In 2023, at age 35 and four years after a second major hip operation, Murray came up with his last and perhaps greatest comeback. Certainly his most dramatic. In a second-round night match at the Australian Open, two days after winning his opener in five sets lasting nearly five hours, Murray clawed his way back from two sets down for the 11^th time. He defeated Thanasi Kokkinakis in five hours, 45 minutes, the longest match of Murray’s career. It ended at 4:05 a.m.

One point during the match has become iconic. Down two sets and a break in the third, Murray scrambled side to side, nearly colliding with the backdrop, lunging and bellowing in agony as he retrieved three successive close-range smashes off of Kokkinakis’s racquet. Somehow, impossibly, Murray snatched a point he had zero right to win to break serve and give himself sudden new life in the match.

"All I can say is that I have a big heart," said a drained Murray in the wee hours after the match.

“I have experience of it and I rely on that experience and that drive and that fight, and my love of the game and competing, and my respect for this event and the competition,” he continued. “That’s why I kept going.”

That’s all a lofty way of saying: Murray is a man who doesn’t back down from a fight.

Injury and perseverance

A fight is exactly what Andy Murray had with his body over nearly the last decade of his career.

Murray suffered from osteoarthritis in his hip; the joint deteriorated into bone-on-bone contact and resulted in chronic, career-threatening pain. Murray ended his season after Wimbledon in 2017 – during a quarter-final loss at SW19, the Scotsman was seen grimacing, hobbling and leaning on his racquet between points – and he plummeted from No. 1 in the world to No. 839. Murray underwent rehabilitation, cortisone injections and arthroscopic surgery, all unsuccessful attempts to alleviate the pain.

In January 2019, Murray, then 31, announced his intention to retire from the tour, anticipating that the Australian Open would be his final tournament. He lost his opening-round match – though, true to form, not before coming back from two-sets-down to force a fifth against the Spaniard Roberto Bautista Agut. On court after the loss, a video tribute from fellow players, including the Big 3, was projected in the stadium: a eulogy for an outstanding and courageous career. “Thank you for leaving your heart and every last drop of energy on the court,” said Novak Djokovic.

At his press conference, Murray tearfully admitted that he had “been in a lot of pain for what has been probably 20 months now” and said that he had “pretty much” done “everything I could try”.

Yet, predictably, that wasn’t the last the tennis world would hear of Andy Murray.

Since a full hip replacement wasn’t an option for a professional athlete, Murray underwent a risky procedure. Hip resurfacing surgery excised a section of his femur and inserted metal implants into his hip. No top tennis player had ever successfully returned to the tour after a hip resurfacing operation.

Yet Murray did come back just seven months later, and he won his first match. The Scot, though, would spend the next four years trying to recover his top form. There were flashes of brilliance but just as many moments of continued frustration.

A laudable career

Murray’s former coach Ivan Lendl also lost his first four major finals. Murray lost three to Federer and one to Djokovic. He appeared destined to be an also-ran in the most elite ranks of men’s tennis (as if reaching four major finals were nothing).

The Scot had the misfortune of coming of age, and arriving on the pro circuit, at a time when Federer was already beginning to dominate. And the emergence of both Nadal and Djokovic was only months away.

Still, despite that trio’s astonishing dominance of the game for most of the next two decades, Murray captured three majors – Wimbledon twice, in 2013 and 2016, and the US Open once, in 2012 – and reached a total of 11 slam finals. He accumulated 46 ATP singles titles, including 14 Masters 1000 events, and was the only player – man or woman – to win two (and consecutive) Olympics gold medals in singles (London 2012 and Rio 2016).

Murray’s breakthrough, after seven years on tour, came in 2012. Before a home crowd on the lawns at Wimbledon, he snatched Olympic gold in singles, throttling Federer, 6-2, 6-1, 6-4. Murray followed that up with his first major crown a month later, defeating Djokovic in five enervating sets to win the US Open – making him the first British major singles champion since Virginia Wade won Wimbledon in 1977. 

Murray was a fixture of the Top 10 from July 2008 through October 2017 (save a single month). The Scot, who ranked no lower than World No. 4 in eight of the nine year-end rankings during that span, was ranked World No. 1 for 41 weeks, finishing as ATP Year-End No. 1 presented by PIF in 2016. Astonishingly, it was the only period in which a player other than the Big 3 held the No. 1 spot from 2004 to 2022. In 2016, Murray became the only man ever to win a major title, Olympics gold in singles and the ATP finals all in the same year (he also collected three Masters 1000 titles).

Unlikely statesman

Murray was born in Glasgow but grew up in Dunblane, Scotland – far from the manicured green lawns of Wimbledon. He began playing tennis at age three, under the tutelage of his mum Judy. As a youngster Murray played with both boys and girls. He was just eight years old when he survived the 1996 school massacre at Dunblane Primary School; 16 classmates and a teacher were murdered, the deadliest mass shooting in modern British history. The Murray family knew the assailant.

Murray didn’t start out on tour seeking to become a leading voice on social and political issues. Over the course of his career, though, he developed into one of the most outspoken members in pro tennis. Rare among male pros, Murray was a passionate advocate for equal pay for the men’s and women’s tours.

“I’ve been involved in sport my whole life and the level of sexism is unreal,” Murray once wrote on his Instagram.

Murray became only the second Top-10 player in the history of the ATP Tour to have a female coach in his box when he hired the former French No. 1 (and current Roland Garros tournament director) Amélie Mauresmo. The experience inspired Murray — whose ranking rose from No. 11 to No. 2 under Mauresmo – to amplify his voice. 

Murray penned a column in L’Equipe, the French sports newspaper, in 2015. “Have I become a feminist?” he wrote. “Well, if being a feminist is about fighting so that a woman is treated like a man then yes, I suppose I have.”

“When I was younger, I wasn’t thinking about stuff like that. But now I’ve seen it with my own eyes, it’s quite amazing how few female coaches there are across sport,” Murray said in a 2017 essay for the BBC.

“Working with Amélie was (…) because she was the right person for the job, and not a question of her sex at all.”

"A woman coaching a man, it breaks a few barriers,” Mauresmo told L'Equipe.I