Reporting from London — The tent in which she slept at a women's tour stop in France once collapsed in a downpour. She couldn't afford airline flights so reached tournaments by bus. Even as a pro tennis player in the late 1970s she'd go to the post office to retrieve money her middle-class parents had wired from Scotland.
Judy Erskine had no coach and no training facility near home. So earthy were her tour days that after one first-round loss, opponent Mariana Simionescu asked whether Erskine would join her in the locker room before they went to a bar, so Simionescu could have a smoke and hide it from her disapproving boyfriend, Bjorn Borg.
A larcenous hand plundered Erskine's handbag one day in Barcelona and, homesick anyway, she returned to Scotland, where her father suggested she discontinue.
So the future mother and first architect of the game of one Andy Murray, who might just win the Wimbledon that begins today, took typing. She took shorthand. She worked as a secretary in a glass factory and an insurance office, a trainee manager at a department store, a saleswoman (with company car!) for a confectionary firm. She took French and German at Edinburgh University until she found the German dull and switched to business studies.
Then, when Judy Erskine became Judy Murray and had sons rapid-fire in February 1986 (Jamie) and May 1987 (Andy), she wound up imbuing their nascent tennis games with what she felt hers lacked, even long before she became a coach hired in 2007 by Britain's Lawn Tennis Assn.
"I wouldn't say I had any big shot, but I was very fast around the court," Judy Murray said from Andy's driveway outside London on the eve of Wimbledon. "I read the game well and I was very, very determined. I would run around the court and put balls back. I don't know if I ever hit a winner in my life, but I would put balls back until the opponent would wear down."
Once her sons began playing at the club 200 yards from home in the cathedral town of Dunblane, "I understood that if they were going to be any good, they had to have weapons. . . . I wasn't a coach of biomechanics or anything like that. I understood how to play the game, and I probably taught them from a tactical basis."
Then, long before Jamie Murray would win the family's first Wimbledon title -- mixed doubles with Jelena Jankovic in 2007 -- Andy turned up at 11 at the Orange Bowl tournament in Miami with his mother and grandmother. Judy watched from off to the side because, even today, she sits in corners and disdains hearing people "chat inanely to me about what they think is going on."
