadium watching two players, one ranked 20 and one ranked 90, and suddenly the guy ranked 20 clutches his hamstring and calls a trainer, it might be a smart move to bet on the lower-ranked guy. Good luck to you. It doesn't mean that in every – or in any case – a player has been bribed to lose a match against a lower-ranked player. As I said all along, it is a very, very difficult thing to prove.
I know the episode didn't exactly heighten my popularity, either with some of the players or with the public, but I survived. The one thing I always say to everyone around me is that it doesn't matter what people say because they don't know me. The majority of critics don't know how difficult it is to achieve anything in sport and, in this country, the press seem to like it when someone fails. That's what makes a story. It is rare to go to the front or back page of a newspaper and read a positive story. I'm not playing tennis to be popular. That's not why I do it. I've got the same friends I had when I was fifteen. I'm still the same person to my family and that is important.
I never thought for one minute that going on the tour would change me, and it hasn't. In the first three years on the senior tour I played 45 tournaments in 35 cities in 18 different countries. I've thrown coins in the Trevi Fountain in Rome and seen the whole of New York from the top of the Empire State Building – that was awesome – but being on tour has never struck me as glamorous or amazing. I've been doing it, in the juniors, since I was thirteen. It is a way of life. I guess I am used to it.
I can't say I've seen much of most of the countries because between playing and practising, there just isn't time. Even in Rome, I've never bothered to go to the Coliseum because there is such a long queue and I don't really have the time to wait.
Most of the time of a professional tennis player is divided between the court, the locker room, the hotel and the airport. Most of that is spent alone or with your coach, but the locker room is where you get to know the other guys a little. For me, the best thing about men's tennis is the characters. There are so many different ones on the tour these days.
Roger Federer is the ultimate in being cool and calm on court, Rafa Nadal who is always bouncing around and absolutely ripped, Andy Roddick, the all American boy, super-confident, serves at 145mph and appeared in the US sitcom, Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I am just never going to do that kind of thing, by the way.
Then you've got guys like Janko Tipsarevic from Serbia, who is really clever and studies Nietzsche and reads Dostoevsky. He has a tattoo on his arm that says: 'Beauty Will Save The World'. If I was ever going to have a tattoo, it would probably repeat something said by Muhammed Ali but I don't think it's going to happen. Tattoos aren't that great. My dad's dad had one and said it was fine until he was about thirty-five and then it started to get wrinkled.
Not that I give tremendous thought to tattoos. The main, the only, professional focus is winning. Not just playing but winning. By the start of 2008 I had been on the tour nearly three years and I just sensed that when Federer lost to Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open, it started to open up more possibilities for us all. Perhaps I went some way to proving it a month later by beating Federer in the first round in Dubai, although he later came out and announced he had been suffering from glandular fever. So it was premature so say there had been a shift from the old guard to the new, but it made me think that men's tennis was in a really good state.
We had someone, Federer, trying to win the most grand slams ever as well as being one of the greatest players of all time. We had someone else, Nadal, who I would call the best clay-court player in history. And then Djokovic had just won his first grand slam to freshen up the story. In previous years, it had been a case of the favourites versus the outsiders. Now the players below the top two in the world were no longer huge outsiders. There were a few of us in that mix: Djokovic, obviously, Gasquet, Berdych, Blake, me. There were chances for quite a few on a given day. I reckoned by now I was in that few.
I've known Djokovic for years because we grew up playing in the juniors together. I still speak to him and get on with him now we are on the tour together, but you get to the stage where you don't want to be too close. I reckon for the next five or six years I'm going to be playing him in the semis and finals of major tournaments and I want to beat him. It's easier to do if we're not close friends.
Many people like his personality, including his famous impressions of other players. He does great take-offs of players' serves. The best ones are Roddick and Sharapova, and Nadal tugging at his shorts. I don't think he does me though. He's been accused of arrogance on one or two occasions, but I wouldn't want to say anything bad about him. Given that we're rivals, we get on fine.
