Just when you think it is all going fine . . . The first three months of 2007 seemed pretty good to me. I reached the final in Doha, played the greatest game of my life so far against Rafa Nadal in the Australian Open, won San José for the second time in two years and topped it all by reaching two straight semi-finals at the master series events in America. On the 13th of April 2007, two years after turning pro, I entered the World Top-10 for the first time. Another goal achieved. Maybe I should have noticed the omen.
A month later, actually on the day of my twentieth birthday with my mum and gran over from Scotland to watch me, I hit a forehand against Filippo Volandri in a first-round match in Hamburg and felt a horrible pain. Game over, tournament over, summer over. I didn't play another match until August. A scan had shown up a small tear in the tendon of my right wrist and that injury wrecked a huge chunk of the season including Roland Garros, Queen's and Wimbledon. It was such a difficult and annoying time, not just for me but also for the people around me.
It was all the more frustrating because the year had begun with so much promise. I had been working with Brad Gilbert for about five months by now and my first tournament in Doha convinced me we were on the right track. Having beaten Davydenko in straight sets in the semi-final, I lost to Ljubicic 4–6 4–6 in the final. I hadn't played as well in the final as I did in the semi, but since he was ranked 5th and I was ranked 17th, I couldn't be too disappointed. It was a statement of intent. I was playing well and next up was the Australian Open.
The previous year had been my horrible debut when I lost in the first round, after the row in New Zealand about sexism, and I felt really determined to do better in Melbourne this time. I do really like Australia and I love the crowd at Melbourne Park. It is a great place: the people are unbelievably friendly and they certainly love their sport. The Australian Open is, far and away, the most relaxed grand slam, and it is easier to get around there than my other favourite tournament, the US Open in New York, where the traffic is a shambles. In fact, the only thing wrong with Australia, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's rather far away.
But that didn't bother me as the tournament progressed. I was feeling quite at home, especially after my first-round win over Alberto Martin of Spain, which was on the Vodafone arena with the roof closed because of the heat. It was the closest I've ever been to a 'triple bagel', winning a match love, love and love. He managed to win the eighteenth game to make the final score 6–0 6–0 6–1. I was a bit annoyed because you probably only get one chance to win a match like that in your lifetime, but even I realised it wasn't worth getting too upset when you win a match that easily.
The next two matches, against another Spaniard, Fernando Verdasco, and Juan Ignacio Chela of Argentina, were tougher but I still won in straight sets to make the last sixteen. My opponent was the world number two and French Open champion Rafa Nadal, who I hadn't played since junior days. He was a year older than me, quite a few pounds heavier and one of the most aggressively physical players who has ever played the game. This was only the second time in my life I'd reached the fourth round of a grand slam. It was going to be the perfect examination of how far I'd come as a player.
At nearly 2am on the stadium court in Australia, after five sets of tennis against one of the best players in the world, I knew how far I'd come. It was the greatest game I had played so far. Both of us maintained such a high standard of tennis all the way through, and there were so many twists and turns in the course of the match that it would have to go down as a near-classic. It had everything, including an underdog (me) and a great set of fans who stayed to the end, and a little group of Scottish supporters who gave me a standing ovation in the fifth set when I won my one and only game.
It was the first time in my career that I had come off a match as brutal as that without losing due to a physical issue. I hadn't been blown away despite the awesome force that Nadal can produce. I held my own against him. I'd worked really hard in the off-season in Florida to get ready for this and I was still fighting to the very last point of the match. Maybe I only lost because he had more experience of playing big matches. While I'd only reached the fourth round of Wimbledon before, Nadal had already won two French Opens (he was on his way to three) and played in a Wimbledon final.
In the fifth set I had six break points on his first two service games. Had I converted them, I'd have led 3–0 instead of finding myself 0–3 down. It was that close. But finding myself down to someone as seriously good and fit as him, it was just too tough to come back. If I'd made a better start to the fifth set, I think I would have won.
Mentally, I wasn't crushed. For me, the worst thing in tennis is not losing matches. What I hate most is underperforming. If you're playing well and losing, it is easier to focus on the next point and believe you can win in the end. If you are playing poorly, it is much harder to believe you can get back into the match. I know how close I came to winning that match. Tennis is a game of inches. You can hit ten unforced errors, but on another day, if the wind blows a little harder, you can hit exactly the same shots and they will be ten outright winners. The better player usually wins, but these little things can still swing the momentum.
