Andy Murray gives lesson in being a champion in Wimbledon win

WHAT is the difference between a great player and a champion? It's not just winning, it's deeper: a quirk of mind, or personality, perhaps something marrow-deep.

Andy Murray

WHAT is the difference between a great player and a champion? It's not just that one has won something significant and the other hasn't. It's deeper than that: a quirk of mind, or personality, perhaps something marrow-deep.

Perhaps it's there in the DNA: the championship gene, something that you find in genuinely exceptional people in sport. But it takes more finding with some champions than with others. People such as Andy Murray

Yesterday Murray taught us a lesson in the attributes of a champion. It really wasn't something I've seen in him before, and I've watched him an awful lot. There was a feeling, something you could read in the sluggish, panther-like walk, that yesterday it really wasn't all about do your damnedest and hope for the best. There was a feeling that victory would be wholly appropriate. He was just that kind of person.

And that is wholly new in the experience of most of the nation he had brought such joy to. It wasn't there last Wimbledon: back then there was still a tentativeness that cropped up at the worst possible moments. There was also - greatly reduced but still evident - the tendency to fall into fits of black despair and self-loathing when he made a bad error. There was still the feeling that he didn't quite belong in the exclusive company of champions.

Murray chose a very foolish time to be the best British tennis player for three generations. He chose a time when the sport was crowded to the point of suffocation with champions: Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and greater than all, Roger Federer. Into this Fab Four came Murray - the Ringo of the quartet. It was horribly unfair, as if Murray was doomed to be merely great - for ever just one rung below the rank of the champion.

But on court yesterday in the final he looked the part from the first point. He rallied with immense self-confidence, not like a man privileged to be playing on court with such an opponent. He played like a man privileged to be the boss - taking control, shading the exchanges, looking that tiny bit more certain than Djokovic on the big points. He had clearly made that transition from mere excellence to champion. All he had to do was confirm it.

Authority. It's something you seek in many sports, but in a sport of the one-on-one confrontation such as tennis, it is the killing weapon when opponents are closely matched. In that teary final last year, Federer had authority - doubly so once they closed the roof - and Murray unwillingly acceded to that. But a year on we had a match that Murray dominated.

It would be too much to say he controlled it. Djokovic returned serve too well for Murray ever to be comfortable. But when Djokovic served you could see the best things Murray had on offer: a still-greater certainty on return of serve, a sense of lurking menace in every game that Djokovic served. Behind the return of serve there was a profoundly certain court-craft, and a still-deeper certainty that at bottom he had the measure of his man.

You'd call it swagger in a person without Murray's almost neurotic detestation of flashiness. So where did it come from? How did such a transition take place? He had watched his lifelong rival Djokovic make the same transition after leading Serbia to victory in the Davis Cup of 2010.

With Murray it came at the Olympic Games, 18 months later.

The process was set up with his adoption of Ivan Lendl as coach. Yesterday Murray said fascinatingly that Lendl "made me learn more from the losses than maybe I did in the past". Defeat can be a source of both knowledge and strength. You have to set despair and self-loathing aside and with Lendl's help, that traumatic defeat in the final at Wimbledon last year was alchemised into gold. The tears that flowed that day - tears that made Murray so much more a sympathetic figure than he was when the black moods struck him - played their part in the victory.

The next step was Olympic gold as Murray rode the white-water river of patriotism that flowed across London and Great Britain during those enchanted few weeks and won the singles gold medal. The Olympic Games are not the loftiest goal in tennis, though: tennis is about grand-slam tournaments, especially the one in southwest London. But Murray was able to use that experience to take the last slam of the year in New York.

He had joined the champions club, and yesterday he showed us all precisely what that means when he played a match of deep brilliance and glorious self-certainty. There were setbacks - he dealt with them, every time coming back with something more. Apart from that crazy final game, in which Djokovic saved three Championship points, this was a perfect example of a player who knows what it is to be a champion.

The men's tournament this Wimbledon has been all about transition. Nadal looked like a player for ever compromised by the troubles with his knees; Federer left like a player who will no longer be a serious threat at grand-slam tournaments. There have been some sad days here. Now the main contenders are Djokovic and Murray: Murray who has won two of the last four slams, twice as many as anyone else. He may have fulfilled the deepest hopes of his nation, but he himself is unsated.

Far from it. This victory at Wimbledon, the tournament of tournaments - double that for a Brit - is not the end. Rather, the victory frees him up.

He can now take the authority of a double-champion into the rest of this career. An era ended yesterday for British tennis after 77 years of disappointment. A new one might just be beginning for Andy Murray. Andy Murray the champion.