CNN's Pedro Pinto speaks to Britain's tennis no. 1 Andy Murray on the pressures of playing at Wimbledon, and his experiences of moving abroad to Barcelona when he was fifteen.
Please find below excerpts of the interview transcript and attached picture for your use.
The interview can be watched online at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SPORT/tennis/06/08/andy.murray.wimbledon.federer/index.html
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** Mandatory credit for use of material to CNN International. ANDY MURRAY, BRITISH TENNIS NO. 1: My mum used to play because where we live in Dunblane, very close to my house we've got four tennis courts, artificial grass, not the best surface to learn on, very very fast and slippery courts but it was very close to our house, maybe a two-minute walk so my mum used to take me and my brother there. I think that's one of the reasons why we both kept playing it's cause I had someone my age that I could play with, we could compete with each other, we both enjoyed it and my mum obviously knew about tennis so she could teach us how to hit the ball, how to develop our strokes and then we just kept playing more and more and that's how we started.
I went over to the States when I was twelve to play in the Orange Bowl Tournament, which is kinda like the unofficial junior world championships, and I won the tournament there and that is when I realised that I was good at tennis. It's very difficult until when you get to a certain age to when you start playing in the senior events to actually know whether you could be good or not and you know it wasn't until I was 17 and won the US Open juniors and that's when I felt I could play well, when you look at the past winners of the junior grand slams, that gave me the confidence to go on and do well.
I've always enjoyed competing. When I was at school, if it's something like I feel I am good at, I played a lot of sports when I was younger, I get very competitive, I like to do well, I played football, golf, tennis, even did gymnastics, table tennis, squash, badminton, I just loved sports. I didn't enjoy school that much because we hardly had any sports in the school, we had to always do it at the end of the day when we had homework as well, it was difficult for me but yes, sports is what I have always loved doing.
PEDRO PINTO, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: How much does it affect you to lose?
MURRAY: The thing is I used to hate it - I mean I still hate losing now but once you start to play on the tour, you know only one person wins every week, you don't learn to accept losing, all the players want to win every match they play, but you learn how to deal with it a lot better. I didn't deal with it particularly well when I was 14/15, they were kind of my worst years. I got a few good tellings off from my parents and my grandparents, I started to get better as I got older but I used to throw my racket quite a lot but now I never throw my racket on court. It's just something that you're told not to do it and you learn to discipline yourself. Yeah you still hate losing but you deal with it a lot better.
On the pressure of playing at Wimbledon:
PINTO: So you are actually able to shut out the Murray mania?
MURRAY: Yeah actually. As I said it's the week before that's the hard part and once the tournament starts all players you just get into the routine. The pressure is still there and you feel it when you are on the court, but it's not as bad as people might think.
Experiences moving abroad to Barcelona at 15:
MURRAY: The first few weeks I found hard. It's a completely different culture there. In Scotland we're used to having dinner at 5.30pm in the evening and if you're eating at 9pm the people there think you're a little bit weird. It took me a little bit of time to get used to that, but obviously after the first couple of months, I was meant to be coming home for Christmas, around the 11th/12th December, I called up my mum and asked her if I could stay another 10 days, and that's when I knew that's where I wanted to train, where I wanted to be. I made a lot of good friends out there, my two best friends I met over there that I still spend a lot of time with and it was great.
- END - **Mandatory credit for use of material to CNN International. For more tennis news, interviews, videos and blogs please visit www.cnn.com/opencourt.
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