I wasn't sick with annoyance when the match was over. Everyone was gutted for me. Kim was there, so were Mum and Brad, and they all said: 'You did great. You deserved to win. Bad luck, you'll get him next time.' But I just wanted to spend some time on my own. I took a car back to the hotel and went for a run, up and down one of the streets, at 3am. I was sorting out my head. I was, for sure, disappointed that I didn't win but that was the match where I realised the standard of tennis I could produce. I was proud of the way I'd fought and I'm sure everyone watching enjoyed it.
You take away a load of confidence from a match like that and I proved that in the very next tournament by winning San José for the second year running. I think the first time was the more special of the two, but this one was still pretty cool. Maybe I had fond memories of 2006 because Kim had been with me – and Brad, with respect, wasn't quite as good-looking. (I certainly didn't want to kiss him when I won.) But it was a good effort to win the final again with almost a mirror-image score, 7–6 in the third set. This time the opposition was Ivo Karlovic, the gigantic big-server from Croatia we call 'Lurch' (but not necessarily to his face), who at 6'10" is the tallest player in the history of the men's tour. Brad used to say that facing him is like having someone serve out of a tree at you! I lost the first set in a tie-break but after that I worked him out better. I knew I'd have a chance because my return of serve is the best part of my game. Even so, you have about a millisecond to see the ball coming at you. Sometimes you barely see it at all.
To reach the final, I'd beaten Andy Roddick again in the semis and he might have been getting a bit sick of me by now. We'd played three times already and I led 2–1 after my third-round victory at Wimbledon the year before. Now here we were again. The first set was really tense and I came through a first-set tie-break 12–10 before closing out the second set 6–4.
I had a lot of close matches that week and came through all of them. Brad was a firm believer in fighting through matches even when you are not playing your best tennis, and his philosophy seemed to be working for me. In the second round against Kristian Pless of Denmark, ranked 83, I won the first set easily and then blew the next in the tie-break before coming back to take the third set 6–4. Against Hyung-Taik Lee, the Korean, in the quarters the match came down to a final-set tiebreak. It was a struggle, but it was a positive sign that I was mentally strong enough to keep winning the tough ones.
The greatest comeback I'd ever made was the year before, just after Wimbledon, when I was playing horrendously in the first round of Newport against a Brazilian ranked 139 in the world, Ricardo Mello. I was down 5–2 and two breaks in the final set. This was the match when I earned a point penalty for the only time in my career on the tour, mainly because the courts were so terrible. I saved five or six match points, I can't quite remember, and then went on to win 7–6. Memories like that can really be good for you if you find yourself in the same situation again. I was learning all the time.
The upbeat feeling around San José got even better when my brother Jamie won his first doubles title there. I couldn't really watch it, even though I was there, because I was pretty nervous. It is always much more nerve-racking watching Jamie than it is playing my own matches. I don't get that nervous when I play, but I've struggled to watch him from a really young age. I don't know why. I suppose I've always wanted him to do really well. There is nothing else I get nervous about in this profession.
For most of the final I was hiding in the locker room occasionally watching on the television screen. Only when he was so close to winning that it was impossible for him to lose, did I run outside and watch in person. It was great. We had cause for a double celebration but we didn't have time. We had to catch the night flight to Memphis and, anyway, neither of us likes champagne.
Brad's old pupil, Roddick, had his revenge in Memphis but at least I reached the semi-finals. I was ranked 13 in decent shape and going into the back-to-back Masters Series events, the biggest in tennis outside the grand slams, the Masters Cup and Davis Cup. The best players turn up for Indian Wells and Miami because the prize money, the ranking points and the competition are all good, but I still fancied my chances.
When I beat Nikolay Davydenko in the fourth round in straight sets, I liked my chances even more, but during the quarter-final against Tommy Haas of Germany I managed to twist my ankle pretty badly in an awkward fall. It was the same ankle I had hurt at Queen's in 2005 and every since then I have worn an ankle brace when I play. I think it saved me from doing some serious damage. I was able to win the match in the final-set tie-break but the ankle certainly wasn't feeling too good when I got up the next morning. I thought about pulling out of the semi-final against Novak Djokovic but I was so looking forward to the match that I wanted to give it a shot.
