WHY ANDY MURRAY’S MIAMI RETURN BRINGS BACK MIXED MEMORIES OF SUCCESS, REGRET AND TEARS

Andy Murray is returning to Miami next week. It’s a place where he says he feels ‘comfortable’, but he has had good and bad times in the ‘Magic City’.

Murray used to regularly spend his winters in Miami, pushing himself to the limit ahead of the new season, but did he go too hard and might less have been more for the three-time Grand Slam champion?

Murray was born in Scotland and has travelled to cities all around the world during his career, but Miami is where most of the magic happened. It’s where he spent his winters for several years,

going through gruelling training camps in a bid to be at peak fitness for the new season.
It’s where he bought an apartment, which he sold in 2017, and where, in 2012, he invited reporters to come and experience a few days of his intense conditioning programme,

under the eyes of fitness coach Jez Green and coach Ivan Lendl. It’s where he invited several other British players to join him for training blocks and where he was in 2013 and 2016 when he accepted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.

It’s also where he pushed himself so hard in training that one of his former GB team-mates, Jamie Baker, reportedly said he would be “lucky to still be playing at 30”.
Miami has been integral to Murray’s success – but did it also play a part in his downfall over the last few years?

The 33-year-old is heading back to Florida next week after getting a wildcard for the Miami Open, a tournament he won in 2009 and 2013, but last entered in 2016.

It’s likely that the pressure on Murray to keep up with Federer, Nadal and Djokovic played a big part in his gruelling off-season work.

But after seeing so much success come out of his time in Miami, it was also where he first realised that his career might be coming to an end.

Training with Fernando Verdasco in December 2018, Murray was struggling with pain in his hip and told his team later that day he would “feel a lot better” if he quit. Murray’s work in Miami was fuelled by a desire to get to the very top of the game.

Two years later, Murray is still playing, although he is down to No 118 in the world after battling back from hip surgery and only has one ATP Tour win to his name this season.

He said ahead of his return to Miami that he feels “comfortable” in the ‘Magic City’. But how much has the city taken out of him? And how much magic does he have left?