Tennis star Sir Andy Murray said he told his family he wanted to quit tennis several times when struggling with injury.
The two-time Wimbledon champion and five-times Australian Open runner-up, said his attitude to the game has been transformed after an operation to deal with severe hip pain.
The 32-year-old Briton looked on the verge of ending his career at the start of the year but returned to singles action on the ATP Tour in August following resurfacing surgery, and won his first trophy since 2017 beating Stan Wawrinka in Antwerp last month.
Having played only one match in Great Britain’s run to the last-four of the Davis Cup Finals in Spain last week due to a groin issue, the former world No.1 is hoping to build up his fitness ahead of the first grand slam of 2020 in Melbourne.
In a BBC interview regarding Andy Murray: Resurfacing, a new fly-on-the-wall documentary which tracks his road to recovery, he said: “There were probably three or four different times in the last 18 months where I had had conversations with my family and also with my team that I did want to stop.
“I wasn’t enjoying playing, I didn’t enjoy competing, I didn’t enjoy all the preparation and training that was going into it because it was just really physically uncomfortable.”
Murray said once the pain had disappeared three months after his latest operation in January 2019, it made him rethink his priorities and rediscover his love for the sport.
“For a large part of my professional career my mood was probably dictated by how I was doing on the tennis court whereas now I’ve realised being pain-free and healthy is more important than that,” he said.
“Getting to play tennis for your job, basically, for your living, is a great position to be in.”
Murray also revealed how tennis helped him deal with childhood trauma, including the impact of the Dunblane massacre.
He said his family knew Thomas Hamilton, who murdered 16 children and a teacher before turning the gun on himself at Dunblane Primary School in 1996.
Sir Andy and his brother, seven-time grand slam-winning doubles player Jamie, were pupils at the school at the time.
He also told the documentary’s director Olivia Cappuccini how tennis helped deal with his parents divorce and his brother leaving home in the following two years.
Sir Andy added: “My feeling towards tennis is that it’s an escape for me in some ways because all of these things are stuff that I have bottled up.”