We were both nineteen years old and I was ranked one place behind him at 14. It could have been one almighty battle, but my best effort on a bad ankle wasn't good enough. I lost 2–6 3–6 and, although it may sound crazy to say it, I actually left the tournament feeling pretty good. It was the first time I had beaten so many top players in a Masters Series event and my confidence was growing all the time.
Two weeks later I was in the Miami semi-final playing Djokovic again, the perfect opportunity to reverse the score. It didn't work out that way. This was the worst match I'd played since joining the tour and I had no idea after the first three games that it was going to run away from me so horribly. We both held serve and I was 0–40 up on his next service game. After that I just made loads of unforced errors, he hardly made any and I didn't win another game. The scoreline 6–1 6–0 was fully justified by the way I played.
What went wrong? I don't know. Some people thought maybe that Djokovic was turning into my bogey player, someone I would always struggle to beat. He had beaten me once before at the Masters in Madrid in 2006 and was now leading our head-to-head encounters 3–0. But that is not the way my mind works. I just played a couple of bad matches against him. I don't believe in bogey players. He's someone I will play many times in my career, hopefully, and I don't plan to see him win every match.
The switch to the European clay-court season from American cement, not always a successful transition for me, instantly brought me problems. I was playing in a doubles match in Monte Carlo with Jamie when my back suddenly went into spasm. I had noticed it was a little stiff before we went on court but I didn't think it was anything serious. It was an evening game, noticeably cold for Monte Carlo, and I just couldn't get out of my chair after the first set.
Part of me really wanted to carry on. I never like letting Jamie down in the doubles and we had already lost the close first set 7–6. My mind was willing, eager to carry on, but my body was stuck in that chair. I had to pull out of the match, and the singles, and then take a little time off to recuperate.
I came back in time to play Rome, but only for one match because I lost in the first round against Giles Simon of France. It was the first time I'd lost a three-setter all year but I wasn't really surprised given my lack of practice time going into the tournament. A week later I was in Hamburg, with no clue, no sign that half my season was about to be ruined by one shot. My first-round match against Filippo Volandri coincided with my twentieth birthday and my mum and gran came out with a home-made cake to help me celebrate.
Volandri was a tough opponent. He had beaten Federer the week before in Rome but I was playing really well and was up 5–1 in the first set when – crack – my right wrist just went. I don't know how else to describe it. I'd never had pain like that before in my life, it was just agony. I called the physio on to the court straight away while Brad was telling me that I should just get it strapped up and carry on. In retrospect, I saw his reaction as yet another sign of mutual misunderstanding. At the time, though, I was just in pain. I didn't know what to do. But the tournament physio had strapped the wrist really tightly and I tried to carry on. The next time I hit a forehand, the pain was even worse than before and there was no way I could carry on. I was really worried that by playing on I'd made the injury worse. I have had a few pains in my time but this was the worst I'd ever experienced by a long way.
So, I spent my birthday in an MRI clinic in my tennis kit with my agent, Patricio, having a scan for an injury and then waiting around for the results. I didn't need to be told it was serious. I knew something bad had happened because I couldn't open doors with my right arm. I couldn't even lift up a drink. It was just completely useless.
In the end, I think I was expecting worse news than we were actually given. I thought I had torn something really badly, ripped something of the bone, but I hadn't. I was lucky in a way. The German guy who ran the clinic explained to me that the tendon I'd damaged was like a tube and had split down the way, not across. That was good apparently. If the damage goes across, the tendon is snapped in two. Later they discovered it wasn't quite as they had first described, but I don't really know what it was. I just knew it hurt.
I could imagine the headlines about me being 'frail' again. Maybe those first impressions from Wimbledon 2005, when I suffered cramp, would stick with me. But I hoped people would understand this was an injury you could not control. If I hadn't been stretching properly and I'd hurt my hamstring or quad, you could say it was my fault. But a wrist injury can come from just one shot. Loads of tennis players get this sort of damage – I know it's happened to Marat Safin and Mardy Fish. But I was also aware that quite a few come back too soon and then it takes its toll in the long run. I knew I was going to have to be patient, even though patience is not my strongest point.
