by Anna Kessel
Chris is determined to lead on the change she wants to see. As a lesbian who enjoys watching men’s football, she was not only fed up with the bigotry she heard in the stands, but tired of football’s LGBT groups that sought to represent only men’s views. She felt it was time to ensure that lesbians had a stake in the conversation too. In her work for Proud Lilywhites, and the sport’s umbrella group Pride in Football, Chris has been keen to ensure that tackling homophobia in football is not an exclusively male preserve. There are co-chairs, for gender parity, and an emphasis on reaching out to women to increase their involvement in the organization. She says she hopes her work will help to enable footballers to come out, if they wish. And she vents her frustration that even in the women’s game there is not enough openness around sexuality. In the late 1990s Chris ran the legendary Hackney Women’s FC, the first out lesbian team. Things have changed massively in the LGBT movement since then, but still there is a shyness in being open about sexuality – even in women’s football. Coming out was a major event for England star Casey Stoney, and Chris wishes more female players would feel comfortable enough to talk about these issues. She herself grew up in a Greek Cypriot family where her mum wasn’t keen on her tomboy status, and even less so when Chris came out. Chris says it would have helped enormously to have England players to look up to who were open about their sexual orientation. ‘It’s a real shame that it’s still not talked about. It needs to be normalized. I don’t mean outing people, but highlighting the importance of inclusion.’
I find Chris’s story inspiring because she is living proof of why we don’t need to turn our backs on the sports we love, just because they might retain archaic and unpleasant elements. There are plenty of people – men and women – who want sport to be truly inclusive, truly family-friendly. These are individuals, like Chris, who feel passionately about implementing change, and instead of sitting around wondering whether it’s ever going to happen, they just go off and do it themselves. This is precisely what we need more of in sport. We need more women to reclaim sport, on their own terms, to mould it into the image they want to see, to become the architects of a new sporting culture that is more generous, more compassionate, and no less fun.
It is a mantra that Judy Murray has followed her entire sporting career, whether that was struggling to play tennis in 1970s Scotland with the nation’s paucity of facilities and expertise, or fighting to take her now-famous sons to the very top of the sport. She has always created her own paths, relied on her own resourcefulness, dug deep and got on with the job. She has had to: even after Andy won the junior US Open she still couldn’t get Sport Scotland to fund him.
Along the way she has faced the opprobrium of the mainstream media who, for many years, insisted on depicting her as the omnipresent, but essentially clueless, ‘pushy parent’. The caricature of the female supporting act is one that is habitually lumped onto all women associated with a sports star as wives, girlfriends or mothers. It is grossly sexist, and unfair. Most of the so-called WAGs that I have met are smart, articulate, educated and career-focused. Unlike the stereotype, very few see their marriage as their vocation. And yet as soon as they display a little chutzpah, show a little business sense, they’re characterized as hard-nosed bitches controlling their husbands’ lives. Two high-profile examples are Mirka Federer and Tania Farah, wives of Roger Federer and Mo Farah, respectively. Two talented women juggling family and managing their husbands’ careers, they are both frequently portrayed as some kind of modern-day Lady Macbeth. Fabrice Muamba’s wife, Shauna, is another important female figure – running her own Caribbean sauce business, Mrs Muamba’s, and holding the family together while her husband recovers from the moment when his heart stopped for seventy-eight minutes on the pitch at White Hart Lane, and a nation held its breath. Fabrice made a miraculous recovery, but it was Shauna who had to step into the role of breadwinner as her husband adjusted to a life without football.
Mums of sports stars don’t necessarily have it any easier. From Cissie Charlton, mother of 1966 World Cup winning sons Jack and Bobby, to Sandra St Helen, mum of Jermain Defoe, mothers in sport tend to be portrayed as overbearing and interfering. When Jermain moved to Canada to play for Toronto FC in the MLS, a Toronto Sun journalist dedicated an entire column to the subject of his ‘tantrum’-prone mum, cast as the wrecking ball in Defoe’s professional career. It’s just not the same for dads. Think of Bert le Clos, the father of Chad, who beat Michael Phelps to a gold medal in the pool at London 2012. From the sidelines, Bert went ballistic and became an instant media hit. He ended up becoming more famous than his medal-winning son, and the public adored him.
