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Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Andy Murray’s mother Judy has revealed how a “very hard” experience as a new parent led to hobbies that would eventually propel her son to international fame and stardom.
Judy, now 65, is credited with training, developing, and supporting the tennis champion from his early childhood, as well as his brother Jamie, who won seven Grand Slam titles as a doubles player. However, the road to success was not smooth for the dedicated mother-of-two, who turned down a tennis scholarship of her own as a young woman.
“The first 18 months of being a mother were very hard,” she told the i. “Jamie and Andy are 15 months apart. Just before Andy was born, we moved from Glasgow, where lots of my friends were, to Dunblane to be nearer to my parents.”
Judy worked as a sales rep for a confectionary company but struggled to balance her job and her work raising two children.
“I realised I wasn’t able to do it with two of them,” she explained. “So the job went, and the company car went too. Suddenly, I was without friends. I felt trapped with these two little kids.”
Left to her own devices, Judy decided to fill her spare time with alternative extracurricular activities.
“I went over to the tennis club to see what was going on, and I realised there were no opportunities for teenagers,” she continued. “I started to volunteer for just a couple of hours a week. I realised quite quickly that I enjoyed sharing my sport, so I got some more qualifications and created a mum’s army, lobbying for school teams. I just wanted to get myself out of the house for a couple of hours, and suddenly, it was the start of a career path.”
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Judy Murray felt ‘trapped’ as a mother (Getty)
The path eventually led to a vocation for both of her sons, Andy and Jamie, but Judy insisted that was not the goal.
“I didn’t set out to raise sports stars – I just wanted my kids to enjoy sports,” she said. “I did what my parents had done with me, which was play constantly in the garden; anything from French cricket, badminton, or tennis on the kitchen table. My sons had parents and grandparents who were all sporty and would play anything with them anytime they wanted.”
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Judy Murray (left) and Andy Murray (right) (Getty)
She explained: “I knew that by playing actively with them, which was also great fun, they could develop the hand and foot coordination skills that underpin all sports. If you do lots of that when they’re little, it doesn’t matter what sport they want to try; they will be able to do it pretty well. Nowadays, since screens have become such a huge part of our lives, I see that kids are coming into sports without those basic physical skills.”
Reflecting on how parenting has changed in the years since raising her own children, Judy added: “There is too much helicopter parenting happening now. You have to give children wings so they can fly, or they become overly dependent on their parents, and they aren’t able to think for themselves.”
Across his celebrated tennis career, Andy won three major singles championships, two of which came at Wimbledon. He was ranked No 1 in the world for 41 weeks, during an era that is often described as the most competitive in the history of the sport.
