The Long Read: Judy Murray talks about her new TV show, Driving Force

It’s not everyone you can phone back and say you’ve messed up, can you do an interview again, but Judy Murray isn’t everyone. She’s a top coach, player, motivator, mentor and mother of champions Jamie and Andy, but more than that, she’s a good sport.

Judy Murray presents Driving Force, her docuseries for Sky Sports.

When our initial interview, her on speaker phone while driving, me working from home on a mobile, is corrupted by a blizzard of buzzing, she does it all over again. No bother.

It’s a quality that makes women at the top in sport open up to her in her new Sky Sports docuseries Driving Force, in which she goes behind the headlines to focus on the negative and positive sides of the profession. She gets the lowdown on the women behind the world-class medals and trophies and skewers the issues and challenges they faced, the lack of opportunities, physical training extremes, discrimination and sexism they overcame and how from their place on the podium the winners can inspire and give a hand up to girls at grassroots. And Murray knows because she’s been there.

“People would criticise me for being there watching and getting excited when I was watching Andy at Wimbledon. But I’m his mother. Of course I’m going to be there to support him and Jamie when they’re playing. That’s my job. You get branded as being overly emotional if you react, but people need to be supported and understood,” she says.

Judy Murray presenting Driving Force

Steph Houghton, Victoria Pendleton, Dina Asher-Smith, Natasha Jones, Charlotte Dujardin, Rebecca Adlington, Sarah Storey, Kelly Holmes, Christine Ohuruogu, Katie Taylor are the athletes, all Olympians, across a variety of sports, whose stories features in the series.

Also putting in appearances are sporting giants Billie Jean King, Andy and Jamie Murray, Venus Williams, Dina Asher-Smith, Martina Navratilova, Steph Houghton, Gareth Bale, Thierry Henry, Katie Taylor and Arsène Wenger, as part of Sky Sports commitment to invest in more original women’s sport content.

“Women’s sport has gathered a lot of momentum in recent years but the visibility behind our top female athletes is very small compared to men so let’s raise the profile. Also this is a massive learning opportunity for emerging athletes and coaches to understand about the psyche, psychology and the journey that female athletes go on.”

And as the Mother of all coaches, Murray isn’t just about naming the challenges, she‘s also focused on practical results beyond the show, hoping to run a programme of engagement where the athletes join experts to give advice, information and tips on sports as well as the issues off the court, pitch, track.

With Jamie and Andy at the "Andy Murray: Resurfacing" world premiere in London last year.

“Whether that’s sponsorship, dealing with the media, handling your menstrual cycle or coping with bullying, you can learn from our experiences, and here’s an expert to give you ideas.

We’d love to run a series of masterclasses to showcase our own sports and encourage people to get involved in taking part or delivering it. We need more women in the workforce and more mums to get involved locally at clubs. This is about raising awareness and doing something about it beyond the series.”

Driving Force is also partnering with leading youth homelessness charity Centrepoint which supports 15,000 vulnerable young people a year with accommodation, teaching life skills, physical and mental health issues and getting them into education or employment.

“Sport has the ability to change lives for the better and that everybody should have the opportunity to try sports,” says Murray. “Thanks to its links with series producer Rosemary Reed of Power of Women Productions, we had an opportunity to bring in people from Centrepoint, in Manchester where they met Steph Houghton and in Liverpool, where Natasha Jonas did a boxing masterclass at the gym where she started.

Judy Murray after being awarded an OBE at Buckingham Palace, London.

“Centrepoint is for 16-21-year olds who are homeless, and through Covid, that’s increasing. It was an opportunity to say we’ve got role models, we can show the power of sport. Every one of our athletes gives back through something they have set up themselves or contributes to on a regular basis so to have the opportunity to work with a charity and use your role model status and profile to inspire and encourage young girls in very difficult situations was great.”

Murray herself, the driving force behind tennis champions Andy and Jamie Murray is the subject of the first episode, interviewed by Sky Sports Golf Night presenter Di Dougherty. Each subsequent show sees Murray in conversation with a top athlete, her empathetic style giving them the space to open up. Murray knows what they’ve been through - the lack of facilities, opportunity, sexism, tabloid glare, the criticism for being confident or assertive and she’s passed this awareness on to her sons, with Andy Murray speaking up about casual sexism and the battle professional females face in a 2017 post-match interview.