So we were pretty glum when we went out for dinner to celebrate my birthday: Patricio, Mum, Gran, Brad, Kim and me. However, something happened that cheered me up a good deal. Eating in the same restaurant was Wladimir Klitschko, one of the recent heavyweight boxing champions of the world, who lives in Germany.
I didn't like interrupting his dinner but boxing is my favourite sport. You don't get the chance to meet one of the world's heavyweight champions every day, so I went over to him and someone introduced me. He didn't know who I was but I didn't mind. I might be well known in Britain, but I am sure he's much more famous than me in the sports world.
He was really nice and friendly, and incredibly massive. He must be about 6'7" tall and his back looked about two or three times the size of mine. He hands were massive too – mine was lost in the handshake. I said, 'I'm sorry, I can't shake hands because of the split on my wrist.' He said, 'It's OK, we shake with the left because it comes right from the heart.' He was obviously a pretty intimidating guy and I'm just glad he doesn't play tennis. No disrespect to my family, but that made my birthday a bit better.
Contrary to what people may think, I never did have words with Brad about his suggestion that I play on in Hamburg before he realised how serious the injury was. He wasn't to know how sore it was from the side of the court and it is typical of the way his mind works that he would be keen for me to tough it out if I could. But I wasn't going to be playing tennis for a while, so we parted company and I just went home to have another scan – I believe in getting second opinions. When that confirmed the first diagnosis, all I could do was try and wait for it to heal.
The worst thing to do in that situation is sit around and mope. Luckily I had no time for that because it's one of the biggest fallacies that you laze around doing nothing when you're injured. I was still going to the gym every day, running, doing leg weights, getting rehab. I was desperate to get better as quickly as possible. I even tried swinging a racket underwater in a swimming pool, so that I could help strengthen my wrist without impact. We tried loads of things that were outside the box. After four or five weeks I could start to knock a tennis ball around, but because the injury affected the way I generated topspin. I could only hit slice forehands. That shot improved beyond belief but unfortunately it's not one I hit very often.
All the time, there was this little rumour that sometimes flared up that I might never play again. People who'd only seen me getting cramp at Wimbledon and injuring my ankle at Queen's were getting the idea that I was fragile. To be honest, the thought of quitting never crossed my mind. Wrist problems are a hazard of the job but I never thought it would keep me out for ever. I did have a lot of people asking me whether the weight of my racket was the problem. I said it wasn't and that's true. It was just one of those freak things.
I worked really hard because I wanted to give myself the best chance of getting back in time for Wimbledon. There was a difference of opinion about that. Brad thought I was ready to play and everyone else said I shouldn't play. I spoke to three doctors, two physios, Mum, my agent, friends and everyone told me the same thing: 'It's not worth it.' I was criticised for leaving the decision to the last moment but the conflicting advice made it difficult to decide. Brad thought I could and I was so keen to try, even if everyone else was against it.
I was in a really bad mood the Tuesday before Wimbledon. Kim said to me: 'What's up with you?' because I was visibly so fed-up. I told her I sensed I would not be ready in time. 'I'm not going to be able to play. It's not getting better fast enough.' To be honest, I didn't quite understand why Brad thought I could play. I'd practised with Jamie Baker at the NTC the day before and I still couldn't hit topspin. I was hitting it with my whole arm, instead of the wrist. No one ever won Wimbledon hitting with an unnatural forehand like that. Even if I could win one match playing with slice forehand, I wasn't going to win three matches in a row, especially if any of them went to five sets. Imagine what would have happened if I'd gone on court and then pulled out after a few games. Everyone would have gone berserk.
I'd like to say it was a tough decision, but actually no it wasn't. It was tough in the sense that I had to miss Wimbledon. But it was right for me. I can't understand Brad's attitude. Maybe he believed the injury wasn't that bad. He spoke to the doctors, but the doctors were wrong according to him.
