I'm the pushy mother. I know that's what a few people think because I've had some horrible letters over the years, accusing me of all sorts of things including 'inciting violence' due to my 'aggressive' fist-pumping during matches and even humiliating my sons with my support. People like that just don't get it. I don't mind what they say for the same reason I tell Andy not to mind when they criticise him: these people don't know us.
Anyone who knows me can tell you that I'm not pushy at all. I am not a control freak. I'm not sacking Andy's coaches behind the scenes. I don't try and dominate the lives of my sons. I've always been a believer that if you make a decision yourself and it's a mistake, you're going to learn much more from it than if someone makes a decision for you.
I've always seen the difference between people who push their kids to do things and people who push to make things happen for their kids. I admit I've often had to push to create opportunities for my kids but if they didn't want to take them I would back off. When it came to tennis, they never wanted to back off.
It wasn't just tennis either. When they were little, it was anything that involved having fun: playing swingball in the garden, chasing the ducks round the pond in the park, flying down the chutes at the swimming pool in Dundee, riding their trikes like mini Valentino Rossis round the Dunblane Tennis club house. It would be pointless me saying I don't know where they get it from. I know very well. I used to take them to those indoor activity centres with ball pools, tunnels and slides. The other mothers sat and had coffee. I went on everything with them, ignoring the signs that said 'For Under-10s only'.
These days, my two little nieces just start screaming when they see me. I play hide and seek with them, I go on the trampoline, chase them round the garden. I get them completely hyper. My sister-in-law, when it gets close to bedtime, says: 'Can't you just read them a story?' I do, but it's nowhere near as much fun.
This may partly explain why Andy's first eighteen months were the hardest of my life. It was a little bit of a shock to discover I was pregnant again when Jamie was only five months old. I had found the whole birth thing such a horrific experience that if I hadn't done it again quickly I wouldn't have done it at all.
We had moved to Dunblane two weeks before Andy was born, back to my old home town and not far down the road from my parents. I'd had to give up my job in retail sales and my company car had gone back. I felt completely trapped. I was used to doing a job and loads of sport and suddenly there was no escape. I was stuck in the house with these two little tiddlers and it was an absolute nightmare.
It wasn't post-natal depression or anything like that, it was just the frustration of an active person suddenly surrounded by mashed vegetable. They were both good babies, although I wouldn't say they slept. I was up and down in the night with both of them. More with Andy, if I remember rightly. It just killed me the next day, and I still had a toddler running round to cope with.
I've been on the women's professional tennis tour, I've been through a divorce, I've watched both my sons win and lose major tennis matches and still I would say that Andy's first eighteen months were the toughest I've every known.
Nothing has been that hard again, not even during the first couple of months of 2008 when Jamie was so furious with Andy for pulling out of the Davis Cup tie in Argentina. All brothers argue, but not many end up with newspaper headlines exposing the fact splashed all over the world.
I felt for both of them: for Andy as all he was trying to do was protect himself from unnecessary injury, and for Jamie because he was thrown in the deep end of a press conference without being properly informed. When he found out from the Davis Cup captain, John Lloyd, when the team were already over in Chile that Andy wouldn't be joining them he was visibly, audibly, livid. In the infamous press conference called shortly afterwards, Jamie had a rant against his brother to the press.
He obviously felt really strongly to have spoken out like that, but it had been caused by a horrible lack of communication. He was fielding all these questions about Andy's withdrawal and he barely knew anything about it. He was being asked as though he should know, since he was family, but he didn't. We had inadvertently put him in a very difficult and exposed position.
It all arose because Andy's knee had been bothering him on-and-off during December and January and it became clear that the worst thing he could do would be to play a succession of intense matches on clay where there is a lot of sliding and pressure on the knee from changes of direction. The result of a scan and the advice of his physios and trainers was that it would be taking an unnecessary risk to play in Argentina.
When Andy finally decided not to go, his agent Patricio called John Lloyd, and we just forgot that Jamie didn't know. I understand from Jamie's point of view that he was put in a difficult position. I also think that Jamie felt very strongly they had a chance of winning the tie with Andy's contribution. Without it, they had no chance.
