It has probably been inevitable for a while. The pain has been too bad, for too long—“probably twenty months now,” Andy Murray said, when he announced that he would be retiring from professional tennis after Wimbledon or sooner. (“It will be very difficult” to keep playing, the surgeon who operated on Murray’s hip a year ago cautioned last week.) It was painful for Murray to play, painful not to play, painful to play uncompetitively. It was painful to put his socks on in the morning. He spoke with tears in his eyes and cracks in his voice. There is always a sense of loss when a sport loses one of its great players. This time, though, there was a shared sense that tennis was also losing one of its better people.

“Human” was the word that kept coming up. “Goodbye Andy Murray, a human in the land of the Gods” began a headline in the Independent. “Andy Murray Was a Real Person Walking Among Gods,” a post on Deadspin was titled. It’s a compliment, of course, but it was also Murray’s curse—the condition he has had to overcome. Roger Federer is blessed with sublime creative genius and unparalleled grace, Rafael Nadal with superhuman endurance and strength, Novak Djokovic with ligaments made of rubber and an inhuman sort of patience. Murray—well, Murray can make it look hard.

It is hard. It is sprinting backward in a sandpit until collapse. It is lung-burning, eighteen-point rallies. It is hundreds of crosscourt backhands without missing a shot. It is dealing with the second-guessing and constant carping of the press. It is coping with daily pain so intense that it can be hard to put on socks. You could see his maximal effort in the shape of his strokes—the slightly ungainly, compact forehand, the sometimes junky shots. He was one of the best returners in the game’s history, and had one of the game’s best backhands, but his true genius was most apparent when he threw up a lob—an incredibly difficult shot to control. Murray did it with pinpoint accuracy and canny timing, and used it to get back into points that should have been lost. He was willing to grind himself in the process of wearing his opponent down.

It was hard on Monday night in Melbourne, playing against Roberto Bautista Agut in the first round of the Australian Open. It was the worst possible draw for a man playing on one hip: Bautista Agut is a machine built to make men run. So Murray ran. And he kept running, even when the result seemed past his reach. A couple of clutch aces brought out roars that rivalled the ones he heard when winning Wimbledon. After dropping the first two sets, he won a tiebreaker to force a fourth. “Make that ball!” he screamed after missing a forehand at 5–6. Somehow, he won a tiebreak in the fourth set to force a fifth. He scrambled and sprinted, saving match point. But he lost in the end. If this was indeed his last match, this was his final, fitting scoreline: 6–4, 6–4, 6–7 (5–7), 6–7 (4–7), 6–2.

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