Andy Murray is a reluctant British hero. His clipped and quiet (grumpy?) persona off court makes way for a hot-headed player on court. Images of him cringing in frustration after a bad shot will come to typify his career. As an athlete, he did not have buckets of flair and as a media performer he was often bitter and rude.
But he was a rare British tennis super star, decorated Olympian, two times Wimbledon champion, and ventriloquist of the ill-tempered parts of the nation. Now, nearly 20 years into his career, Murray has announced that – after one last spin at the Paris Olympics this summer – he will retire.
Commentators suggested that he never had the athleticism or grace of the greats like Nadal and Federer, that he was destined to never quite be in their league. After his first hip operation in 2017 and hints of retirement by 2019 – his fitness likely never to recover to the days of his Wimbledon victories – this seemed like sharper and sharper analysis. Compared with those two, Murray appeared like an actual human rather than, as a fitting tribute in The Athletic suggests, a “demigod”.
But the most human thing about Andy Murray is not the fact that he’s just a shade less talented than the greatest tennis players of all time (he still has three grand slam titles). Rather, Murray has revealed his humanity via the messy, protracted and potentially legacy-compromising end of his career. His last Wimbledon saw him withdraw from the singles tournament and mount an unsuccessful doubles campaign with his brother. And recent performance points to a player unlikely to make it to the podium in Paris.
Knowing when to quit – it seems – is a truly inhuman quality. The art of graceful retirement eludes most of the greats, who at best compromise a great legacy and at worst completely trash it. Murray belongs to the former category. His stage-managed exit from a glittering tennis career in the middle of an Olympics that he is unlikely to win might be clumsy (and I suppose oddly befitting of the awkward man) but it is not what he will be remembered for.
His retirement will be consigned to the back catalogue in the great tomes yet to be written about him, his career, and that curious style of Britishness he has come to symbolise.
American hero seems not quite the right label for Biden in this moment. It is a great shame that the man’s legacy was felled by his own ambition
There has hardly been a worse exit strategy from the great stage of public life, meanwhile, than Joe Biden. In the wake of his announcement – that he would step down and clear the path to the nomination for Kamala Harris – some have jumped at the chance to coronate Biden as an American hero. This is what America first means! Country before party! Country before self! This would be a nice legacy but unfortunately it does not apply.
He stepped down far too late. And with each passing minute he clung on to the nomination, he worsened the Democrats’ chances of beating Donald Trump; made it harder for a replacement to get a foothold; and condemned a highly unstable world – perhaps the most unstable it’s been since the Cold War – to an erratic and isolationist Trump-Vance ticket.
So, American hero seems not quite the right label for Biden in this moment. It is a great shame that the man’s legacy was felled by his own ambition. He was a good president (though he doesn’t necessarily receive requisite credit from the electorate); he was beloved as vice-president under Obama; he lived through devastating tragedy as a good and principled man.
But his initial refusal to step down after one term led him to a moment that will be preserved in aspic for the rest of history: that debate, where he mumbled and mixed up his words and appeared a totally diminished entity. Unlike Murray, it seems the last act of Biden’s career – and all the associated arrogance – will loom large in the books about him. It should go without saying that it never had to be this way.
It is incredibly easy for people to detect when they are at a nadir – the trenches of their career or stardom. But it seems a much harder task to identify when you are at your peak: that there are no more ceilings to break and no higher echelons to aspire to; that there is no second term and there will be no more grand slam titles.
Bowing out at the crest of the wave is perhaps a superhuman feat – one that precious few manage. When careers of superstars end in their prime, it is too often owed to premature death – a tragedy far greater than a clumsy career denouement.
Harper Lee would be an exception to prove this rule, had Go Set A Watchman not been published a year before her death, compromising what would otherwise have been the most perfect oeuvre in the entire canon: To Kill a Mocking Bird. Martin Amis also contends that Homer has a perfect body of work, limited to just the Iliad and the Odyssey. So perhaps sympathy might be afforded to Biden and Murray and those who don’t quite know how and when to stop: it is a skill as honourable as it is rare.