How fine art became a hobby for Andy Murray and the pro tennis community

What do Britain’s leading tennis players chat about while they’re waiting for their turn on court? The answer might surprise you, because it’s not usually forehands and backhands.

All kinds of tangential things come up, from the recent movie Challengers to the pace of the greens at Wentworth. But there is one clique with a very particular interest.

If you ever walked into the player lounge and saw Andy Murray and Cameron Norrie huddled together with Norrie’s sometime-coach James Trotman, it’s a safe bet that they were discussing something highbrow – like the brushwork in Maggi Hambling’s latest semi-abstract canvas.

Yes, a fine-art appreciation society has developed behind the walls of the Lawn Tennis Association’s Roehampton headquarters. The core membership comprises Trotman – who now concentrates on coaching new British No1 Jack Draper – as well as Murray and Norrie, with Murray’s former coach Jamie Delgado and Davis Cup captain Leon Smith loitering on the fringes.

Draper himself is not convinced, though. “I don’t know what they all see in it,” the 22-year-old told me in November. “Whenever I look over Trots’s shoulder, he’s staring at something that looks like it’s been made by a six-year-old, splashing paint around at random.”

Professional athletes tend not to be seen as the most cultured group of people. But these half-dozen enthusiasts break the mould… and then rearrange it into an intriguing sculpture.

To judge for yourself, dial up Trotman’s Instagram page. The images are almost always abstract paintings, and he captions them assiduously. One post, from June 8, is labelled “Paule Vezelay, Eight Curved Forms and Two Circles, Oil on Canvas, 1946.”

Norrie’s tastes also tend towards abstraction. Speaking to reporters in January, he identified both Hambling – the Suffolk-based painter and sculptor mentioned above – and Damien Hirst as his favourite artists.

“Probably my most collected artist is Damien Hirst,” Norrie explained. “I’ve got some originals and some prints. But I do like Hambling as well. Andy and I have talked about her a few times and, yeah, I don’t really know too much about it, but I’m still learning and it’s something interesting.

“I started collecting a couple of years ago,” Norrie added, “and I always asked Trots [Trotman] his opinion on a few things. He’s pretty good at it and he’s got a really good eye. My girlfriend [Louise] also went to art school and she’s really into it.

“I always enjoy going to a few museums as well here and there. So, yeah, it’s quite addicting.”

Asked whether his interest is primarily for pleasure or investment purposes, Norrie replied: “A bit of both. First of all, you have to enjoy what you’re buying. But I need to leave a little bit of space for my girlfriend to make some art and put some on the walls.”

With his interest in provocative contemporary artists, Norrie clearly stands among Trotman’s cultural disciples. “We had a day off in New York recently, and me and Cam went to the Met Museum,” Trotman explained. “It’s something different.

“He’s got his own taste and his own eye,” Trotman added. “It’s a luxury, obviously, but if you can live around things that you really appreciate and enjoy, it’s nice.

“Cam said he was in New Zealand recently and there was an artist’s open house and he went and had a look and saw a piece that he really liked and he bought it. I asked him actually to send it through because we [Trotman and Draper] just practised with him now.”

Murray’s curiosity was piqued in a different way. Five or six years ago he was introduced to Hambling by a mutual friend who knew about her deep passion for tennis. The connections in this story work both ways, because Hambling once participated in a charity exhibition match at the Royal Albert Hall. According to a profile published by The Economist in 2020, “she returned a serve from Pat Cash with a fag clamped between her lips”.

In that same profile, Hambling explained: “He’s very funny, very intelligent and very genuinely shy. He came up to the studio, and for about an hour and a half he was asking me all these questions that really made me think.”

The unlikely relationship between Hambling – a chain smoker whose preferred tipples are whiskey or Special Brew – and the famously ascetic Murray led to a commission from the National Portrait Gallery. In 2019, Murray sat for her. Or, rather, he performed serves and groundstrokes in her studio while wearing his Wimbledon whites.

The two parties remember the experience very differently. For Murray, “it was difficult, it was a physical morning… I was there for three to four hours at least”. For Hambling, “it was actually a very short time. He says 10 minutes, I say less”. She also told The Economist that he was a terrible subject: “His whole thing is about movement, and I was asking him to stay still.” But the result is delightful, creating a sense of motion that a photograph could never match.

It is typical of Murray that he is constantly asking questions. Hambling does not find this easy to deal with, explaining that “it’s fatal when I think”. But then Murray is one of those people who likes to take things apart and look at them from every angle, as if the world were a giant Rubik’s Cube.

Perhaps his close interest in the art world should not surprise us. He lives with an artist, after all: wife Kim, who paints portraits of pets. He once even experimented with creating his own work – although it did not go terribly well.

“It’s like most things really,” he told The Guardian’s arts correspondent at the unveiling of the Hambling portrait. “You think, ‘I could do that’ or ‘that’s not difficult’. My wife was out that night, I was by myself in the house. She came back from dinner and was like, ‘What the hell have you done?’ I ended up with paint on the ceiling and all over the floor. It was horrific.”

For Trotman, who developed his artistic interests as a 25-year-old tennis vagabond, there are certain parallels between art and sport. He admits, though, that not everyone in the locker-room is as open-minded as his younger self, who spent many hours visiting museums and galleries in between tournaments or coaching appointments.

“The other guys used to laugh at me,” Trotman told Telegraph Sport. “Because abstract art was a big area of mine, and they’d look at it and say, ‘Well, look, I could do that. I don’t get it. It’s rubbish.’

“Which is the typical mentality. But then I’d start to show them the artists’ early work before they turned to abstraction and how good they actually are. And it’s kind of fascinating, because it’s more about their journey in pushing their boundaries. It’s about asking ‘How can I challenge myself?’ – just the same as tennis players or any profession. And so that’s why a lot of them turned to abstract art: that search for something different, and something a little bit more cutting edge.”

Trotman says he keeps at least 100 pieces in his home and garage. A couple of rooms have been converted into mini-galleries, and sometimes he has to sell work in order to make space for his latest purchases. “Everything has a value, and you can’t ignore it,” he says. “But primarily I’m always buying with a view to what I want to live with.

“Jack’s not one of us yet, he’s not there,” Trotman added. “But Andy likes his art. Cam enjoys it. And I think sometimes it’s just an escape. You’ve got your work and your tennis, which is so intense, takes up so much of your time. And then there’s family and the commitment there. The one thing I’ve got that’s mine is my art. So when I get a spare moment, I’ll research it and go to shows and try to buy bits and pieces at auction.

“The tournaments themselves are so busy, but if people are training at the National Tennis Centre or working on the grass, we get a little bit more time around each other. It’s another point of conversation. We’ll WhatsApp images through and talk about artists. With Instagram now, it’s so easy to follow. It’s such a visual picture, isn’t it?” He pauses, then grins. “But, yeah, I used to get a few snide remarks for sure.”