Judy, meanwhile, has had a very different path. ‘I got slammed a lot along the way for being “the mum” and being told I’m pushy and all the rest of it,’ she told me. ‘I just had to remind myself that the people who wrote these things don’t know us, they’ve never spoken to me or my family; all they see is me pumping my fist in the box and they clearly think I’m some sort of crazy, psychotic mother and it couldn’t be further from the truth.’ The reality is that Judy has had to graft every step of the way, both in her own tennis career and in coaching her sons to play tennis through the early years. Scotland was never a hub of tennis talent; there was a lack of people to go to for advice, a lack of financial support, a lack of facilities and resources, and a lack of belief that anyone Scottish could ever become world class. Frustrated, she ended up quitting her job as national coach, and going it alone in developing her sons’ skills. ‘I did it by myself because I thought nobody will believe in my kids unless I do. It was a huge learning experience for me; I had to learn all sorts of things. I did a PR course so I didn’t have to pay other people to do it, because I didn’t have any money; I learned how to build a website; I can do tax returns in three different countries; I started to learn the life and the business to it. It’s been a big adventure.’ I say that most people don’t know these things about her; they probably assume she did a bit of ball practice with the boys and then sat in the box at Wimbledon, hair done, cheering. ‘Well, I never told anybody any of these things on the way up,’ she says. ‘I never did interviews, I just kept focused on what I was trying to do. It’s only really in the last few years, with Andy winning slams, that I felt confident talking about it.’
As her words sink in, I can’t help but feel she has been dealt an unfair hand. If a father had produced two sons as talented as Andy and Jamie, and endured financial and emotional hardship to get them onto an elite platform, he would be hailed as a genius. Think of Lewis Hamilton’s dad, frequently credited with the career of his son; the stories about him working several jobs to give Lewis a fighting chance in an elitist sport are well known. Why hasn’t the same compliment been extended to Judy?
Like her son Andy, Judy is often portrayed in the media as rather dour. But a few minutes into our conversation and I realize she is anything but. A cake obsessive, she has me in stitches describing how she makes ‘top hats’ for her sons every time they come home. ‘You couldn’t really call it baking,’ she says, ‘but it’s where you melt the chocolate, put it in the base of the cake case, split a marshmallow, put a blob of chocolate on top of it and a Smartie on top and it looks like a top hat. It’s a real kids’ party thing. At Andy’s wedding I made thousands of them, but they were absolutely decimated between Jamie, Andy and Jamie Delgado. It brought back all their memories of children’s parties. It was really funny; you’re so used to seeing them in this elite sporting environment and there they were sitting round this tray of top hats talking about kids’ party food.’ We talk about lemon meringue pie, Victoria sponge and Coburg cake. It is one of Judy’s favourite subjects, and I delight in chatting about cake as opposed to nutrition and protein shakes as is the norm with so many sports stars. Judy says these things are an important part of her family life. ‘As a family we have very little time together; the boys don’t get home much, so those moments are very precious. At Christmastime I always do party p
oppers and whoopee cushions and daft things like that; they make us laugh and reminisce.’
As her sons’ success grew, Judy began to be approached by women’s sports organizations asking her to help them fight gender inequality in their sector. As Fed Cup captain, Judy had begun to witness some of these issues herself. ‘I realized how much harder it is to work and push to make things happen on the women’s side of the game than the men’s. Everything is very much focused on the men. Everybody talks about the Davis Cup; it has a bigger profile, it’s been around longer, and in more prominent locations. There’s hardly any female coaches on the women’s tour, and of course hardly any on the men’s – although Andy taking on Amélie [Mauresmo] has helped enormously in challenging those perceptions that women should be considered.’