Perhaps people thought it was strange that the boys hadn't spoken to each other anyway, but, although they're brothers, they don't communicate on a daily basis, and especially not about tennis. They might send each other messages on MSN, but that's just banter. When they are together, they just have fun. They rarely talk about tennis at all.
I was relieved when they started speaking again. It didn't take long. They are brothers after all and blood is thicker than water. On the 13th of February the first thing that Andy said to me on the phone was: 'It's Jamie's birthday today, Mum,' so I knew he was thinking about his brother and that everything would be OK. They met for the first time afterwards at the tournament in Indian Wells and it was fine. I think Jamie now understands Andy's reasons for withdrawing from the team, but these should have been communicated to him personally before the announcement. It was obviously wrong that Jamie had to find out from John Lloyd.
You have to put everything in perspective. They've been competing – or wrestling or arguing – since Andy was old enough to walk. Most of the time they are polite young men (believe it or not) who enjoy each other's company. These things happen and, anyway, I understand the pressures of life on the tour.
I was on it myself once, not for long though. I had left school, just turned seventeen, and I really wanted to give it a try. It was completely different in those days. There was no one in Scotland to help. No coach, no training facility, no other full-time players. You had to do everything on your own. I had no money for flights and accommodation. I often had to take buses and stay overnight in a tent which, on one occasion in France beside the tennis club in Antibes, collapsed in the pouring rain.
The worst time, for sure, was at quite a big tournament in Barcelona when I was on my own as usual. I had just played Mariana Simionescu, who was Björn Borg's girlfriend at the time, and lost. In those days your opponent would always buy you a drink afterwards in the club-house bar. It's crazy to imagine that now. Justine Henin saying to Venus Williams: 'Would you like a beer?' after beating her in the Wimbledon quarter-finals is hilariously unimaginable. Anyway, we were on our way to the bar when Mariana said: 'We have to go to the locker room first.' I asked her why. 'Because Björn doesn't like to see me smoke,' she replied, lighting up a cigarette. 'I can't smoke in front of people or else he'll find out.'
So we stopped for her nicotine break, then had our drink together and it was a good job she was paying. I was so short of money I then had to go into Barcelona to a Spanish post office to collect extra funds that Mum and Dad had sent me. It was all I had in the world. Coming back from the city, the bus was mobbed. I had my handbag over my shoulder and, of course, when I got off the bus my bag was open and my wallet, including my passport and my ticket home, were gone.
I just stood there on the pavement in sheer horror and disbelief. I couldn't move from the spot for a while, but then I forced myself to go and find a policeman, who took me into a shop to find someone to speak English and eventually I found my way to the British Embassy who organised a little money and a passport home. When I arrived back in Dunblane, I was so distraught about the theft that my dad basically said: 'That's it. You can't do it on your own any more.'
It was hard because I loved tennis and, within Scotland, I had a successful career. I went on to represent Great Britain at the World Student Games in Bucharest in 1981. The reason I remember it so well is that I played mixed doubles with a guy named Bill Gowans against the Romanians who consisted of Virginia Ruzici (who was number 10 in the world at the time but listed as a student by the home country) and Florin Sergarceanu (who went on to become Romania's Davis Cup coach). We lost 6–4 6–3 in a great match with a big noisy crowd. Ruzici was a great athlete, a beautiful gipsy-like girl, with big gold hoop earrings. Bill kept drop-shotting her and she would invariably run up and smack the ball right at me. After she had done it about half-a-dozen times, I suggested to him it might not be the greatest tactic. He said: 'I know, but I just love to see her running towards me!'
All together I won sixty-four junior and senior titles in Scottish tennis, which is no big deal and I never talk about it to Andy or Jamie or anybody else. All Andy knows is that I was good enough to play with him until he was about twelve, and then he started beating me.
However, I am glad I tried for those few mad months on the tour. At least I have no regrets and it probably made me grow up fast. Doing things on my own made me stronger. When I see kids having so much provided for them these days, I think: You have no idea how lucky you are to have this chance. You learn so much more when you make your own mistakes. You try that bit harder if everything isn't given to you on a plate.
