LONDON – 87-year-old Dora Jacobovitz, who survived the horrors of Nazi Death Camp Auschwitz and the deaths of everyone she was ever close to in life up until the time the camp was liberated in 1945 by Russian Red Army soldiers, when Dora was 10, said she was still a big fan of Scotland’s Andy Murray despite his emotional issues related to no longer “being able to really get things going on the tennis court” due to his spastic hip.
Dora, an avid tennis fan from Murray’s hometown of Dunblane, Scotland, who has followed his career since he first started openly weeping during post-match press conferences in 2007, said Murray’s cries for empathy were understandable, given the on- and off-court traumas he has faced.
“Andy really has faced a tough road in coming back from his hip resurfacing surgery of a few years back,” said Dora, who lives in a bedsit at the edge of Dunblane’s Hambullurton Park with her cat Judy, who she named after Murray’s mother/coach. “I did write Andy a personal letter where I said to him, I say, ‘Now Ands, having been brutally beaten, starved and otherwise daily tortured meself by the Nazis from about 1943 until 1945, I can certainly understand your frustration at not being to chase down a yellow felt ball on the hardcourt, or banking the usual £1.2 million that goes with winning a title.'”
“I told him I can totally relate to the traumas he’s been suffering, including not being able to fully deploy his true playmaking tennis genius in front of rabid, worldwide television audiences, or only being able to jump six inches off the ground when he makes his previously terrifying leaping overhead smash at the net, rather than his usual eight or nine inches.”
“It reminds me very much of the times my Nazi overseers would not allow me near any kind of foodstuff for weeks on end, resulting in my general inability to carry out any of life’s ordinary daily functions, such as simply enjoying a cup of dirt tea, carving the name of my main Nazi guard’s name into the other prisoners’ foreheads with a penknife of spending time with the ghosts of my now-exterminated family and friends.”
“He really has had a tough go of it despite the fact he is still raking in millions from commercial endorsement deals. Where he gets the mental fortitude to carry on we may never know!”
Murray last openly wept during a press conference at the Queen’s Club Open in England in June after defeating Benoit Paire of France. He said he cried then because he realized that almost every match he played now could be his last one, after which he will comfortably retire to the 26-room, multimillion-pound Surrey mansion he shares with his wife, Kim, and their cockadoodle, Bjorn.
“You never know when your time is up in this game,” Murray blubbered at the time after only banking about £300,000 just for showing up at the Queen’s Club. “May as well make the best show of it and have a good cry later.”