He does speak his mind. That is probably a good thing. I remember him having a go at Nadal once by saying Rafa took too long a break between points by walking too slowly, dragging time out, bouncing the ball. It's true. I was timing the break between points when Nadal was playing Jo-Wilfred Tsonga in the Australian Open 2008 (Tsonga had put me out of the tournament in the first round, so I had some spare time on my hands). You are allowed 25 seconds to prepare to serve and Nadal was taking 37 seconds, while bouncing the ball over twenty times.
The top players obviously do get away with too much even though the rules are there. You can't be too strict. I'd say 28 seconds would be fine, like driving at 73mph on the motorway, but once the time goes beyond that, they're breaking the rules. The rules aren't there to be broken. They should be stuck to. The umpires should tell the players to get a move on.
I don't know exactly why they don't, but a player should get a warning if it happens repeatedly. They shouldn't get away with stuff like that. It's not fair on the other player. That is one of the little things I would change on the tour. Then again, I would change pretty big things too.
If you were starting from scratch you would redesign the men's tour completely. As things stand, it doesn't seem right that we only spend four weeks playing on grass and yet we can spend up to four-and-a-half months playing on clay. The Masters Series tournaments – the biggest tournaments on the tour, the next stage down from the grand slams – are all bunched together when they should be more spread out, and they also need to do something about the Davis Cup. It's at the wrong time, in the middle of the tour. You go to a different surface in a different time zone and you're going to get injured doing that. If affects your preparation for the next two or three tournaments as well because you can't just turn up on the day in the Davis Cup and start playing. You need to get used to the surface and then you switch straight back to another one. It's too hard. They need to do something about that.
We must respect traditions, but innovations can be good too. Most of us thought the glamour ball girls in Madrid were fine. It certainly brought a bit of attention to tennis when football usually gets all the headlines. They're not the best ball kids I've ever had, but it's fun. At most tournaments, the ball kids play at the club or love tennis, whereas the models haven't played much tennis. They don't throw the balls very well and they can't catch them very well either, but they're not terrible. They are easy on the eye, although some players get a bit distracted. I guess it's better than having a 14-year-old spotty boy throwing balls at you.
That doesn't mean I want to get swept up in the Hollywood side of tennis. That is not the way I am. Quite a few players know actors or have dated actresses and models. Tommy Haas is friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger and dated a Hollywood actress, so did Andy Roddick, and Robby Ginepri went out with Minnie Driver. I don't really know a lot about this, but there is a cross-over between tennis and celebrity at some level. It doesn't interest me, but I think my brother might be tempted to enjoy it.
I suppose when you think of some of the players on the tour over the years – McEnroe, Borg, Connors, Becker, Sampras, Agassi – these are some of the biggest names in sport. Their fame goes beyond sport and it is natural that people would want to be around them. It is pretty obvious that Federer is established as a global superstar, doing adverts with Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry, but I don't think for one second that any of the top players are stupid enough to get distracted by it because this is a really short career. You can be famous at any age, but if you haven't won a grand slam by the time you're thirty, the chances these days are that you never will.
That cuts down the fun in the locker room. There is nothing like the pranks and banter that go on in football or rugby, but that is because we are not part of a team. Even so, crazy things can happen occasionally. The Frenchman, Michael Llodra, caused a few headlines at Key Biscayne in 2005 when Ivan Ljubicic, the Croatian player, found him hiding naked in his locker. Not surprisingly, Ljubicic asked him: 'What the hell are you doing here?' Michael explained that as Ivan had been playing so well lately, he had been trying to absorb some of his positive energy.
I wasn't there, this happened a little bit before my time, but I remember thinking that I would have found it funny if it happened to me. I think I would have found it funny. Maybe I would have found it a bit worrying too. At least it proves that when people moan that there are no personalities in tennis any more, it isn't completely true.