In fact among the last words I can make out before the buzz of interference claims our conversation first time round are the words “Boris Becker” and “idiotic comment” a reference to him saying back in 2011 that Andy should ditch his mother if he wanted to win a grand slam. We know how that turned out.

Second time round with a clearer signal, Murray is back on the line telling me more about her latest venture.

At Cromlix House, the hotel owned by son Andy Murray, in Dunblane, 2019

“Driving Force came from the lack of opportunity I experienced as a young player. I would have loved to have played at Wimbledon and been able to go on the circuit but we really had nothing back then. Nobody aspired to be a great player or a great coach because you couldn’t play tennis all year round.

But Judy Murray is someone who hears the word ‘no’ and does it anyway.

“I never saw obstacles as barriers that stopped you, I saw them as things that you had to find a way over or under or round because I’ve never let anyone stop me. I’m one of those people that if you tell me I can’t do something, I will go out of my way to prove you wrong and that’s been the story of my life.”

“Driving Force is about the backstory of these amazing women and performances because so often we watch the Olympic finals and we never give it a thought as to how they got there, how they felt that day, that week, that year.”

One of the things Murray stresses is the need to invest in performance and with women’s sport on the up, she sees increased profile and coverage as a great shop window.

“We were a long time coming to the party, in terms of investment and trying to get a female athlete or female teams up to a level where it was watchable, but now there is a significant number of national teams - look at Scotland’s women footballers qualifying for The World Cup and the excitement that brought, as well as the massive profile. I watched them play Jamaica in their last warm up for the World Cup, with friends and some younger girls I used to coach and the crowd was 18,000 where the previous best crowd was 4,000. The country got behind it because the level was great and it was a world championship.

Judy Murray's new TV docuseries, Driving Force, which features top women Olympian athletes, is on Sky Sports now.

“When it gets good enough it becomes watchable, and when it gets watchable sponsorship and branding get involved because people want to see it. Now that we’ve got the performance up there we need to put our foot on the gas to continue to grow it. Visibility is everything.”

What the women featured all have in common, along with anyone who makes it in sport, female and male, is support, usually from parents.

“The parents who take them swimming early every morning or play sport with them, or the teacher or coach who spots a talent or who makes it fun.” Murray is big on fun: the Murray brothers’ first rackets were cereal boxes with which they hit a ping pong ball back and forward across the kitchen table.

Along with the fun there is the commitment of money and time that parents are often not prepared for and Murray would like to see support programmes so parents know what they’re getting into.

“You start your child off at swimming lessons at the pool at four in the afternoon and they get picked out as having talent and nobody tells you down the line that’s every morning getting up at five, driving them to the pool, hanging on there, taking them to school, then going to work.

“I had NO clue what tennis would demand of me as a parent -there was no infrastructure, no track record, because nobody had done it before. You’re just flying by the seat of your pants. There’s also the impact on other children, the cost. The more parents understand, the less chance of them suddenly panicking, ‘what do you mean you’ve picked her for that and it costs £500 I don’t have? I’m going to have to tell her she can’t go, you should have told me.’”

One of the winners in Driving Force, equestrian Charlotte Dujardin, started mucking out in a stables and worked her way up to Olympic champion five years later. Unlike many big names in her sport she doesn’t come from a privileged background but left school at 16 and began working as a stable hand at 20 for her now teammate Carl Hester, who let her ride his horse Valegro to Olympic victory.

“She wasn’t prepared for the barrage of media and having to speak in public in front of press packs, being absolutely terrified as a very private person. You need to be prepared for not just what your sport demands at top level, but how to be in the public eye.”

“Often athletes want to win the gold medal, but don’t necessarily want to be famous or life to change but the reality is it will. Being unprepared in many cases has led to the breakdown, or depression. It’s not always the demands of the sport, but what success did in terms of changing your life.”

Rebecca Adlington the swimmer, also speaks of some of the unexpected negatives of success.

