Andy Murray: Wimbledon Champion by Mark Hodgkinson

Author:Mark Hodgkinson [Hodgkinson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471132759
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

5

Lover, Painter, Driver, Hairdresser

In the style of Anna Kournikova – who once predicted that female tennis players would eventually have to give the public what they wanted and compete topless – some kept on confusing Wimbledon with a beauty parade. Live on the radio, the BBC’s John Inverdale would cause much consternation over the final weekend by remarking that Marion Bartoli, the winner of the ladies’ title, was not ‘a looker’. But was that as invidious as those who now focused their attentions almost exclusively on the women sitting off court, and who kept on comparing Andy Murray’s girlfriend, Kim Sears, to his opponents’ other halves? This was how one tabloid previewed Murray’s meeting with Fernando Verdasco: ‘Think the quarter-final showdown between Murray and Verdasco is the big match today? Well, stand by for the Battle of the Babes.’

Why would you want to read about the ferocity of Verdasco’s forehand (capable of putting dents in the Centre Court backstop), or how a new racket meant there was now even more zing in his shots, when you could discover more about his girlfriend, Jarah Mariano, ‘a Victoria’s Secret model who had stripped off for a series of sizzling shoots’, who had appeared in the latest Bond movie Skyfall, and who, rather daringly, liked swimming with sharks? She was compared and contrasted with Sears, who, in her own words, specialised in ‘quirky yet emotive’ portraits of pets, who had called her business ‘Brushes and Paws’, and who was terrified of modern art (someone had made the observation that she was a well-groomed young lady painting well-groomed cats and dogs – Sears knew herself that she was on the other end of the spectrum to Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks and cows, and that she was no enfant terrible of the art world, the Tracey Emin of pet portraiture).

As Hadley Freeman, a Guardian columnist, rightly observed in a piece examining how Wimbledon had exposed the sexism women face as players and girlfriends, ‘Perhaps some day the media will be able to deal with the idea of high-profile men having girlfriends and not treat them as accessories or sad desperate harridans waiting anxiously for their wayward menfolk to marry them – but that day has not yet come. Throughout Wimbledon, the girlfriends of the male players were gawked at and purred over, their attributes detailed as clinically as discussions of the players’ diets. Whenever Murray would play, newspapers would compare all of his qualities with those of his competitors and among those qualities would be his girlfriend – whose advantages and disadvantages were listed alongside the girlfriend of her boyfriend’s opponent.’ As Freeman noted, television directors also kept cutting to Sears between points.

No one should make the mistake of regarding Sears as mere accessory. In the opinion of Jean-Pierre Bruyere, a chiropractor who had worked closely with Murray for many years, Sears was ‘the greatest asset in Andy’s team’. ‘Kim is special, as Andy is. She is always polite and she has beautiful clear-blue eyes which illuminate her nice face.

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