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At Wimbledon, Andy Murray carries a small Scottish town's hopes
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I took a few minutes out of a workday to watch the final set of a five-set marathon pitting Stanislas Wawrinka, the young Swiss player, against Andy Murray the great British hope of a nation and an empire. I was struck by a personal piece aired on ESPN carrying early round Wimbledon coverage. His mother noted in the piece, that Andy was eight or nine when on March 13, 1996, a man carrying four handguns came into the Dunblane Primary School, opened fire and killed fifteen young children and one teacher. Another child died later at the hospital while 24 others were injured but recovered.
Andy was there that day and says in his autobiography, Hitting Back, he remembers the fuss but was too young to understand what had happened. The gunman finally turned one of his four weapons on himself and ended his own life. He was a scout troop and boys club leader whom it was thought may have had pedophilic tendencies toward the young boys under his care, but nothing was ever confirmed.
The 1990’s proved a stormy decade for school shootings. Here in Colorado, at our own Columbine High School, on April 20, 1999, two armed students opened fire in what was later shown to be a premeditated event. The two killed twelve students and a teacher, injuring 21 others. It was later determined the boys may have been influenced in part by graphically violent video games.
Dunblane is a small village on the north side of the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. In the aftermath of the massacre, citizens succeeded in gathering 705,000 signatures onto the so-called Snowdrop Petition that led to the then conservative government’s passing a law in 1997 banning the sale or possession of certain types of handguns.
Similar efforts in the aftermath of the Columbine shootings failed to change the laws involving weapons possession, even by minors. The proliferation of violent video games also continued unabated despite subsequent school shootings around the country, the most recent being the killing of a 15-year-old female student by a classmate at Dillard High School in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on November 12, 2008. Overseas, a 17-year-old male student at Albertville Technical High School killed fifteen people in southwestern Germany this past March 11th.
Andy’s grandparents were interviewed for the ESPN piece about Andy’s rise and determination in the world of championship tennis where he is currently the third-ranked player behind Nadal and Federer. His grandmother said the town was changed after the event. His grandfather, Roy Erskine, who played professional soccer for the Hibernians, the major league team in that part of Scotland, said, Today, “Dunblane is Andy Murray.” Andy won the match against Wawrinka 2-6, 6-3, 6-3, 5-7, 6-3 and goes on to face Juan-Carlos Ferrero from Spain in the quarterfinals. While Britain and her empire place their hopes on his shoulders, Andy thinks of himself more as a Scotsman and remembers his family and classmates back in the small town of Dunblane.
