Judy Murray’s time in the tennis spotlight has been fraught with sexism and accusations of pushiness. But she’s persisted – and now she’s speaking out about the problems in the women’s game

Britain’s most famous tennis mother has got more than her sons on her mind today. Judy Murray wants to discuss all that is worrying her about the sport she loves, notably the abuse of teenage girls in the women’s game.

It is 12 years since I first interviewed Murray – a lifetime in British tennis history. Back then, 19-year-old Andy had just established himself as the country’s No 1 singles player, and 20-year-old Jamie had got to his first final of an ATP doubles tournament. Since then, the Scottish triumvirate has transformed British tennis.

In 2013, Andy became the first British winner of the Wimbledon Men’s singles title since Fred Perry in 1936. He won again in 2016. But it is often forgotten that the less heralded Jamie was the first to win a grand slam tournament – the mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 2007 with Jelena Jankovic. In 2016, their careers peaked. Astonishingly, Andy became the world singles No 1 at the same time as Jamie became the world doubles No 1.

Meanwhile, Judy, already a respected tennis coach, further proved herself. For five years she captained Britain’s team for the Fed Cup – the premier international team competititon in women’s tennis – while becoming more and more vocal about the failings of the tennis establishment, never more so than today.

Her memoir, Knowing the Score, has recently come out in paperback. It could just as easily have been called Settling the Score. When she was initially asked to write it, she thought that she had better wait until the boys had retired. Why? “Because I thought I’d piss too many people off if I wrote the book while they were playing.” Like who? “The Lawn Tennis Association, the tennis authorities and sportscotland.” Basically, anybody who is anybody in British tennis. Her publisher convinced her that it was best to have her say while the boys were still playing. And she didn’t pull her punches.

Murray chronicles the numerous ways that she has been discriminated against as a woman in a sport still dominated by men. Most obviously she was labelled a pushy parent because she was ambitious for her boys, invariably pictured as the clench-jawed, gnasher-baring, fist-pumping monster mum. She became so self-conscious that she had her teeth whitened and straightened. Then there was the time Boris Becker announced Andy Murray would not win a grand slam till he cut his umbilical cord; the LTA chief executive who saw her watching footage of 16-year-old Andy’s next opponent and said: “My goodness, you’re taking this all a bit seriously, aren’t you?”; the performance director from the Scottish Institute of Sport who told her that her boys did not meet the criteria for national funding because they were only among the top 25 juniors in the world; the time she collected an award on behalf of Andy, and comedian Tam Cowan, who was presenting the ceremony, looked her up and down before saying: “Could he not have brought you anything decent to wear tonight then?” On that final occasion, Murray says, she was crushed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It was very hard hearing people criticising your son’ …Judy with Andy, 2004. Photograph: Alistair Devine/REX

Murray is 58 and looking good – fit, sharp haircut, stylish outfit. When we meet, she says that she is slightly on edge because Andy is making his comeback after 11 months out with a career-threatening injury that required hip surgery. She is not worried about him winning, just hoping he gets through the match in one piece. (He did, but on Sunday, he withdrew from Wimbledon saying despite his progress he wasn’t yet fit enough to play the best of five sets).

She doesn’t feel angst about her boys like she used to. In their early 30s, the sun is probably setting on their careers. Now, she is more preoccupied with growing the game back home. For the past four years, she has been travelling through Scotland in her brilliantly garish pink and green muralled minibus, branded Tennis on the Road, offering free lessons to encourage children to take up the sport. She has also developed Miss-Hits tennis specifically for girls. “Tennis is still very much a minority sport in Scotland,” she says. Even after the success of her sons? “Exactly. We need a lot more investment in Scotland in terms of public sports and state schools. It’s just the fee-paying schools that tend to have tennis courts.”

Murray was born into a sporting family (her father, Roy Erskine, briefly played professional football in Scotland before becoming an optician) and she was a talented tennis player herself. She was offered a tennis scholarship at a US university, but turned it down – it felt too far away. Instead, she headed to Barcelona and competed against Björn Borg’s then fiance, Mariana Simionescu. Murray was having the time of her life until her passport and money were stolen. She returned home, beaten. That was the end of her tennis career. Instead, she settled for a degree in French and business studies at Edinburgh university.