There was a gap between abandoning the tour and going to university, so I took a crash course in shorthand and typing, and then took a series of temp jobs like working as a secretary in a glass factory and later in a car insurance office where I maddened my boss by typing 'Ford gear' instead of 'Ford Ghia' from his dictaphone every time. How was I supposed to know? I had never owned a car in my life.
I studied French and German at Edinburgh University before switching to French and Business Studies, because, to be honest, the German was so boring. For a while after that I was a trainee manager with Miss Selfridge and then I was employed as a sales woman for a confectionery firm with my own company car. It was that car – or one of its successors – I had to give back when I discovered I was pregnant with Andy.
Life changes with children in unimaginable ways, not just because you are looking after them but because pretty soon you discover the new characters that have arrived in your world. In many ways both boys were very similar, and yet they were very different too: both sensitive and fuming, but Andy with a stubborn streak so that it was always very difficult to tell him what to do. Whether he thought something was right or not, if you forced him to do it, he would dig his heels in and say 'No.' You have to find the right way to approach things with Andy. With Jamie you could always be a little bit more direct.
Jamie, now, is the extrovert. He loves going out in a crowd and being the life and soul of any social situation. That has only come in the last few years, boosted by his famous win at Wimbledon in 2007 with Jelena Jankovic and by the success he has enjoyed on the men's tour in the doubles. Andy isn't shy but he is more the introvert. He likes going out with a smaller group that he's very comfortable with. He is very happy with his inner circle, and has a really good relationship with his girlfriend, Kim and has a few very close friends from his junior tennis days. He is very level-headed and he's quite good at sussing people out.
I remember Paul Annacone, the LTA men's head coach, saying something to Andy like: 'When you're 18, you have to do xxx . . .' and Andy just said 'Well, why?' He will not follow instructions blindly. He won't just accept what somebody tells him. You have to prove it to him first.
Both boys are quite sensitive, but I would say Andy's the more sensitive of the two. He hates seeing people begging in the street, he hates cruelty to animals. He is more inquisitive than Jamie and he can be more argumentative – not in a bad way, but he likes to reason things out.
He has always been very sensible. When he went away to Spain I didn't have to give him a pep talk about potential vices. I trusted him. He never expressed any interest in drinking. He is so like me in many ways.
Apart from one time, I never, ever wanted to drink, even all the way through university. The only time I did was in a bar in Edinburgh the night before we were due to catch the London sleeper en route to a three-month stay in France as part of my degree. Someone encouraged me to try a Southern Comfort and lemonade. I agreed to try one, then two, three, maybe even four. When I tried to move away from the pillar I was leaning against, I couldn't walk. I then fell down a flight of stairs – it wasn't until the next morning I discovered I was covered in bruises – and I was violently sick on the train. The girl in the bunk below has never forgiven me!
I have never done it again. I never want to have that feeling again. I don't get it – how can people want to feel that terrible? I am pretty sure Andy is the same.
We're certainly similar on the tennis court – both seriously competitive. There was a family doubles event at our club in Dunblane which we would play in from time to time. I also remember us playing a fun summer tournament in North Berwick together. At that time I was a Scottish internationalist and I actually remember being quite nervous before our match because I didn't want to let Andy down. He was eight years old and he wanted to win. It was a handicap event and I knew he'd be thinking: 'My mum's one of the best in Scotland, so we should win.' In the end, we didn't and I felt thoroughly annoyed with myself. He tells me that I was swearing under my breath at the back of the court all through the match – and I probably was!
I know it was supposed to be a fun tournament, but I am not good at playing sports socially. I can't hit a bad shot and then laugh about it. I just can't do it. There is a myth that when I was a youngster I was such a bad loser that my mother once confiscated my rackets. That's not true, but she did leave me at a tournament once to find my own way home when I smacked my only racket on the ground during a match and broke the frame.
Maybe Andy gets some of his competitiveness from me, but when I watch him play I can see he has something that I never had as a player: an amazing self-belief. He plays to win, I played not to lose.