“Becky Adlington was 19 when she won her two Olympic golds unexpectedly in 2008 in Beijing. She talks about how everybody loved her, Becky the golden girl, champion athlete, swimmer, Britain’s finest. Two days after it changed, picking her apart for her appearance, she was big, she had a big nose, she was ugly. Nobody had prepared her for that, how to deal with media, social media, and the effect it had on her and her family.

Murray is long used to coping with the media as well as the international demands of the job, but like the rest of us she’s coping with Covid restrictions in this year like no other. How does someone who rarely sits still cope, especially with sons and grandchildren who don’t live near her base north of Dunblane.

“I’ve not done too badly. Because I’m so used to travelling around it was a forced chill-out for me and I actually really enjoyed it for the first two months. I surprised myself! I’m a very common sense person, so I thought I can’t do anything, there’s no point moaning. I did the whole Netflix and chocolates thing like everybody else. But then I thought no, get out and about. I’ve got the countryside all around me and I did staycation stuff and then when I was allowed to I drove down to England to see the family a couple of times.

“But Christmas, I have no idea what’s going to happen. Because of the boys’ careers - the circuit starts right after Christmas, the 27 or 28th with Doha or Brisbane - so a family Christmas is few and far between. Last year it was an absolute treat to have Andy and Kim and the kids up here - Jamie was in America with his wife’s family - but this year, we’re all waiting and seeing aren’t we?”

In the meantime there are phones and laptops and she can always catch up on Twitter, where Andy was recently seen very quietly celebrating the Scottish football team’s success in Serbia.

“I was watching the game,” she says, “and when it went to extra time I thought ‘aw no’, and didn’t watch the penalties. But I saw Andy’s, em ‘celebration,’ on Twitter, which I thought was very basic.” She laughs, “The explanation is the kids were all asleep. They’re all up at half five and it’s Kim who gets up with them, so if he started jumping around the room the dogs would join in and everyone would get woken up.”

As the daughter of a footballer who played for Hibs, Murray always wants the Edinburgh men’s side to do well but says “actually I’ve been following the Hibernian women more recently. I was part of a Zoom event with them, where girls were given advice on different things.” A big fan of the women’s game, she praises the passing game and skill level.

“For me their strength is playing the ball - you don’t see so much of the big punt up the pitch.”

But Murray’s first love was always tennis and she played her way up to being one of the country’s top players but missing out on official support in time moved into coaching, producing winners at every level, from grassroots to Wimbledon. As a self-confessed “tomboy” she never felt embarrassed about taking part in sport, but it’s a question she’s often asked by girls and women.

“It didn’t bother me going on the school bus with my hair wet, but the world is a very different place for girls nowadays and the way you present yourself is massive. What I say to girls is whatever makes you feel good you should do, whether hair or clothes, and think about what it was that made you not feel good about yourself. Was it what you’re wearing, something somebody said? Everyone’s the same, I mean many people, including myself, are a bit overweight at the moment…”

Could that be the Netflix and chocolate?

She laughs.

“”Yeah. But my thing is you get to the CAUSE of it, then tackle it. Ask yourselves, what’s the issue. If it’s that you don’t know how to work a machine in a gym and don’t want to look stupid, ‘fess up and say to someone, ‘I’d like to know how to do that, can you show me please?’.

Even when women know exactly what they’re doing and are winning, they can be pulled down. Murray cites dancer Kevin Clifton’s defence of Strictly’s Maisie Smith, saying she’s voted down because she’s confident. “He was saying why is it that girls who are good at what they do and confident are branded as cocky and showing off but if a boy did it, it’s wow look at that.”

Speaking of Strictly Come Dancing, who does she rate most likely to last the series?

“I don’t know. Maybe Oti and Bill Bailey - I’ve enjoyed them a lot so far, but it’s too early to tell.

And would she like to be on it, swap the sofa for the studio?

“No. I’m very happy having done it once. And I’m not sure the public would be wanting to see my wooden dancing again. They’ve seen enough!”

She’d much rather be in the driving seat on Driving Force.

Driving Force is at 9pm on Sky Sports Mix and Sky Sports Main Event at 10.15pm on Tuesdays. It is also be available On Demand via Sky and NOW TV.

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