It is often assumed that Murray channelled her thwarted ambition into her sons. She has been compared with Richard Williams, who coached his daughters Venus and Serena to global domination. Murray says she admires Williams hugely, but they couldn’t be more different. “He set out hoping to make them champions. I set out hoping my kids would enjoy sport as much as I did. I had no idea where we were going with it.”

You really didn’t dream about turning them into world-beaters? “No chance! Anybody who knows me knows that’s not true. I still get a little bit prickly when people say things like that because it was so not that.” In fact, she says, for much of their childhood they didn’t focus on one sport. Jamie was an exceptional golfer and at 15 had a handicap of three, while Andy was asked to sign youth forms by Rangers football club when he was 14. She says she was always ambitious for her children, but insists she wasn’t pushy.

The Murrays grew up in Dunblane, a town in central Scotland that became notorious for a mass killing. Both Andy and Jamie were pupils at Dunblane primary school when Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and one teacher in the school gym in March 1996. Andy’s class had been on their way into the gym when the shootings occurred, and his best friend’s little brother was killed. It was a tough time for the family. Murray has always said that one of her ambitions was to help make Dunblane famous for something more than the massacre.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On Strictly Come Dancing with Anton du Beke, 2014. Photograph: Guy Levy/PA

A year later, when Andy was nine and Jamie 10, Judy and the boys’ father William split up. By now, Murray had been hired as Scotland’s national tennis coach on a £25,000 a year salary. She combined the job with ferrying Andy, Jamie and their friends around Scotland to play sport, particularly tennis.

It was time-consuming and costly, and she was frequently skint. When Jamie was 12, she allowed him to leave home to join a tennis academy in Cambridge. He hated it. Eventually she told Jamie he had to return home, but by then his confidence was shot. For two years, he didn’t touch a tennis racket. Murray still berates herself for allowing him to go. She promised herself she would never let Andy leave home to pursue tennis before he had finished school. But at 15, he was determined to join his friend Rafael Nadal in Barcelona, where he would play with and be coached by the world’s best.

Murray worked out it would cost £35,000 a year for Andy to train there. At the time, Andy was ranked in the top three in Europe in his age group. She approached the LTA for support, but was snubbed. This still rankles. “I wasn’t expecting them to give me the whole lot, but given that there wasn’t an alternative in the UK that was right for his stage of development and that they had an annual £50-60m budget and no players coming through, I thought they’d help us more. I was blown away by it. It was so disappointing.” If she went to the LTA as a parent of a promising youngster today, would it be any easier? “I think it would probably still be a struggle.”

Why haven’t they learned? “I don’t know. From the experience I’ve had as a parent, as a coach, as a woman working in that very male-dominated sporting world, I am surprised they haven’t picked my brain more. The same for Kyle Edmund’s parents. No child gets anywhere without parental backup and support, so why not tap into our experience? As parents we had to help our kids get through the world junior circuit and then transition to the senior circuit; we had to find the right coaches and fitness trainers and financially make it all happen.”

Murray believes the sport is still infected by class snobbery. “You often find clubs in Scotland are three or four courts surrounded by housing, so there is no room to expand, and that people who have been members for years start to treat it as their second home. They don’t want you coming in if they don’t know who you are. We need everywhere to be open doors and welcoming. Golf and tennis have similar challenges.”

But the area that concerns her most is the women’s game. In 2011, she was appointed captain of the Fed Cup (in effect, coach/manager), and says this is the job she has found most satisfying – and shocking. Satisfying because she believes that in her five years in the role (she resigned in 2016), she developed the women’s game in Britain; shocking because of what she discovered.

Judy with Jamie and Andy as toddlers. Photograph: Steve Gibson

When she started, she says, the culture was entirely dysfunctional. Whereas there was great camaraderie on the men’s tour, she found the women rarely talked to each other – not even team mates. The senior members of the squad, Anne Keothavong and Elena Baltacha (who was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, and died the same year aged 30), had barely spoken to each other since they were teenagers because they believed that to be competitive, they had to be enemies. Murray told them this was nonsense – they would get nowhere without mutual respect at the very least. On their first away trip, to Israel, Murray brought a load of games, just as she had done when she had taken her boys on the road. Baltacha and Keothavong ended up great friends.