Going on to become the Scottish National Coach was not something I planned, it just happened. My dad always said he thought I would make a great coach, but I was too busy when the boys were small – setting up a lingerie and Italian jewellery business or helping Mum in her children's toy shop – to do anything about it. It came about as a happy accident.
There was a junior tournament at Stirling University and because I had been Scottish number one (and probably because I was local) they asked me if I would present the prizes at the end. I said OK, I would. In a rash moment, handing over the awards to the under-12s, I said that the winners – two boys and two girls – could come and have a hit with me for an hour in Dunblane as a bonus. They all took me up on it and afterwards the parents asked if I would do it on a regular basis. That's where my first four pupils came from.
Two of them were a brother and sister from Falkirk and part of the deal was that their mother would look after Andy and Jamie – take them over to the park in their buggies – while I coached her children for two hours. All four of those pupils went on to be Scottish Junior Champions and one of them reached the top-500 in the world.
It turned out that coaching kids was something I loved to do. I have very happy memories of Jamie Baker, another British Davis Cup player, coming round to our house when he was really young and playing table tennis on our kitchen table, with the boys using a cornflake packet as the net. There was always something sporty going on in our house. Ornaments had a pretty poor survival rate.
Andy has talked about the sacrifice he made to leave home at fifteen and go to the Academy in Barcelona. He felt it was the right thing to do, and we supported him completely. It was an easy decision and, in some ways, a very hard decision too. Letting your children go away from home in their early teens is always difficult and we had already been warned that it could go horribly wrong.
I'm sure that Jamie's lack of confidence before his latter success as a doubles player stemmed from the miserable time he had at the LTA training school in Cambridge when he was only twelve. For a long time after that he didn't want to be away from home for any great length of time. Between the ages of about sixteen and twenty, when he was really struggling around the lower levels of the men's tour, it would have been very easy for him to have moved away from tennis and never blossomed into the outgoing character he is now.
I feel tremendous relief about that outcome because I was definitely guilty about Cambridge. I look back and understand what happened, but at the time we just didn't know what to do for the best. He had been offered a live-in place at Bisham Abbey to train with Pat Cash's old coach, Ian Barclay, and he was desperate to go. He had pretty much had his bags packed for six months. Then, one month before he was due to start, the LTA announced that they were closing Bisham Abbey down and the Cambridge option came up instead. We had a look at it and he wanted to give it a try.
However, he was leaving his friends, his school, his home, his parents, his first coach and all that is secure about life. You have to feel absolutely certain that where your child is going is the right environment, not just on the courts but twenty-four hours a day – and it wasn't right for Jamie. He used to be in tears on the phone, but he wanted to tough it out. I didn't know whether to leave him there or bring him home, it was a terrible dilemma. That's why I am a great believer now in establishing much better regional set-ups. Many children won't thrive a long way from home at such a young age, and yet at that age you need high-quality sparring partners, not just a few local kids and your coach.
In the end, after a few months we did go and fetch Jamie back and I could immediately see his game had deteriorated, or his interest had, and he seemed far less happy on the tennis court than he had ever been before. It was heart-breaking. That is why we had to be sure about Andy's decision to go to Spain and, when he loved it, why we worked so hard to afford it.
We got some funding from the LTA, sportscotland, and from Tennis Scotland in the first year, but were still left a lot to find ourselves as costs for training, lodging and competition were around £30,000 a year. We also had a little sponsorship from Robinsons, but it's difficult to encourage big firms to invest in potential. It is much easier when you have actually made it. Although it was sometimes pretty stressful trying to find the funding over the three years Andy was at Sanchez-Casal, and it was a massive relief when RBS came onboard to sponsor Andy during that time but in many ways I am glad it was tough because it made it a real challenge and kept us all working hard.
We have proof that hard work pays off. I'll never forget the day he beat Soderling in Bangkok in 2005 to make it into the world's top-100. He sent me a text afterwards that just said: 'I did it Mum.' I remember crying as I read it. I was just as tearful when he beat Tim Henman for the first time, in Basle, at the end of the same year. I wasn't there, but I knew it would be a really big thing for Andy because Tim was so much a role model to him. I listened to him sounding so humble in radio and TV interviews afterwards and I thought: 'Andy, you have handled that so well.' I was really proud of him.