Still, standing up and speaking at conferences, or to the media, wasn’t something that felt comfortable. When Women in Sport announced that just 0.4 per cent of sponsorship went into women’s sport, Judy was horrified. ‘But at the time I said, oh God, no, I couldn’t talk about anything that’s not tennis. I said there must be someone else who can, I’m not confident in front of cameras. Isn’t there another high-profile female coach, because I didn’t think of myself in that way. And they said to me, “Well, can you think of anyone?” And I couldn’t.’ Judy agreed to sit down with the research, and the more she read the more angry she became. ‘Angry and disappointed,’ she says now. ‘I knew women were well in the minority but I didn’t realize how bad it was.’ With no women on the board of the International Tennis Federation, women making up less than 1 per cent of FIFA’s voting congress, and only one woman on the board of the Football Association, there is still a long way to go before women are even sitting at the table, let alone equally represented.
The stark figures prompted Judy into action. If no one else would speak up, she reasoned, then she simply had to. ‘And so I’ve since made myself do things like that, because I’ve realized I do have a voice; I think it is important to have women in key positions so that [other] women can see it’s possible. It’s still not really my thing, I’m not gagging to get up and do it, it makes me very edgy, but I’ve become more confident in recent years. I felt more comfortable talking about how we’d come from a tiny town in Scotland and gone on this great big adventure and come out on the top of it. There were things on that journey that made it difficult for me because I was female, because I was their mum. Some things bothered me, but I never let anybody see that it did. I kept going because I wasn’t going to get distracted by all that.’
I love that Judy grabbed the bull by the horns and decided to be part of the change she wanted to see. As a high-profile person she could easily have dodged the responsibility. But she felt passionately enough to want to make a difference. I felt that the first time I met her in person, at the launch of the Women’s Sport Trust, where she spoke from the floor, railing against the lack of female coaches across sport and the injustices therein. I was genuinely taken aback by her commitment to the issues, and inspired. Best of all, she is not just a woman of words, but a woman of action.
In 2014, spurred on by frustrating experiences at the elite end of women’s tennis, Judy decided to launch Miss Hits, a programme aimed at encouraging girls to play tennis, and women to coach. With four times as many boys coming into the sport as girls, Judy knew that women’s elite tennis in Britain would never change until something was done about the grassroots game. Most people would wait for a governing body to sort out a programme for them, but Judy is a roll-your-sleeves-up-and-get-on-with-it sort of person. ‘I just felt that if I went and spoke to the LTA it would take forever to get off the ground,’ she says, frankly. ‘Like everything I’ve done and had success with, I’ve just done it myself.’
Judy invested £300K of her own money into starting up the scheme, which broke tennis down into a game with no rules. ‘Tennis is a very complex coordination sport and you have little girls coming along for the first time who have never even held a racket in their hands – they don’t know how to hold it, it’s probably too heavy for them. We have to teach the skills first, how to throw and catch a bouncing ball, how to move to and from a bouncing ball, before thinking about hitting it. From the research we did it became clear that girls didn’t like the way that boys were too competitive and too noisy and hit the ball too hard.’
The concept of breaking a sport down into bite-sized pieces that assumes no prior knowledge is so important. When it came to sport at school I always felt I had missed a trick somewhere. The boys all seemed to know what to do; I was already behind the curve even at primary school age. In my view, this is one of the greatest barriers to getting young girls interested in sport – that they are thrown in head first, and expected to muddle along. No wonder so few excel or enjoy it. Judy’s approach echoes the same emphasis on physical literacy that Tanni talks about, or that Jacqui takes her young daughter to learn about at play schemes – creating the building blocks for the future. I count the months until my own daughter turns five and can join Judy’s scheme. I think she’d love it. Already Miss Hits has trained up 200 teachers, which Judy says is a key part of the programme. ‘Female coaches love the fact that it’s just for girls, and just for them. So often in tennis we’re outnumbered as female coaches; women are squeezed out or shut up. They’re in a minority so they don’t have the confidence to speak up or ask questions.’