Unless you are at the very top and can afford to travel with an entourage, the tennis world is lonely. And even more so for girls starting out, she says, because there are so few female coaches. “If you’re a young female player and you’re travelling the world, you often have nobody to talk to.” Murray says the young girls on tour are vulnerable – their bodies are changing rapidly and they have nobody to discuss it with. “I noticed how little the girls would go out for dinner together. Players tend to spend most of their time with their coach or hitting partner and often they are guys – guys who are quite a bit older than them. Who do these young girls talk to if they have got emotional or physical problems? You can’t talk to a guy that you’re largely employing.”

Does she think tennis will have its #metoo moment? “It’s really about the women getting to the stage in their life where they feel confident enough to speak out. Who do you speak to? There should be an independent sports body, where players can go where they know someone will listen to them and they know someone will act on it – whether that’s emotional, physical or sexual abuse. Often you’re scared to speak because you think it will prejudice people against you, rock the boat.”

Has she heard of such abuse in the women’s game? “Yes. I think anybody would tell you that there are examples. I think everybody who’s on the circuit would be able to name you something that isn’t quite right. It’s very easy for a young, inexperienced player to be taken advantage of, whether that is physically, emotionally, sexually, financially.” Has it come out yet? “I don’t think it has. I would certainly advocate for anybody who has been the victim of abuse in that coaching relationship to speak about it. ’

Does she think it will happen? “It only needs one person to start it off.”

Perhaps she should team up with the great campaigning former tennis champion Billie Jean King and start tennis’s #metoo movement. She laughs. “I’m a huge admirer of Billie Jean King. She’s an amazing, amazing woman. But it shouldn’t just be up to her to be doing this, we need the current players to step forward. Use your voice when you’ve got a voice.”

Murray says she feels so much stronger since using hers. She used to be cowed by the way she was portrayed – dour, humourless, aggressive. But not any more. Actually, she is the opposite – warm, funny – as we found out when she was a popular, if hapless, contestant on Strictly Come Dancing in 2014.

Murray is now a grandmother – Andy and his wife Kim Sears have two daughters. How old are they? “Two years and four months, and seven months,” she says proudly. Would she coach them if they showed ability in tennis? “Definitely not. I’d teach them how to dance! I’m never going through all that again.” Really? “Yes, absolutely. I’ve stepped right back into the grassroots. I love it. There isn’t stress.”

One of the things she found most stressful, she says, was the regular attacks on Andy’s personality – journalists who said he was taciturn, over-aggressive, scruffy, charmless. She gives me a knowing look.

I once called Andy the most charmless man I’d ever met, and asked if he could really be related to the throughly likable Jamie. Look, I say, he got his revenge – in Andy’s autobiography, he called me the strangest man he had ever met. She rocks with laughter. Can she understand why the press had a pop at him? Yes, she says, but he was so young. “It was very hard hearing people criticising your son. I was thinking, give him a break: he’s a kid, he’s a great competitor, he’s a perfectionist, he wears his heart on his sleeve. Actually, away from the court, he’s laid back, great fun, kind, sensitive.” Did the criticism bother him? “Yes, of course it bothered him. Of course.” That’s what I like about her – she doesn’t let me off the hook, but she doesn’t hold grudges.

Many experts think Andy has seen his best days on court. Does she think he could win another grand slam? “If his body allows him to. I think he’s got unfinished business. He’s one of those kids that, if somebody tells hm he can’t do something, he’ll go out of his way to prove you wrong.”

A while ago, she suggested Scotland needed a decent sports centre to encourage emerging talent. She was ignored, so decided to build one herself. “It’s going to have everything – a six-hole golf course, a climbing wall, adventure playgrounds, soft play area and, of course, tennis courts.” She estimates it will cost between £10-12m. “I want to have a bricks-and-mortar legacy for the boys in our backyard, so it’s just outside Dunblane. It’s been a lot of work and a lot of struggles, but hopefully it will be up and running by 2020.” She has also just launched the Judy Murray Foundation, which aims to get people more active in rural or deprived areas.

How would she like the Murrays to be remembered? “I hope people will say we raised the profile of British tennis, showed that Britain can produce top players, got more people playing and coaching. Hopefully, that we grew our sport in lots of ways.”

She talks about their annus mirabilis in 2016. “It was just perfect. That’s just the dream stuff, isn’t it?” In December 2016, Andy’s achievement was acknowledged with a knighthood. Two months earlier, Jamie was awarded an OBE, and last June, Judy was awarded an OBE too. That’s a pretty impressive family, I say. She smiles. “Yeah. It’s good, isn’t it?”

Knowing the Score is published by Vintage, price £8.99