I think the most recent time I cried was when he won in St Petersburg at the end of 2007 after coming through that really difficult time with his wrist injury. He'd struggled physically and mentally, missed four full months of competition and he had had some horrible results in the run-up to the tournament. It had been a long, long haul, but he won and I remember thinking: 'He's back.'
I keep these moments to myself. I don't think Andy would ever have seen me cry at one of his tournaments. If he did, he would just give me a row. 'What are you crying for, you stupid woman?' I am pretty sure about this because at Christmas 2006 he gave me a card that said: 'I'd like to thank you Mum . . .' and he listed a whole pile of things like '. . . for always believing in me, always supporting me, always letting me make my own decisions . . . but I most want to thank you for being the best Mum in the world.'
Of course, as I am reading it, tears are running down my face. He took one look at me and said, genuinely mystified: 'What are you crying for? You are so stupid.' He is very affectionate, but he would never say nice things like those to my face. I don't think most teenagers would, but just the thought that he is appreciating what we do for him, meant a great deal to me.
The joys and perils of being on tour with Andy are pretty numerous. I don't go to many of his tournaments because I have a job and he has a coach, but when I do go there is always something to do. At the 2007 US Open he suddenly turned round and said: 'Mum, I haven't got any clean shirts for my match tomorrow,' despite the fact that there's a laundry service at the courts. So – not for the first time – I had to wash out his dirty shirt in the sink, hang it up and blow-dry it with a hotel hairdryer.
Then there is the story of the shoes. He wore through his tennis shoes at the Madrid Open while winning a three-set match against Ivan Ljubicic which finished at 6pm. The shops shut two hours later and although he tried everywhere, he couldn't find the same make in his size. He had to play the next day, an evening match, against Djokovic and so Brad called me and said: 'The kid's got no shoes. You're going to have to find some and bring them over here.' At that precise moment I had just checked my bags on to the Heathrow– Edinburgh flight after working in London for a few days. My battery was dying on my phone and I had no charger with me. First I had to try and locate new shoes. It was 7pm in the evening – no shops open – so I called Patricio who was on the way to a Chelsea match. He said there were shoes in his office in Fulham. I called Patricio's partner to ask if he would open the office at this time of night and get me the shoes. He did, and offered to bring them to Heathrow. Bonus.
While he was doing that, I caught the tube over to Terminal 4 to see if I could buy a battery charger. No luck, so I had to call Brad on a pay phone to say I had the shoes and would get a flight in the morning. I went to the BA desk to book a seat but there were only two left and they were business class. I'd never flown business class in my life, but I had no option. I had to stump up the £600. I then went to the hotel booking desk and found a room for the night. Another £140. I waited for the shoes to arrive, then had to hang around till about 10.30pm to get my bags off the Edinburgh flight, then jumped on the Hotel Hoppa Bus and got to bed just before midnight.
I was up again at 4.30am to catch the flight and made it to the tournament hotel in Madrid before he was due to set off for practice. I handed him the shoes and he said: 'I don't know why you bothered, there's nothing wrong with the ones I've got!'
Every cloud has a silver lining, though. David Beckham, then playing with Real Madrid, was at that tournament and I met him in the players' lounge after the match. Maybe it was divine justice for the journey I'd made to get there.
You might say life with Andy can be hectic. It can also be wonderfully funny. The Scottish boxer Alex Arthur came to Wimbledon 2006 to watch Andy in his match against Andy Roddick. He came up to the players' lounge with us afterwards with his wife and said: 'I'd rather go a full fifteen rounds than sit through that again. I've never been so nervous in my life.' He told us that he had been sitting behind this American guy who kept shouting: 'Way to go Roddick.' Every time he did, Alex shouted like an echo: 'Way to go Murray.' He said. 'I know it was really childish, but I couldn't help myself.'
