For most people, being told that they’re boring would be considered an insult, for tennis player Andy Murray though it’s simply confirmation that his ingenious method of avoiding controversy by being as boring as possible is working exactly as intended.
For anyone unfamiliar with Murray, he is, at the time of writing this article, the current reigning Olympic tennis champion and the overall second best player in the world at the moment according to the ATP. Despite his status as literally one of the best tennis players on Earth, few members of the press want to speak to Murray due to his reputation for being a miserable, gloomy bastard in virtually every interview he’s ever given, answering with short, concise sentences delivered in a droning, monotonous voice in tandem with a blank, lifeless stare that screams “I’m here, but I am very unhappy about it”.
Seriously, click on any random video of Murray giving an interview and it’s virtually indistinguishable from footage of paint drying in HD save for the fact paint at least usually has a cool nickname to distract you like “Arctic wind” or “beaver taint orange”, wanna know what Murray’s nickname is with the press? Mr Angry, because he’s kind of snippy sometimes and because nobody gives a shit about giving him a cooler one like The human tranquillizer or Megatron.
Murray’s attitude during interviews has given him a reputation as something of a wet fish, which suits him down to the ground because according to him, being boring is all part of his plan to avoid scandals. You see, in an interview with GQ, when asked to respond to the accusation from a rival player we’re not going to name because fuck him, that he lacked “character”, Murray bluntly responded “Whether people like you or not should be irrelevant“, before explaining that he intentionally gives boring, but otherwise factually correct and honest to questions he’s asked so that he doesn’t have to “deal with the aftermath of any scandals“.
This ingenious method of avoiding controversy is likely a result of the metric shit-ton of abuse Murray got way back in 2006 when he sarcastically told an interviewer that he was supporting whoever was playing against England in the World Cup when they made fun of the fact that Scotland (the country he was born in) didn’t qualify. When the news reported the quote without also adding that it was a joke and that Murray possessed a backhand that could slap the nose off their face, he was bombarded with death threats for a month strait from angry and presumably overweight and sad soccer fans. After the controversy died down, Murray vowed that he’d never be involved in a similar scandal again and as a result he became the human equivalent of size 10 Times New Roman font, adopting a persona of utter and complete blandness so that the news simply had nothing to talk about.
And it fucking worked and to date, Murray has only been involved in one other scandal, in 2014, when he tweeted about the then Scottish Referendum after staying quiet about it for months, directly citing the abuse he suffered back in 2006 as the reason he’d (initially) refused to make his feelings clear. Other than that though, Murray has basically become a total black hole of charisma that nobody from the press wants to interview because they know nothing that he’s going to say is going to sell papers or make people click on their articles, which in our eyes, makes this guy a fucking hero.
