ANDY MURRAY was born in Glasgow and his career as a professional tennis player was forged here too.
Tickets fly off the shelves these days when the double Grand Slam winner and 2012 Olympic champion competes anywhere in Scotland but that wasn't always the case. The crowd at Scotstoun in September 2003 wouldn't have reached into triple figures when Andy, with coach Leon Smith in tow, decamped from the Sanchez-Casal Academy in Barcelona to claim the maiden title of his senior career.
His victory in the Glasgow futures event - which saw him pick up the lion's share of a whopping £6,500 prize purse - came in only his third senior competition. Back in those days, he was most likely to have spent the winnings feeding an Oreo cookie habit than anything else.
With the benefit of hindsight, his opponents can't have known what they had in for them. After defeating the splendidly-named English player Oliver Freelove 6-4, 6-4 in the semi-finals, waiting for Andy in the final was Steve Darcis, a man who would go on to become no mean player in his own right.
The Belgian, a former World No 44 who memorably took the scalp of Rafa Nadal at Wimbledon 2013, went down 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 and Murray had his first piece of senior silverware, on Scottish soil no less. Just for good measure, he almost added the doubles title to his resume at the same tournament, he and English partner Guy Thomas losing in the final. As prodigious as the 16-year-old Murray was, he was still ranked outwith the world's top 500 back then. A young Mallorcan called Rafa Nadal was already in the top 50.
This wasn't Andy's first exposure to competition in Scotland. There was usually an annual tilt at a title grandly known as the Scottish Junior International Championships, played on courts he knew well at Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. There is a famous tale of how, aged eight, Murray and partner Gavin Rumgay, now a Commonwealth Games star and one of Scotland's leading table tennis players, won the Under-12 doubles at that venue, but wasn't entirely able to win over some doubters from south of the border. "One senior LTA official remarked that Andy was 'really competitive'," said Peter Nicolson, a past president of Tennis Scotland, quoted in the Edinburgh Evening News. "But he doesn't have the right technique so will be found out when he gets a little older."
Sometimes it was all a bit too much. "I got defaulted once when I was twelve at the Scottish Junior Championships at Craiglockhart," says Andy in his autobiography. "I was playing one of my brother's best friends and in a moment of frustration I flung my racket towards the chair. It went underneath the fence and just seemed to keep going forever. The assistant referee defaulted me and I had to trudge off the court to pick up my racket. Afterwards I ran off to my mum. I was really upset and wanted her support ... but she was just annoyed."
These visits to Edinburgh continued into the senior ranks. As early as 2002, not long after his 15th birthday, he was making it through a couple of rounds there before losing in the quarter finals to an English junior called Richard Irwin, while his emergent year of 2013 also continued in the capital. Having reached the semi-finals in the singles, there were echoes of events this weekend when he paired up with brother Jamie to take the doubles title, defeating English pair Andrew Kennaugh and Richard Wire in the final.
Since then, those competitive visits to Scotland have been less frequent but no less notable. Who could forget, for instance, the Aberdeen Cup? Well, most, probably. That was the exhibition event between Scotland and England held in the Aberdeen Exhibition Centre on a Davis Cup-style format in both 2005 and 2006. For the record, Murray helped the Scots to victory on both occasions, atoning for a 2005 defeat to Greg Rusedski in the singles with victory in 2006, albeit against a somewhat disabled opponent. There were back-to-back victories for the Murray brothers in the doubles against Rusedski and his partners David Sherwood and James Auckland respectively.
If hosting the Aberdeen Cup was a plea from a nation deprived of tennis action, unsurprisingly in recent times having a Scottish star man has made the LTA noticeably more keen to locate their team competition north of the border. Andy famously opted out of Davis Cup duty when Team GB was in its wilderness years, but the 27-year-old has still featured in three ties on Scottish soil, helping the Brits emerge victorious in all three.
His only defeat in a Scottish rubber came alongside Rusedski in the doubles to Iliji Bozoljac and Nenad Zimonjic of Serbia, in a 3-2 defeat against Serbia at Braehead also notable for an appearance from a young Novak Djokovic. Back at Braehead in 2011, he won all three of his rubbers in a 5-0 win against Luxembourg in 2011, including a triple bagel singles triumph against Laurent Bram, before teaming up with his brother Jamie to mastermind a doubles win against Bram and Mike Vermeer. His last competitive Scottish appearance came the same year in a similarly straightforward 4-1 win against Hungary. Four years, two Grand Slams, and one Olympic title win, have elapsed since then. The wait is nearly over.
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