Thanks, Andy! How Murray allowed small town scarred by tragedy to redefine itself

Andy Murray didn't put Dunblane on the map. It was already there, sitting quietly between Stirling and Perthshire in central Scotland, when a sleepy town home to a few thousand people became the scene of Britain’s deadliest mass shooting.

- JAMIE BRAIDWOOD

Murray was eight, his older brother Jamie 10, when on 13 March 1996 a gunman broke into the gym hall at Dunblane Primary School and killed 16 children aged between five and six and their teacher.

Both Andy and Jamie are survivors of the Dunblane massacre. Andy’s class had been on their way to the gym hall when the first shots were heard and they were taken to hide in the headmaster’s office, sheltering underneath a window. Their mother, Judy Murray, later revealed how she raced to the school to join the hundreds of parents gathered at the gates on the Doune Road, not knowing if their children were alive or dead, all fearing the worst.

The Murrays knew the gunman, who ran youth clubs in the area. He had been in their car, having taken up offers of lifts to the train station. Throughout his 20-year career, Murray has only occasionally talked about the Dunblane massacre and the effects that day had on him. The most revealing insight came from the 2019 documentary Resurfacing, where Murray explained that within two years of the shooting his parents had divorced, his older brother had left home to join an academy and it all contributed to him suffering from anxiety. Murray said that ever since then, tennis has been his way to escape from the trauma of the past, his fuel.

It remains remarkable that the career of Britain’s greatest ever sportsperson and one of the darkest days in the country’s modern history are linked in this way, and yet, it is only part of the story. At 37, next week’s Wimbledon is expected to be Murray’s last.

It will bring an era to an end, as well as a time to reflect on his historic achievements and the legacy he leaves behind, all of which are tributes Murray would, of course, thoroughly disapprove of. Above all of this, though, is the impact Murray made on Dunblane, allowing a town scarred by tragedy to embrace the chance to be defined by something else.