Presented by VETERANS PLUMBING.
This Day In Sports…July 8, 2012:
Andy Murray, the first British player to make the Wimbledon men’s final in 74 years, puts up a game effort with the urging of 15,000 partisan fans—and thousands more watching on a giant screen outside Centre Court. But Switzerland’s Roger Federer made history of his own, dispatching Murray in four sets to win his seventh Wimbledon title, tying the record of Pete Sampras. (Federer would eclipse the mark with his eighth All-England championship in 2017.)
Murray won the first set, but Federer would catch fire from there, winning 4-6, 7-5, 6-3, 6-4. One turning point came early in the second set, with Murray unable to capitalize on his lead as he failed to convert four break points. Then in the sixth game of the third set, the irrepressible Federer navigated through 10 deuces to finally produce a break of Murray. In between those sequences history was made when rain forced Wimbledon’s Centre Court retractable roof, installed in 2009, to be closed for the first time in a final.
The victory was also Federer’s 17th Grand Slam title, a record at the time, and it catapulted him past Novak Djokovic into the No. 1 spot in world rankings. That allowed Federer to pass Sampras’ career record of 286 weeks as World No. 1. He’d spend another 17 weeks at the top to establish the current record of 302 weeks.
Murray was Great Britain’s first men’s finalist since Bunny Austin in 1938, and the Brits were still seeking their Wimbledon men’s champion since Fred Perry in 1936 after Murray lost his fourth Grand Slam final without a victory. They’d have to wait just one more year, though. Murray would blast past Djokovic in straight sets in the 2013 Wimbledon final to bring the house down all across the U.K.
Murray grabbed his second Wimbledon championship in 2016 when he took down Milos Raonic in straight sets. Only one Brit has made it as far as the semifinals since—Cameron Norrie fell to Djokovic in the final four in 2022. The British drought on the women’s side has been epic. The country’s last female champ was back in 1977 when Virginia Wade defeated Betty Stove. Wade made the semis against Chris Evert in 1978, but there has been only one women’s semifinalist from Britain in the past 47 years: Johanna Konta in 2017.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