One of my favourite players when I was growing up, apart from Agassi, was Guillermo Coria, the Argentine player. He didn't have Agassi's personality but he had a great game to watch. Following him gave me my introduction to another controversy in our sport – performance-enhancing drugs – because he was suspended for a while in 2001 for testing positive for steroids. I didn't really understand it at the time, I was only about thirteen years old, but clearly drugs have been an issue in our sport for a while.
There was a time when it looked as if a whole batch of supplements issued by the ATP themselves were contaminated with nandrolone and Greg Rusedski was one of the guys who had to fight to clear his name.
In the end, not many players have ever been found guilty. Coria's original ban of two years was reduced to seven months and he sued the multi-vitamin company that supplied his supplements.
I am really conscious about everything that goes into my body. That is why I don't take any vitamins or protein shakes, because of the potential for contamination. I am scared. If you fail a drugs test, your respect in people's eyes is just gone. When you are a clean athlete, even if they don't like you as a person, they can still respect what you do on the tennis court. But if you are seen to be taking drugs to enhance your performance, then that is really tough to come back from. I'd rather just eat a lot of healthy food and work hard. The only thing that I take that is not completely natural is the energy drink I have on court. Of course, you never know if something like that could be contaminated either. You just have to try and give yourself the least chance of that happening by taking as few supplements as you can. I have heard that apparently 10 per cent of the products on the shelves could make you fail a drugs test. Maybe that is a scare story. I don't know for sure, but I would rather not risk it and find out.
We get tested so often throughout the season and in the off-season that I think it would be difficult to get away with much. When I was in Miami training during the 2007–8 winter break, I was tested three times – twice for urine, one blood – and that reassured me. I like the fact they test us all year round. Obviously, there have been bans for some players but I still believe I am competing in a relatively clean sport.
Other players have other opinions. I know that Lleyton Hewitt once said: 'I'd like to think that tennis is clean but I can't say a hundred per cent. Sometimes you are not so sure. I know I'm clean but sometimes guys look stronger in the fifth set than they did in the first. You have to worry about that.' That is his opinion. I don't really worry that much. The testing makes me feel more comfortable about it.
I get criticised a lot for being too skinny. I've been called a 'scruffy Hugh Grant', which actually isn't that bad because he's quite good looking. I had a reputation for being unfit when I first came on the tour and maybe some people thought I would bulk up quicker if I took steroids, but that's obscene. I would never do that. I have worked really hard for my muscle with my fitness trainers in the gym and I would never take a short cut. It is not something that would make me happy. Imagine winning Wimbledon and then looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing a cheat in the reflection. It would feel awful.
Look at Marion Jones, one of the best athletes the Olympics has ever seen. She lied to the whole world by denying she took drugs and now she is locked away from her family in prison. Her Olympic medals are all gone, her reputation is shot. Drugs are just a short cut to the end of your career.
I don't even eat bananas. Not because I am scared of contamination but because I don't rate them. I think it's a myth that they're good for you as an energy-giver. Players do sit there and eat them at changeovers, but it can't be to give them energy because they take ages to digest and because other things are way better. Maybe it is just because they are easy to eat compared with chewy bars that get stuck in your teeth. And you thought we just worried about our forehands.
To be honest, I think bananas are pathetic fruit. They don't look great for a start. They're not straight and I don't like the black bit at the bottom. All right, they're not terrible but they're such an average fruit. I'm more a peaches and plums sort of guy. And apples . . .
Apples are miles better. A good Granny Smith, a soft pear. A banana isn't even juicy. You bite into a pineapple and you get this great burst of juice. There's no juice in a banana. And it squashes easily. If you put one in your bag and someone kicks it, it spatters about all over the place and then sticks to everything. At least with an apple, all that happens to it is a bruise. You can still eat it. But if a banana gets squashed – there's no coming back from that.
They call me opinionated. I guess they're right. Even about bananas.