I was criticised for announcing at a press conference just a couple of days before Wimbledon: 'As of now, I plan to play.' It annoyed some Sunday paper journalists because they thought I wasn't telling the truth. But I was really trying to give myself the best opportunity to play – just in case. Following practise at the NTC that morning, where I didn't feel totally comfortable hitting over my forehand and Brad said I would be OK to play, I left the NTC saying, 'Fine, I'll play.' My mum and Patricio followed me out and we all came back to my flat where we discussed it. I calmed down and wrote up a list of pros and cons and when you saw it in black-and-white like that, there was no argument. If Brad hadn't thought so strongly that I would be fit to play, I might have pulled out much sooner. Regardless of what people think about our relationship, if I hadn't respected him I would not have listened when he kept saying: 'You can play. You can play'. I tried my best but it wasn't to be. I pulled out just after lunch the day before the event started. I was desperate to play and I was more than entitled to wait until the last minute. But if this was to happen to me again, I'd pull out the week before and continue with rehab instead of giving hopeful, but misguided, press conferences.
Two-and-a-half months later, on the 5th of August – a full month after Wimbledon was over – I was back on court beating Robby Ginepri 6–4 6–4 in the Canadian Open. It sounds better than it was because I still wasn't hitting through my forehand. After playing on grass where the balls come in at a nice height, I was having to adjust to American hard courts where the ball bounces high and you have to use a lot of topspin to control your shot. That was the movement that hurt my wrist. It was fine when I had my whole body behind the ball, but when I was out of position it was still really sore.
It wasn't surprising. You don't go from being in unbelievable pain and not being able to open doors to suddenly hitting the ball perfectly again. There was a lingering problem, in my mind as well as with the wrist. Every time I wanted to generate topspin, I was scared to try. I hadn't practised it enough and I was scared.
The doctors were telling me this was normal. Your brain is trying to protect you from feeling that pain again. Some mornings when I woke up, my wrist would be sore and stiff and it would crack a good deal. It's pretty tough in those circumstances to go out and hit a tennis ball at 100mph. It was tough on the mind. I was walking out on court just hoping to get through matches, not going all out to win.
I had stuck in my mind all the instances of other players, like Safin, who had tried to come back from a wrist injury too soon and then ended up needing surgery and missing far more time than he had already taken. A wrist injury is one of the toughest in tennis because you need to use your wrist on every shot. If you injure your shoulder that's better, because it is going to ache only when you serve.
I wasn't sure whether I had come back too soon in the States. My mind was badly affected, and on the court the matches went from bad to worse. After the fortunate win against Ginepri, I found myself floundering against Fabio Fognini, a guy from Italy not even ranked in the world Top-100. I didn't just lose, I lost easily 2–6 2–6. My relationship with Brad was deteriorating because I didn't think he was really listening to me. He felt I was just being depressed and negative. Maybe I was, but I had a pretty genuine reason to feel like that.
When you think it can't get any worse, it does. The next week I was slaughtered 1–6 2–6 in the first round of Cincinnati by Marcos Baghdatis. I couldn't go on like this. I phoned home and spoke to my mum and we made the decision that I should just cut short the American trip, come back to London and see a sports psychologist that she had found for me who had worked with the West Ham United football team. It was Brad, actually, who suggested I speak to someone professional who might be able to relieve the mental pressure I was feeling. But he seemed to think I had more deep-rooted problems and that worried me. I asked my close friends what they thought. They all said that off the court I was just as chilled as ever.
I had two or three sessions with this guy Robert Forzoni, who had worked with a number of Britain's Commonwealth boxers as well as a few West Ham players such as Dean Ashton. He believes in motivational videos, reminders of things you do well to act as inspiration or maybe a distraction from your problems. He was also a big fan of the 'inches' speech that Al Pacino delivers as a basketball coach in the film Any Given Sunday. It sounded pretty appropriate to me.
We are in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me and we can stay here and get the shit kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell one inch at a time . . .
I can't remember it all, but that was the gist of it. I don't even remember exactly what Rob and I talked about but I know it wasn't about my wrist. Maybe that was the secret. We were discussing other things like how I was going to win matches, how I saw myself as a player, what my goals were – positive things. For a long time, I had been dwelling on my injury and for months every single person I saw asked me: 'How's your wrist? How's your wrist? How's your wrist? Are you going to be OK for Wimbledon?' On and on and on. It was all people could talk about and all the time I just wanted not to talk about it.
When I went back over for the US Open, Rob came with me to watch and I started to play better tennis again. Even so, I was hitting the ball with only 50 per cent power. It was just taking me a long time to get over it. I had to go through a process first. I had to build up strength in the wrist physically and faith in it mentally until I was sure it was absolutely secure.