Being Andy's mum is never boring, for reasons good and bad. My reaction when he is in trouble for swearing is the same as any other parent. 'Oh no!' It's embarrassing and you know it's going to lead to us having a 'conversation' about it, but I do understand why it happens because Andy is a fiery character. It means he is frustrated by something, like missing an easy shot or adopting the wrong tactic. He is only angry at himself and he has always worn his heart on his sleeve. He has always been like that. It is part of him. Unfortunately he gets wrongly portrayed as an angry young man when he is anything-but off the court.
I admit his language at the Davis Cup in Glasgow against Serbia in 2006 was embarrassing. He was perhaps a little bit unlucky that the microphone at the umpire's chair picked it up and broadcast his outburst to the nation on television. I'd rather that hadn't happened – but I think he really felt that a bad call had changed the outcome of the match and he was particularly fractious that day because he had been so ill with a bad throat (ironically!) that he shouldn't have been playing at all. However, he knows he made a mistake and he learned from it. He has never been in so much trouble since then.
People also noticed that Andy shouted at Brad Gilbert, when he was his coach, when things were annoying him on court. It caused quite a bit of comment, but Brad didn't mind. He said he preferred Andy to shout at him rather than shouting at himself: he thought it was a way of deflecting the blame for a bad shot on to somebody else and maybe that was a good way to handle it, that Andy didn't the rest of the match berating himself.
Andy has deserved some criticism for his behaviour, but I often think he is punished in the media more than he deserves. The accusation that he is anti-English is just nonsense. We both agree that there is nothing better than beating the English if you are Scottish, but my mum is English so I have absolutely no problems with anyone south of Hadrian's Wall. In sport, there is a wonderfully competitive element when Scotland plays England but, in the end, it is just a cultural joke. Andy was very unlucky that something he said as a joke – about supporting England's opponents at the 2006 World Cup – was taken seriously by a few people in the media.
The other criticism we have to contend with is that he's injury-prone. Sometimes perceived problems are just a combination of bad luck and sensational headlines. He has been a little bit unfortunate to turn the same ankle three times in his sporting career, but the first time he did it he wasn't playing tennis at all. He was a teenager playing football for a junior team, Auchterarder Primrose, and it wasn't repaired quite as well as it might have been because we weren't that savvy about injuries in those days.
Since then he's had the knee injury that kept him out for six months in 2004 but that was also unfortunate in that he was born with the bipartite patella and it was misdiagnosed as tendonitis for several months. For all I know I have one too, but I never did well enough as a sportswoman to have a single scan in my life.
I think people started to have a go about his fitness due to the cramping issues at Queen's and Wimbledon in 2005, and that was caused by a lack of understanding. Andy was perfectly fit for the rigours of junior tennis, best of three sets and pretty small venues, but the first time the cramping happened, he was playing a grand slam champion on the show court at Queen's in front of television cameras and a huge crowd, and he cramped up after waiting ages for treatment when he went over on his ankle again.
The second time it happened was in the fifth set against a Wimbledon finalist on the Centre Court at Wimbledon when he just ran out of energy after so much physical and mental exhaustion. That shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone. It's normal It's happened to loads of other players when they step up from juniors to seniors. It happened to the Argentine junior, Juan Martin Del Potro, when he was playing Fernando Gonzalez in the Australian Open 2007. It happens. The only difference is that while the Argentines have a huge press corps following their matches, they have more than one player to write about.
I accept the fact that Andy will have to bear the burden of attention alone, as Tim did for so many years. I think he has handled it pretty well so far. I have just got to hope that some other British players will push through in the next few years, because he is pretty young to have to cope with all the attention by himself. I do wonder, though, where the next generation is coming from. British tennis has not always had the most healthy mentality. Sometimes it seems that success just means everyone gangs up against you.
I remember Andy playing in the final of a junior tournament. He was younger than the other players and I became very aware that most of the audience were supporting Andy's opponent – not because they wanted him to win, they just wanted Andy to lose. If Andy played a great shot there was no recognition of it. When he lost a point there was noisy applause. It was an unhealthy environment. That's when I started to think that the best place to survive would be out of it and Spain became the best option.
