Andy Murray's edge: the mother of all tennis coaches

Her son won that tournament, and the scattered witnesses included Angela Buxton, the English 1956 Wimbledon singles finalist and doubles champion and present-day tennis consultant, who saw "beautiful, flowing shots" from "a boy who had a big, big, big future. He was toying with the boys. He was playing all these little drop shots and lobs. He understands the game, understands the court, understands the tactics."

It foretold the trait that distinguishes Murray still, that has vaulted him to No. 3, enabled him to go 6-2 against Roger Federer, helped him become the first Briton in 71 years to win the Queen's Club grass-court event in London: variety. A defensive aggressor, he can hit every shot in the book and some not in any book.

And his mother, Buxton said, well, "She's one of the few people in this country who knows what she's talking about," a coach unafraid "to go out on a tangent and say something that's new and arguable."

As Britain has languished at a game it invented, as it has cohabited interminably with the words No British male has won Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936, as it has hoped through Englishman Tim Henman's four gnashing semifinal appearances between 1998 and 2002, its ultimate answer might come from a family Judy says "never, ever" envisioned this.

As the daughter of a father who played professional soccer and parents who play tennis -- her father joshes he invented topspin -- Judy Murray lacks utterly the hey-let's-play-for-fun gene, much like her son. (Just Sunday, Andy went go-karting, vowing to trim his lap time from 51.8 seconds to 51.3.) In Andy Murray's entertaining book "Hitting Back," written with the wit-rich London sportswriter Sue Mott, he recollects playing doubles at 8 with Judy and hearing her swear under her breath, a charge she deems plausible. He also scolds her for her ire at his racket-hurling default from a junior tournament because her own defaulting as a junior once irked his grandmother into driving home without her.

"I broke my racket," the winner of 64 Scottish girls' and women's titles admits. "The head crumpled and I didn't have another."

Yet as she coached her sons until their early teens, she carefully avoided angst. She realized that her father's chronic instructions as she'd leave home -- "See and win," he would say -- might've muffled her own game into passivity for the fear of losing. So for long tennis trips, she'd purposely fill cars with four kids or minivans with 12 so the rides home didn't groan with one child and one parent analyzing shortcomings. When the teenage Andy would quit the game for patches before he went to Spain at 15 to train in earnest, she'd consider it prudent.