I went into New York, my favourite tournament, with a different mentality. Usually I am desperate to win but that wasn't my priority any more. I just wanted to get through it as best I could. I needed to do as well as I could without any more injury scares. The first round against the Uruguayan, Pablo Cuevas, ranked 129, went fine and I won pretty easily in straight sets. Then the real test came in the wily and experienced shape of Jonas Bjorkman, the 35-year-old Swede who had played a lot of doubles tennis with my brother's new partner, Max Mirnyi. It wasn't a comforting thought that he'd played fifty-four of the last fifty-five grand slams going into our match.
I was going to be tested but I wasn't scared any more. It was nice to be back on court again, competing with the top players. I was still not that comfortable on my topspin forehand and I was missing a lot of balls, but I was still in there fighting. I won a tough five-setter 5–7 6–3 6–1 4–6 6–1 and it was the first time since Hamburg that I'd managed to string two victories together. The relief didn't last that long. I lost in the next round to Hyung-Taik Lee, but all things considered, and throwing in a visit to the top of the Empire State building which was awesome, I think I turned a corner.
I came home for the Davis Cup tie against Croatia and won another five-setter against Marin Cilic. Progress was good and I went off to Metz after playing the dead rubber (the one Jamie had given me a hard time about) to get a bit more match practice. It was while I was there that the BBC interview about gambling and match-fixing in tennis occurred. The controversy had yet to break when I played Tommy Robredo in the final and lost, having won the first set 6–0. I was playing really well and I should have won the tournament, but I came away pleased more than disappointed.
I played two rounds in Moscow and then came home for a week when the whole gambling issue erupted. The headlines were completely untrue. 'Tennis Is Fixed, says British No 1 Murray' and 'Murray Taking Flak For Fix Claim'. I could have done without it. Nikolay Davydenko, the Russian player under investigation after retiring from a match at the Polish Open, came out and said: 'If Murray says that he knows, that means he gambles himself because people who start talking out loud have their fears disappeared.' I wasn't quite sure what that meant but I could tell he wasn't happy. Even Rafael Nadal said he thought I'd gone overboard. 'I don't think anything like that happens. Everyone gives it 100 per cent and there are no fixed matches.'
For the record: I still have the feeling that if you are ranked 100 in the world and someone comes to you and says: 'Here, you can make $200,000 if you lose a match' then someone might be tempted. But so far no one's been banned for throwing matches or betting in large amounts. Players have come out and said they've been approached but all of them have turned the offers down. That is obviously good for the sport. We can't say that players are guilty of match-fixing unless someone is found guilty of doing it and that hasn't happened.
But we cannot ignore the problem either. At one of our ATP tennis meetings in Miami, in 2007, we had a visit from a guy from the American Mafia. He explained to us how wrong it would be to get involved with these people. If you do something for them once, they're not going to let you go. They'll approach you many more times and it's very tough to escape.
Obviously there were investigations going on then, otherwise there would have been no point in organising a visit from an ex-Mafia informant who'd spent time in jail. He said he'd turned his life around and warned us that anybody getting involved in this kind of business was in big trouble if they were caught. He was pretty authentic and looked the part because he wore sunglasses all the time. He made sense, and I thought it was a good idea for him to speak to us. Some of the other players didn't, they thought it was a bit extreme, but later events proved that there was a problem and something needed to be done to try and address it.
The controversy rumbled on. It was still with me when I arrived in Madrid but I had a good clear-the-air talk with Nadal, who understood how these things can happen in the media, and with that pressure off my shoulders I then played my best tennis of the year to beat Radek Stepanek in the first round, followed by Juan Ignacio Chela in the second. Both of them were fairly easy straight-set victories. I played so well against Stepanek that he never once reached deuce on my serve, and I would say it was probably one of my best matches since turning pro.
Maybe it was fate that my next opponent was Rafa Nadal, in front of his home crowd, playing only his second match since hobbling away from the fourth round of the US Open with knee problems. We hadn't met since that epic match in Melbourne, and this one followed the same up-and-down route. I slammed down a few aces, then lost my serve to love to go 6–5 down. I levelled when he failed to win a point on his next service game and then he won the first-set tie-break with a gigantic leap of celebration while 10,000 Spaniards went mad. He won the second set 6–4 but only after a battle.
