Baseline Awards of 2019: Comeback player

Across the last few weeks of December, Baseline will dish out awards for the greatest acts of 2019.

It was the press conference that rocked the tennis world.

Struggling to recover from hip surgery, Andy Murray made public how much pain he had been in and announced that, after Wimbledon, he was going to close the door on a Hall-of-Fame career—if he could even make it to the grass-court season.

Another one of the game’s all-time greats, Bob Bryan, told Murray about the procedure that he had done on his own hip, which enabled him to return to the court, pain-free, after missing most of 2018. Soon after his loss at the Australian Open, Murray went under the knife again.

Hope was renewed for the former world No. 1, who targeted the grass-court stretch for a return to the game, rather than a farewell. In his first tournament back, Murray played at Queen’s Club in London, where he was a five-time singles champion. But he wasn’t looking to add a sixth title in that discipline. Rather, he entered the doubles draw with Feliciano Lopez. In true fairy-tale fashion, the duo proceeded to take the crown.

Murray played in more doubles draws, while also slowly making a return to the singles court during the summer hard-court stretch. He skipped the US Open, but played the lower-level Rafa Nadal Open in Spain before heading over to Asia, where he posted some encouraging results.

Making his way to Antwerp, Belgium, for the European Open, the Scot's comeback run continued. Ranked well outside the Top 200, Murray beat four Top 100 opponents in a row, including 18th-ranked Stan Wawrinka in the final, to claim his first singles crown in more than two years.

The win lifted Murray back into the Top 130 and, more importantly, proved that his career was far from over. Just returning to the court was a comeback in and of itself; winning two titles after being on the verge of retirement made it one for the ages.