Being a tennis mum means more than just coaching. It is about looking at all the pitfalls and trying to avoid them if you can. Some people just don't seem to like visible tennis mothers. I remember the flak that Gloria Connors used to get, but what a great job she did with Jimmy. I admired her sense of determination and fighting spirit. I also remember the way the cameras used to focus on her when she was shouting: 'Go on, Jimbo,' in the crowd. I have learned over the years to keep my mouth firmly shut. Actually I react immediately when Andy hits a great shot, but by the time the cameras come to me I've switched back to sitting there as neatly and quietly as though I was related to the Henmans. It's a good trick and it works.
Naturally, not everything has gone quite so smoothly. We have had some rough times. Andy's injuries have been little short of 'hell' for the people around him, and one of those times was the wrist injury in 2007 when he was struggling so badly to get back to form that we arranged for him to see a sports psychologist.
Andy had started playing again in the August, having missed the French Open and Wimbledon, and it was obvious he wasn't hitting through the ball on his forehand side. He managed one win in Canada against Robby Ginepri and then lost easily 6–2 6–2 to an Italian qualifier that he would normally expect to beat. Watching him you could see, he was very, very tentative. He was quite down about that. The following week he went to Cincinnati and was absolutely hammered in the first round by Marcos Baghdatis. When we talked on the phone he said there was no point in playing any more matches leading up to the US Open. He said he didn't feel confident about hitting the ball. It wasn't a physical problem because the wrist wasn't giving him pain. It was mental. That is when we organised the psychologist, Roberto Forzoni who worked with West Ham United, and it really seemed to do Andy good. It helped that Roberto knew nothing about tennis so he talked about his feelings over many things not just the injury itself.
One of the problems was that Brad wasn't understanding how Andy felt about the injury. In Brad's mind it seemed to be a case of: 'The wrist's fine now so get out there and do it.' It was an unsympathetic response and Andy was really struggling with that. Most of the time when they travelled it was just the two of them and although the tennis expertise was great, there appeared to be little emotional support. 'The wrist's repaired now. What's wrong with you? Get going.'
I know that everything he did for Andy, Brad always believed was for the best. But it was a business to him. Whereas to us, this is our child, and good or bad, we will do whatever we can to help him get better. It's not just about results.
If someone said to me: What was the happiest day of your life? I think I'd have to pick three occasions when the boys have done so well. The most excited I've ever been was probably the first Davis Cup match Andy ever played, the doubles victory over Israel when he was seventeen-years old and partnering David Sherwood. That was just unbelievable. Then there was the Davis Cup tie against Holland when both the boys were in the team at the same time. And, of course, Jamie winning the Wimbledon mixed doubles with Jelena – and Andy being so supportive of him – was incredible.
Now my ambition, apart from supporting Andy and Jamie in their careers whenever they need me, is to establish my own indoor/outdoor training centre in Scotland for players and their coaches. I feel very passionately about tennis in Scotland. We've proved it doesn't really matter where players come from. If they've got the talent that is correctly developed, plus hunger and belief, coupled with the right direction and the right opportunities, then it is possible to produce world-class players.
It's a big challenge and it will need investment, but I'm hoping that between the LTA, sportscotland and corporate sponsors, enough funding will come forward to make it possible. Maybe a few years down the line it is something that Andy and Jamie might be keen to get involved with. Andy has enough on his plate right now but when his playing career is over, I can see him playing a part.
Both the boys love tennis and just want to go as far with it as they can. Jamie calls it 'living the dream', but I do worry about the weight of expectation. What they have done is already pretty special, but I think there is a general lack of understanding that there are a lot of good players out there. Every match is tough at the top level. Andy and Jamie are still very young, and they still have lots of improving to do.
Just because someone like Novak Djokovic, younger than Andy by a week, won the Australian Open in 2008 doesn't mean that Andy is failing by comparison. It just means he's not ready to win a grand slam yet. I can see so many areas of his game that Andy can still develop. He will improve, without doubt, because he's got a very exciting game and a great tactical brain.
To me, it doesn't even matter if he never wins a slam. We would love him to, but if it doesn't happen, he will still have been a top-10 player at a very young age and he has emerged from a small country where tennis remains very much a minority sport. The future is bright for both the boys as long as we're not too impatient.