How tennis learned to love Andy Murray

livemint.com:

“I want to play forever," Andy Murray said, and it meant a lot coming from him. Few tennis champions became more familiar with the brutality of the sport—in Murray’s case, a ruthless churn of injuries and surgeries and body parts which failed him again and again. Tennis is beautiful but it can also be cruel, and Murray—the Scottish former World No.

1 and two-time Wimbledon champ who bid adieu to his favorite event in a tender farewell Thursday—knew its savagery as well as anyone. I loved the later stage Andy Murray. He was physically diminished, not a threat to push deep into most events, but his effort never shrunk.

These were humble, hip-resurfaced years, regularly tormented by that bad back, but when Murray got out there, he still gave everything, gutting out first-round tiebreakers against no-names, barking at himself as if millions were on the line, when he was barely rattling inside the Top 100. Once in a while, Murray, now 37, would summon vintage form and it was spectacular—nothing made a tennis tournament better than a rollicking Andy run, the creaky champ youthfully re-energized, the crowd rallying behind him. At his peak…well, this isn’t ancient history, even if it feels like that.

Peak Murray was an athletic dynamo, as good of a defensive player as there’s been in the baseline era, capable of lunging and stretching and staying in points that long ago should have been finished. He had weapons: a snappy cross court forehand, a curt backhand down the line. He lobbed like a lunatic.

But his key advantage was that maddening endurance. He was hard to outwork or outrun. Playing Murray was a pain in the behind, always.