Sir Andy Murray(1987–)

Andrew Barron Murray was born at Rottenrow Maternity Hospital in central Glasgow on the fifteenth of May 1987, second son of Willie Murray, a Dunblane retail manager, and Judith Erskine, a tennis coach of the Stirling tennis circuit. He was raised at Dunblane in central Stirlingshire (the small Perthshire-border town his elder brother Jamie Murray, the doubles specialist, was also raised in), was schooled at Dunblane Primary School and at Dunblane High School, and took up the tennis at three on the Dunblane Sports Club courts under his mother's coaching. He was identified as a national prospect at twelve by the Scottish Lawn Tennis Association, moved to the Sánchez-Casal Tennis Academy at Barcelona at fifteen for the two-year intensive training programme, and turned professional in April 2005 at seventeen.

He broke into the senior ATP Tour through 2005 to 2007, won his first ATP title at the SAP Open at San Jose in February 2006, took the Stockholm Open and the Madrid Masters in 2008 to break into the world top five, and through the next four years sat as the youngest member of the Big Four (Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Murray) that dominated men's professional tennis through the period. He reached his first Grand Slam singles final at the 2008 US Open and lost three further finals (2010 Australian Open, 2011 Australian Open, 2012 Wimbledon) before the breakthrough.

The breakthrough was at the London 2012 Olympic Games at the All England Club on the fifth of August 2012, where Murray beat Roger Federer in the singles final 6–2, 6–1, 6–4 to take the Olympic singles gold medal, the first British singles tennis Olympic gold medal since Josiah Ritchie's bronze at the 1908 Games. He followed it on the tenth of September 2012 with the US Open singles title (defeating Novak Djokovic in five sets), the first British male singles Grand Slam champion since Fred Perry's last US Open title in 1936, a span of seventy-six years. On the seventh of July 2013 he won the Wimbledon Championships men's singles final against Djokovic in straight sets in front of the Centre Court Royal Box, the first British male Wimbledon singles champion since Perry's 1936 title.

He led the Great Britain Davis Cup team through the 2015 campaign, winning all eight of his singles matches across the four ties and the doubles rubber alongside his brother Jamie in the final, to take the Davis Cup trophy at the seventh of December 2015 in Ghent against Belgium, the first British Davis Cup victory since the team of 1936 under Fred Perry and Bunny Austin. He won the second Wimbledon singles title against Milos Raonic on the tenth of July 2016, won the second Olympic singles gold medal at Rio on the fourteenth of August 2016 against Juan Martín del Potro, and ended the 2016 ATP year as the World Number One singles player from the fifth of November to the thirty-first of December 2016, the only British singles player ever to hold the ATP World Number One ranking.

He underwent two hip-resurfacing operations across 2018 and 2019 (the first British professional tennis player to continue at the elite level on a hip-resurfacing prosthesis), returned to the tour through 2019 to 2024, and retired from competitive singles play at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on the second of August 2024 after the men's doubles quarter-final defeat. He was made an OBE in 2013 and was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours List in his twenty-ninth year, becoming the youngest tennis knight in British history. He was awarded the BBC Sports Personality of the Year three times (2013, 2015, 2016), the only three-time winner of the post-war era except for Sir Henry Cooper. The Murray name in modern Scottish sport carries the weight of the three Grand Slams, the two Olympic singles golds and the 2015 Davis Cup.