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7 Stories on Andy Murray
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SI.com: Bryan Armen Graham: Men's game is crowded at the top

History was made last Friday at the Rogers Cup in Montreal, when the world's top eight players took part in the quarterfinals of the same tournament for the first time since the ATP Tour starting the rankings in August 1973.

SI.com: Jon Wertheim: Murray mania continues to mount, a wing for Santoro and more mail

WIMBLEDON, England -- While marveling at Venus Williams's play on grass....

SI.com: Bryan Armen Graham: Murray's ecstasy, agony on display at SW19

Two years are tattooed on the English sports consciousness like scarlet letters of anguish and self-pity. One is 1966, the first and only time the Three Lions hoisted the World Cup. The other is 1937, the last time a British player won at Wimbledon.

SI.com: McLellan, Julien, Murray finalists for Adams Award

The San Jose Sharks' Todd McLellan, Boston Bruins' Claude Julien and St. Louis Blues' Andy Murray are finalists for the Jack Adams Award as the NHL's top coach.

SI.com: Jon Wertheim: Hot Murray could bring home Wimbledon

This story appears in the April 13, 2009 issue of Sports Illustrated

SI.com: L. Jon Wertheim: Andy Murray bears the hopes of an entire tennis-mad kingdom on his slight shoulders

For all the tradition coursing through Wimbledon -- the lords and ladies in the Royal Box, the queuing for grounds passes, the Pimm's cups with side orders of strawberries and cream -- this may be the most hidebound ritual of them all: Everyone in Great Britain becomes irrationally optimistic at the prospect of a homegrown male winning the tournament for the first time since Fred Perry in 1936. And then, when the player doesn't prevail, the entire country reacts with disproportionate anguish. When Tim Henman reached the Wimbledon semifinals in 2002, a headline in the Daily Mirror read: NO PRESSURE, TIMBO, BUT CHOKE NOW AND WE'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU. When Henman fell to eventual champion Lleyton Hewitt, the next day's headline was NATION OF LOSERS. Even the staid London Observer once described rooting for British players at Wimbledon as "a national spasm of patriotic agony."

SI.com: Molding a new Mac

Sometimes, sports has an awesome eye for irony. In tennis, the best one right now is this: The great hope of British tennis more closely resembles former British public enemy No.1 -- John McEnroe -- than any of the proper and refined players of the United Kingdom's sporting past.

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