Five Things We Learned from the Andy Murray BBC Video

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Five Things We Learned from the Andy Murray BBC Video

By Chris Oddo

(June 24, 2013) -- For those who haven't seen it yet, the BBC ran its hour-long documentary about Andy Murray on Sunday evening, and it was up on YouTube not long after the show had ended.

Twitter was buzzing with praise for the video, and rightfully so, as the footage showcases Murray's humanity and down-to-earth-ness, while also giving the public some perspective about the type of respect he's earned from star players on tour as well as such luminaries in the sporting and creative world like Sir Alex Ferguson, Kevin Spacey, Ivan Lendl and Lennox Lewis.

There was also a hilarious segment in which the BBC production crew elected to do a rather daft reenactment of Murray's toilet break, which was taken prior to the fifth set of Murray's 2012 U.S. Open title-winning victory over Novak Djokovic. Check it out at the head of the page, because words will surely fail to do it justice.

Aside from that bit of gratuitous artificial sweetener, the video is top-notch, with candid interviews, splices of tear-inducing sports drama, and intimate portraits of a man who is so unabashedly genuine that it is impossible not to find yourself rooting for him by the end of the hour.

Here are our top five moments of the broadcast:

1. Kim Sears says that Murray got drunk on the plane after his U.S. Open victory. “Everyone asks 'Oh, has Andy ever got drunk,' and I always say, the only time he did was on the back from the U.S. Open,” Sears says. “I fell asleep because I was so tired.”

2. Rafael Nadal once texted sweet nothings to Murray in New York to make him uncomfortable in front of his girlfriend. “I was texting him like five, six messages,” Nadal says, “I love you, I want to see you, and he was in front of his girlfriend. I put him in a very bad position.”

3. His brother hates seeing Murray get too emotional and negative on the court. “I don't like watching him sometimes when he's in that frame of mind,” he says. “You just kind of want to shake him a bit.”

4. Murray breaks down in tears when trying to talk about the tragedy that he experienced in his hometown of Dunblane, Scotland in 1996. It's a very poignant moment, and you can almost feel Murray reliving the horror of the shooting in a grade school that shook his town to its core. You can really get a sense of Murray the man in this piece, his emotional capacity, his vulnerability and his honesty.

5. Murray and his girlfriend Kim Sears out with the dogs for a walk (love Murray's boots, by the way). Murray claims that the paparazzi used to wait outside his house at Wimbledon to try to get some exciting shots of Murray and his girlfriend, but when, after five or six days, they realized that all they ever did was walk the dogs, he says they got bored and never came back.