A left-hander, Murray also played a major part in Britain’s Davis Cup success, playing brilliantly alongside his brother in the quarter-final with France at the Queen’s Club in a five-set, four-hour semi-final match with Australia, before seeing off the Belgian pair as Britain won the title in Ghent.
Murray will be remembered for his razor-sharp volleying skills and the preposterous angles he conjured at the net. His returns were often unorthodox and he was fond of a lobbed service return to unsettle opponents.
His mother Judy thought Jamie had the better hand-eye co-ordination of her sons when young. Jamie and Andy briefly became rivals as tennis players – and also while wrestling on the duvet.
Judy once recalled: “Andy’s favourite [wrestler] was The Rock and Jamie’s was Stone Cold Steve Austin, and they used to create these bouts that they saw on the television. They used to wrestle each other on the duvet and thump each other with pillows, and create these belts and make up their own rules and scoring systems.”
Jamie is 15 months older than Andy, and as his early dominance on the tennis court started to fade Andy says he quite literally bore the brunt.
“We were coming back from Solihull in the minibus and I’d beaten Jamie in the final, I think, of the under-12s, so basically I was winding him up about that and my hand was on the hand rest,” he told BBC Sport in 2015.
“We were sitting next to each other and he just basically punched me on the hand – I lost my fingernail and I’ve still got the scars to show for it.”
Despite some defeats against his brother, Jamie was still very much on track for a professional singles career until a negative experience at an LTA training school in Cambridge in his very early teens.
He struggled with living away from home and the elite training environment, and even though he has never sought to blame the LTA, his forehand suffered and he has said he was never quite the same player again.
