Andy Murray, the tennis player who survived a massacre at his primary school and managed to reach the top Julio M. Cantero
On March 13, 1996, a madman killed 16 students and a teacher at an educational institution in Dunblane, Scotland, where Andy, then 8 years old, attended with his older brother, Jamie. This brutal massacre strongly marked his childhood and, in tennis – where he would win three Grand Slams and two Olympic golds, and in which he would reach the top of the ATP ranking in 2016 –, he found refuge to overcome the profound horror he experienced.
He was just two months and two days away from turning 9 years old and, shortly after 9:30 on Wednesday, March 13, 1996, while at Dunblane primary school – in Stirlingshire, Scotland – he heard two gunshots outside his classroom. , and that they came from the assembly hall area.
He had never heard the real sounds of firearms and, in his memory, he only registered those from television series, those from a movie he had seen at the local cinema, and nothing else.
But these were other sounds. Those of death. Those of the 17 that would cause the massacre unleashed by Thomas Watt Hamilton, 43, former head of a boy scout group and who had been fired from this school for “inappropriate conduct.” The shots seemed endless and, furthermore, they were confused with the screams of terror and the cries of the other students and teachers. Meanwhile, with his older brother, Jamie, they hid under the desk in the principal’s office – where their teacher had taken them, trying to escape the massacre – and, much later, he would remember that, sobbing, along with his classmates, class sang songs quietly, to drown out these noises. Logically, such a traumatic experience would deeply mark the life of this child. Even a year after the bloody event, his parents divorced and, six months later, his brother moved away from home, leaving him alone with his mother.