Judy knows first hand how important it is to have faith in female coaches, and it is a belief she appears to have instilled in her sons too. When Andy appointed Amélie Mauresmo as his coach it made global headlines, so rare was it to see a female coach working at the highest level in men’s sport – never mind that Amélie had won Wimbledon and the Australian Open in her own playing career. As he struggled to make a comeback from injury, the results didn’t go his way at first, and he gallantly made a point of defending his coach from the barbed criticism aimed in her direction. He saw it for what it was: thinly veiled prejudice, and bravely decided that he was having none of it.
In 2015 Andy took the extraordinary step of writing a comment piece for L’Équipe defending his appointment of Amélie. ‘Have I become a feminist?’ he wrote. ‘Well, if being a feminist is about fighting so that a woman is treated like a man then yes, I suppose I have.’ It was an incredible moment, the very embodiment of #HeForShe as a reality and not just a social media hashtag. Andy instantly earned the respect of many more female fans and commentators. That same year, in the US, there were more female firsts in men’s sport – the San Antonio Spurs hired Becky Hammon, making her the NBA’s first-ever full-time female coach in history, swiftly followed by the Sacramento King’s appointment of Nancy Lieberman, making her only the second part-time female coach in the history of the sport; in the NFL Jen Welter became the sport’s first female hire for the Arizona Cardinals; meanwhile Sarah Thomas became the first full-time female NFL referee. But Andy and Amélie’s story was something special, a personal relationship in which he spoke up for her against the critics, and didn’t bat an eyelid when she went on maternity leave. ‘With Amélie it was a brave choice in some ways,’ says Judy. ‘It is very unusual to find female coaches working with anyone at that level in men’s sport, but in other ways it was a no-brainer because she has a similar outlook and feel for the game. She’s been at the top, she knows the emotions, she knows how hard you have to work, and she hasn’t got an ego. She sits and she listens to Andy and lets him talk, and I think at this stage of his life that was one of the things he was looking for, to be more open about how he felt about everything.’
And therein lies the reason why it is so very short-sighted to deny women opportunities in sport. Because women contribute something that’s unique. And while it might be more comfortable to persist with the old ways, to wriggle out of challenging sexism, to resist building extra female toilets in sports stadiums, it isn’t more productive. It isn’t what’s best for sport. I go to a lot of women and sport forums, and read a lot about why gender inequ
ality exists. And one of the most common things I hear is that women aren’t confident enough. They don’t put themselves forward for things, they don’t apply for jobs, they don’t ask for pay rises, they don’t insist on promotions. There is truth in this, for sure. But it’s also the lazy verdict. It plays into our image of women as weak, lacking in leadership and the skills needed for success. And why would you want to employ anyone who hasn’t got what it takes to overcome these issues?
I was fascinated to read a different slant on this whole debate in the Harvard Business Review. Society’s idea of success, it argued, was based on male attributes. What society didn’t recognize was where these attributes frequently let us down, when male leaders were overly aggressive, too comfortable with risk-taking, confident without basis. Why, it asked, did we not value the qualities that women bring to the table? Why did we eternally see elements, such as Amélie’s ability to listen to Andy, as a weakness?
I find it exciting to see the change taking place in sport right now, in our lifetimes. Sure, at times it is frustratingly slow. I get annoyed when sport institutionally, habitually, sidelines women and minorities. But I am cheered by all the individual exceptions to this trend. By the Judys, the Andys, the Amélies, the Annies and the Chrises who are taking decisions into their own hands and shaping sport into a world they want to be part of. They are, collectively, making things better. Not just because it is morally the right thing to do, but because it is part of evolution, innovation, progress, and pushing sport to new heights. They are making sport better. We must congratulate their efforts, and – ultimately – join them.
What does a woman’s voice in sport sound like?