Jakub Mensik, Miami champion, was going to pull out of the tournament an hour before his first match

Andy Murray, who made humid Miami his training home for much of his career, may be making his final trip to the city’s signature tournament this year. At 36, he has said that he’ll call it quits, for a second and presumably final time, this summer.

Murray’s South Florida fitness regimen never proved more useful than it did during the 2013 final at Crandon Park. He faced one of the game’s most relentless competitors, David Ferrer, in the middle of a typically steamy spring day on Key Biscayne. The two slugged and sprinted and staggered their way through three sets of exhausting rallies, for two hours and 45 minutes.

Afterward, the winner didn’t mince words.

“It was a brutal, brutal match,” Murray said. “Both of us were kind of on our last legs.”

Advertising

“It was a good job it wasn’t a best-of-five-set match,” Murray said, “because I don’t know how the last few sets would have ended up.”

Ferrer may have ended on his last legs, but he started on the front foot. The Spaniard known as the Little Beast began very much in beast mode, taking the rallies to Murray and seemingly running circles around him, as he leaped out to a 5-0 lead.

In trying to avoid the bagel, Murray also found a semblance of his form, and began to match Ferrer’s intensity. After 10 days of matches in Miami, neither player was his freshest, or, in the end, at his best. In the third set, the two opened with six straight breaks of serve, as tired errors flew around the arena. But as the quality declined, the drama increased, with neither player able to win cheap points or put the other guy away.

With Murray serving at 5-6, Ferrer reached match point, for what would have been his second Masters 1000 title. After another long back-and-forth, Murray hit a shot that Ferrer thought was long. No call came, so Ferrer stopped the point and challenged. It was the wrong move; the ball was in. Instead of winning him the match, the point essentially lost it for him. Unable to put it out his mind, Ferrer lost that game and the final tiebreaker 7-1.

Advertising

Ferrer came oh—OH—so close to winning his second Masters title.

Murray won his second title in Miami, and his ninth Masters 1000, but he would be on to bigger and better things soon. Four months later, he would win his biggest final of all, over Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon.

By the end of this one, though, he was just thinking about his own survival.

“It was a good job it wasn’t a best-of-five-set match,” Murray said, “because I don’t know how the last few sets would have ended up.”

Advertising