There may be some comfort in that. Tennis, after all, is about points, not style points. But what was far from reassuring for Murray, once a U.S. Open champion, was that he was cramping and suffering (and muttering) against Robin Haase after just two sets in this age of the men’s tennis marathon.
“It’s not the worst I have ever felt necessarily, but it’s the worst I have ever felt after an hour and a half of a tennis match,” he said after his 6-3, 7-6 (6), 1-6, 7-5 victory.
Opening day was, to be sure, a scorcher at Flushing Meadows: bare, sunscreen-lathered shoulders rubbing up against bare, sunscreen-lathered shoulders in the vast walkways of the Open, which were soon crowded enough to pass for Roland Garros amid the afternoon rush for the ice cream vendors and the outside courts.
Inside Louis Armstrong Stadium, Judy Murray, Andy’s mother and former coach, brandished a fan decorated with the Scottish colors in the second row of the stands.
Smelling salts or a blindfold might have come in handy, too, because there were stretches of this strange-but-true match that had to be tough for a parent to watch.
Three years ago, when Haase and Murray played here in the second round, Haase won the first two sets before Murray recovered to win the next three. This time, the eighth-seeded Murray looked like he had taken the memory and the lesson to heart, winning the first two sets himself.
But that was when the trouble began in earnest: Murray, not one to mask his frustrations, has played through all sorts of pain in his career, as when he beat Jarkko Nieminen despite major back trouble at the French Open in 2012. But Monday was a full-body breakdown: cramps in Murray’s legs, cramps in his right side, cramps in his left side, cramps in his right arm, cramps in his left arm, cramps just about everywhere it seemed.
“For me it was unexpected, and therefore quite difficult mentally to deal with,” Murray said. “Sometimes it can happen in one area of your body, but when it starts to kind of go everywhere, you don’t know exactly where it’s going to creep up next. When you stretch one muscle, something else then cramps, too.”
It also was unexpected because Murray said he had trained particularly hard and well in the lead-up to this tournament. He had felt good enough to declare beforehand that this was the best prepared he had felt coming into a Grand Slam tournament since Wimbledon last year (he won that Wimbledon, putting an end to a 77-year drought for British men in singles).
That was presumably no throwaway statement from a veteran like Murray, by now quite adept at tapping the brakes on runaway expectations by understating his own chances. “I got a great training block over in Miami done, so physically I’m where I would want to be,” Murray said on Saturday. “My body is pain-free, which is good.”
Forty-eight hours later, his body was pain-wracked, which was clearly not good, even if he did manage to hit a backhand return winner in mid-cramp in the fourth set, which made for quite an unusual and acrobatic follow-through.
Haase, an attack-minded Dutch veteran, had problems of his own on Monday. He was feeling nauseated and also had a foot injury.
“I was more busy with myself, and I was struggling myself,” he said of Murray’s increasingly apparent problems. “I tried to play my game, and it didn’t bother me what he did or what he felt.”
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