Murray's journey from trough to triumph

"If anyone had told me Jamie would have even been playing in the final I wouldn't have believed them," Judy Murray said after her son became the most unlikely British player to win a Wimbledon title.

Coming from someone who believed in Jamie Murray's abilities enough to continue financing him even through his deepest trough, and to ease him through the difficult transition into a doubles player, this was a more telling remark than it seemed. And his triumph in the Wimbledon mixed doubles with Jelena Jankovic, the world No3 from Serbia, is a more telling success than it seems.

Mixed doubles is no laugh-and-kisses event either for the Murrays or for Britain but something that can seriously bring about change. Besides helping Jamie as a player and a person, it will have helped restore balance to Murray family relationships and buy time for a beleaguered but radicalising Lawn Tennis Association.

One of the LTA's concerns is the management of expectation, which has been so destructively intense that in the past the association has focused too much on bullet-dodging and prestige projects. But since Roger Draper arrived as chief executive last year greater emphasis has been placed on earning pressure-free time for long-term projects - especially finding young players and entering them for competition - through short-term success, particularly by boosting Andy Murray and trying to develop doubles.

Jamie Murray has earned an extra chunk of that. But although the LTA may be applauded for helping keep Murray and Louis Cayer together and for more recently appointing Cayer as its doubles specialist coach, it was the perception and courage of his mother which made success possible for Jamie.

She first saw his doubles potential, about four years ago, and she found Cayer, who had been working with Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram, a top combination. "I think I wouldn't be sitting in this [winner's] chair right now if it wasn't for him, to be honest," Jamie said of Cayer. "I hope that he knows that as well."

To feel he is no longer hanging on his brother's coat-tails by becoming a successful doubles player is quite a rehabilitation. Andy Murray has felt this keenly too. People found it hard to believe when the younger brother said in Doha in January that he got more pleasure from Jamie's success than his own. What happened since is a massive relief to all of them.

While Andy was defending his title in San Jose in February he could not watch as Jamie and Eric Butorac tried for the men's doubles title. He hid in the locker room. When they succeeded he came out and burst into tears. People's perceptions of so-called grumpy Andy altered that day.

The brothers are about as different as you could imagine. Jamie's ability to charm, as well as his emerging doubles talent, made Sunday's success possible. It enabled him to take smiling advantage of a chance meeting with Jankovic when players signed in. His agent had asked if she was available for the mixed but she had not replied.

"We came at the same time with the van and he said, 'Are you going to play with me?'" Jankovic said. "I said, 'OK, go and sign.' I didn't think too much. Now I am thinking, what are the odds that we come at the same time and he ask me? If this didn't happen we wouldn't even play this tournament. Wouldn't even win Wimbledon. Maybe it was like destiny. It's amazing."

She may well partner Jamie again, in the US Open next month or at Wimbledon next year. Meanwhile it has freed up Andy to concentrate on what he needs to do. It's freed up the LTA to do what it needs to do. And it has freed up Jamie to believe that he is making his own way too. Not bad for something which started with a grin.