Andy Murray: Rebel In Reverse

Andy Murray isn’t the best player of his era, but he may be remembered as its most important.

- Stephen Tignor

AS HE SAT DOWN TO BEGIN HIS FIRST PRESS CONFERENCE AT THE MIAMI OPEN this spring, Andy Murray made for an unlikely-looking radical. Dressed in a blue Under Armour fleece and black sweatpants, with his uncombed hair pushed hastily to one side after a workout, Murray leaned back, put his hands in his pockets and calmly began answering questions. If you knew the world’s No. 2-ranked player only from the steady stream of rants, raves and semi-intelligible soliloquies that flow from his mouth when he’s on court, you might have had trouble recognizing the soft-spoken, levelheaded, 28-year-old new father who sat before the media.

On this day, though, reporters suspected that Murray, despite his easygoing demeanor, was going to have a juicy quote or two for them. They swarmed his table and pushed their cameras, microphones, notepads and whatever recording device they could find into his face.

Two days earlier,  Raymond Moore, who was then the chairman of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, had dialed the tennis world’s outrage meter up to 11—and talked himself out of a job—by stating that the WTA rides on the “coattails” of the ATP, and that, “If I were a lady player, I would go down on my knees every night and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were born, because they have carried this sport.”

Later that day, Novak Djokovic dug the men’s hole a little deeper when he said that ATP players deserve more prize money than WTA players, and expressed his admiration for female pros this way: “They have to go through a lot of things we don’t have to go through. You know, the hormones and different stuff.”