Judy Murray looked down at her hands. They were shaking.
It had been less than a week since her son Andy won the US Open in 2012, his first Grand Slam title. This was everything he had worked so hard for, all the sacrifices they made as a family had been worth it. She was meant to be elated, and she was. But she could not keep that tell-tale tremor out of her fingers.
After the buzz of New York, she was back in Scotland attending a charity advisory board meeting, and ran into a friend from her student days. “He said to me, are you OK? I said yeah, yeah I’m fine,” Murray says, reflecting on it publicly for the first time more than a decade on. “I’m so used to just looking after myself. But he said, you’re not fine. He was looking at my hands, I looked and I actually was shaking. I just said, it’s been manic.”
As Murray tried to deflect the attention away from her trembles, her friend persisted. “He said, I’ve got this guy I speak to when life gets a bit too much for me, here’s his number. I was looking at him, this great big, hulking former rugby player, and thinking, really? But we all have things that affect us.”
2012 was a monumental year for the Murray family. Judy was Great Britain’s Fed Cup tennis team captain, travelling the world as a coach. Then there was Andy’s rollercoaster summer: his heartbreaking Wimbledon tears, after the bitter disappointment of losing the final to Roger Federer; the ecstasy of avenging that loss with an Olympic gold on Centre Court; and a month later finally getting the monkey off his back with a win in New York.
But the happiness and relief quickly turned into a heavy “fog” for a woman who had become the world’s most famous tennis mother. “That year was absolutely constant,” Murray says. “Dealing with the ups and downs I think you go with it at the time. Then you go home and I just didn’t want to move. My friend gave me the number of this guy that he spoke to, a doctor friend of his. It took me about six days to phone him, I was definitely that way where I thought I can sort it out myself. I’ll be fine. But the fog wasn’t clearing.”