It was another really great match between us and I wasn't too disappointed when I met Brad, my mum and Leon afterwards. I felt a little tired after playing three weeks in a row – Metz, Moscow and Madrid – but I wasn't even thinking about my wrist any longer. I was feeling more and more confident about how hard I could hit the ball again and moved on to St Petersburg with every hope of doing well.
This was only the seventh tournament I'd played since the injury, and winning it was a very good effort. I had an unbelievably tough draw as well. Playing two Russians in Russia is always going to be tough and after beating Dmitry Tursunov in the quarter-finals, I came back against Mikhail Youzhny after saving one match point. Later, my Mum said she cried with relief when I beat Fernando Verdasco 6–2 6–3 in the final because it meant I was back to my old self. I was playing well and winning again.
I am sure it is just a coincidence, but I've noticed that every time I've won a tournament there has hardly been any British press there. It's either been a long way from home, like San José, Qatar or St Petersburg, or else one of the smaller tournaments such as Marseilles. I am not reading anything into this. It is just something that struck me at the time.
I still had a chance of making the Masters Cup, the lucrative end-of-season tournament for the top eight players in the world, this year being played in Shanghai. I still had to keep winning and a couple of players in front of me had to lose, but I had my passport stamped with a Chinese visa just to be on the safe side. Six of the eight places were already taken but the chance to win $1 million was worth shooting for.
It came down to Paris: if I won Paris, I'd reach Shanghai, and it turned out to be eventful. First there was the car crash. It was funny that a couple of weeks before, when we were being driven round Moscow, I'd asked Brad if he'd ever had an accident in one of the tournament cars during his career, as some of the driving overseas is pretty suspect. He said he'd had a couple. I told him I'd never had one. 'Be careful what you say,' he'd said.
He was obviously right about that. We were on our way to the hotel in Paris in the pouring rain when our car braked suddenly and the guy behind absolutely nailed the back of the car. We were lucky we were in one of the big Mercedes people-carriers that they use at tournaments because we were basically fine. But the impact of the crash was really loud, and for a split second we had no idea what had happened. The front of the car behind us was pretty badly damaged.
Actually, it wasn't quite true to say I'd never been in car crash, but it wasn't in a tournament car. It was in a New York taxi and I knew as soon as I got in the back that I had a dodgy driver because before I even shut my door he was trying to beat the red light in front of us. At the next set of lights, he stopped and another cab piled into the back of us, probably trying to run the red light himself. It was a pretty hard hit and as I didn't have my seat belt on, I went flying into the perspex window behind the driver and hit my head. I climbed groggily out of the car and the driver demanded five dollars for the fare. I couldn't believe it. I said: 'What? I've just got my head smashed!' I ended up paying though. The two drivers were really snapping at each other and I thought it was probably the safest thing to do. I may have been the only person ever in New York who's paid for a one-block ride and a crash.
This crash was obviously not the greatest start to a tournament I've ever had, and in the third round I was drawn against one of my favourite players to watch, and a Frenchman, the Tahiti-born Fabrice Santoro. They call him 'The Magician' because he has great hands and plays a wonderfully tricky game. At 34, he was the oldest man in the World Top-50 but he had already beaten Djokovic in the previous round, who turned up for the match in a Zorro mask that he'd picked up in a restaurant the night before because it was Halloween. It didn't bring him much luck, but since he'd just had his wisdom teeth removed maybe he had an excuse.
I played very well to beat Santoro but ended up losing in the next round to another Frenchman, Richard Gasquet, who was also trying to get to Shanghai. I was disappointed and tired, not so much physically as mentally. The Brad thing was still going on. I wanted to win the match, but things were preying on my mind. We'd been together for five straight weeks in Europe and I wasn't enjoying it. I should have been loving life, getting so close to a place in the Master's Cup – and if I wasn't there had to be something major wrong. I knew it was time to address the problem.
Even so, being one match away from Shanghai was a good effort and I could go away on a two-week holiday to Miami with Kim feeling relatively pleased with myself. It was just typical that while I was supposed to be relaxing, I developed some sort of illness and ended up on a drip. Why isn't life ever simple?