Murray holds court in fight to save career
ANDY MURRAY’S remarkable battle with a seemingly career-ending hip injury is the subject of the intimate and emotional feature-length documentary Resurfacing, available on Amazon Prime from tomorrow.
To be given the chance to share at close hand such a personal process – an elite athlete at the very pinnacle of his career struggling with the prospect of losing all he has worked for – is rare to say the least. To have the story told in such an open and brutally honest way is rarer still. Murray’s journey, told from January 2018 to August this year, is a remarkable tale of one step forward and three painful steps back.
It is one of surgeries, remedies and injections, where early optimism is often left trampled on the practice court but one where ultimately hope is never extinguished. ‘I was world No.1 but I couldn’t walk or put my shoes on,’ says the Scot as the film opens with an anxious Murray preparing to go under the knife in Melbourne after the hip proved too much of a problem in a Wimbledon defeat at the hands of Sam Querrey the previous summer.
What follows is a seemingly endless round of procedures and rehab as Murray reflects on what he will do if the process should fail and he loses the structure to his life tennis has always provided. He talks openly of his early years when he was criticised for being mentally weak and accused of neither working hard enough nor being fit enough. He explains why tennis is so important to him and how it became an escape after the tragic events at Dunblane, where he went to school, and later his parents’ divorce.
That is not to say Resurfacing is all doom and gloom. For those that only know Murray as an uncompromising figure in post-match interviews, his candour and honesty is refreshing and often amusing. He displays a remarkable bond with his team, particularly physio Shane Annun and fitness trainer Matt Little, and there are heartwarming glimpses of Murray the family man.
Ultimately, however, it is all about returning to the top and that is where the hope comes in. After his latest surgery, which we get to share in the most graphic of ways, Murray is back on court and back winning alongside Feliciano Lopez at Queen’s.
Whether he can return to anywhere near where he was before losing to Querrey is still to be seen. But if this story tells us one thing, it’s that Murray is not a man to give up without a fight.