Sir Andy Murray commits one of golf’s cardinal sins at BMW Championship Pro-Am

“When I’m taking the club up, I feel like I’m getting to the top too fast,” said Andy Murray, in an earnest discussion with Bob MacIntyre, his fellow Scot, on the ninth tee of Wentworth.

It was odd to see Murray asking for tips, when he has been the master of his sporting domain for so many years.

But then, you can see how the Wentworth Pro-Am would make a fellow anxious. All those spectators, crowding dangerously close to your ball. All those social-media channels, ready to broadcast embarrassing footage of your duffed drive around the world. Yet it was Murray’s shirt which first got people’s attention as he forgot one of the game’s most cherished rules: tucking it in.

“I was pretty nervous,” said Murray after coming off the course. “I couldn’t really feel my arms and legs.”

Asked if it was worse than walking out at Flushing Meadows to play the US Open final, he replied “It’s a different sort of nervous. I’m not thinking I’m going to walk out on a tennis court and forget how to hit the ball. Whereas here, you’re sort of nervous about – there’s people standing like five metres away from where I’m driving, and I’m like, I’m useless at this game.”

I can confirm that Murray did indeed top one drive like a card-carrying hacker, shouting “Noooo!” as the ball scudded 50 yards into a gorse bush. You’d have been disappointed otherwise, wouldn’t you? It’s no fun if a sporting legend transfers to a different arena, and then masters it without the slightest fuss.

Which is not to say that Murray didn’t hit plenty of stonkers as well. Within the first five holes – which he played in a Texas scramble format alongside fellow amateurs James Anderson and Anton Du Beke – he had already managed a pair of excellent up-and-downs from greenside bunkers, and marked each one with a celebratory fist-pump.

The intensity of the reaction was not feigned. Here’s a man who used to pass the time between tennis matches by throwing scrunched-up paper balls into the bin, in a do-or-die duel against Tim Henman. In Murray’s world, every day is game day.

“I still enjoy competing,” said Murray, when asked about the fist-pumps afterwards. “Obviously it’s never going to replace what you had on the tennis court, but this stuff is fun. You hit enough bad shots in golf, you’ve got to give yourself a pat on the back when you hit the odd good one.”

The format for this pro-am event was too complicated to explain here, except to say that Murray, Anderson, Du Beke and MacIntyre began their round on the 18th hole as part of a shotgun start. Billed as the second-string group behind the Rory McIlroy/Gareth Bale party, they eventually trailed in 16th out of 20 entrants. It turned out that Du Beke, despite a handicap of one, doesn’t swing as smoothly as he twirls.

Playing off seven at the moment, Murray has already said that his next competitive goal is to become a scratch golfer. While he expects the project to require a couple of years, MacIntyre scoffed at this suggestion, saying “He’ll be at scratch in no time”. Murray also acknowledged that it would be nice to be better than Henman, who plays most days and has a handicap of plus two.

“He was good for a guy that’s obviously not played that much golf,” said MacIntyre. “He did say he was practising a lot [two-and-a-half to three hours per weekday, in fact] in the build-up to this. He changed his clubs yesterday, a full set. I was very impressed with his game.”

Murray was accompanied by father Willie, who carried his bag. He joked afterwards that “My dad might be getting the sack after his performance today. He spent most of his time following Bob around. But no, it was brilliant. During my tennis career, I didn’t get to spend loads of time with my dad. So getting to do that, it was a really cool day, as well.”

By the last few holes, Murray had reverted to the limping gait we remember from his tennis twilight. Even so, he still nailed his final two shots into the 17th. He already looks considerably lighter than he was in his playing days, and he confirmed afterwards that he has lost 12 pounds in the seven weeks since his retirement.

“I went to the gym three of the first four days after I stopped, worked really hard, and then went up to Scotland for a couple of days for a holiday,” Murray said. “I haven’t been back since. It’s been five weeks that I’ve not been in the gym, longest ever for me probably.

“With my weight, I don’t know if it’s appetite? If I’m not eating as much? We obviously have loads of the sport drinks [in tennis], which have got a lot of calories in them, and I only really drink water and coffee now. I was expecting the opposite to happen.

“I said to my wife, ‘Look, I’m going to make sure when I stop, I stay in good shape.’ And she said, ‘Oh, if you’re just going to go and play golf, and do what Ivan’s done [a reference to Murray’s former coach Ivan Lendl, who is twice the man he used to be], I don’t want that.’”

Murray’s golf game dissected

Driving/woods
Murray’s tee shots showed a slight tendency to leak off to the right, but overall – with the exception of that topped drive on the seventh hole – they held up well. “I hit one really bad drive,” he said, “but yeah, for the most part, it was solid, better than what I was expecting.” Distance-wise, MacIntyre reckoned him to be hitting the ball 250 or 260 yards.

Irons
Very solid. There were no real shockers in this department, and plenty of nicely struck approaches. Murray’s swing might look a little stiff in parts – the legacy, one assumes, of all those hip and back operations – but he has an easy rhythm that derives from an early start in this sport. As he explained after the round, he and brother Jamie used to “go out with our parents or grandparents and start on the second tee and play four or five holes in the summers after tennis training or after school.”

Wedges
His least favourite part of the game. Murray’s worst shot was unquestionably an attempted approach from 85 yards into the eighth hole, which he duffed into the water guarding the green. “Those 50- to 80-yard shots, I found hard,” he explained. “We were talking about it in the build-up and both me and Jimmy [Anderson] were like, ‘I hate these shots.’ And then both of us hit it right in the middle of the water, completely fat.”

Putting
Strong showing here. “I’ve not lost that,” said Murray, who was highly efficient over the five- or six-foot range that can make all the difference to a scorecard. He was perhaps a little tentative at times, leaving a few balls short, but he read the greens well. As a tennis player, he always embodied that sporting cliche “good touch for a big man”, and the same now applies to his short game.

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